By: Brandon Wolfe
Initially, and not a little bit jarringly, “The Garveys at Their Best” seems to present us with exactly what its title promises. When we open, on Kevin going for a run, sneaking a smoke from a pack he’s surreptitiously hidden under a mailbox before heading home, nothing seems terribly out of the ordinary. What throws us off is what we find when Kevin arrives home: Laurie, dressed in regular, non-white clothes and speaking. With actual words coming out of her mouth. She even has a pleasant demeanor and is warm to both Kevin and a bubbly, singing Jill as they all shuffle off to their daily routines. For this is a flashback episode to the final days before the Departure changed everything for all of these people. We also peek in on Nora’s previous life to find an encouraging husband and a pair of adorable children. Everyone’s so happy. It’s weird.
The kicker of “The Garveys at Their Best” is how it appears at first to show us a Bizarro world where all of these mopes we’ve gotten to know over the past several weeks were once shiny, happy people. But as the episode progresses, we come to realize that these people were already train-wrecks in the making even before millions of people vanished from the face of the earth. The Departure didn’t ruin them so much as accelerate their already-in-motion ruination.
Take Kevin, for instance. We know him in the present-day as a moody sort with a deep well of anger roiling within him, and that’s essentially who he was before. While his marriage seems to be pleasantly idyllic in the episode’s early scenes, we later see the hostility that crops up between him and Laurie with little provocation. A simple argument snowballs into Kevin shouting harsh obscenities at his wife, the levels of mistrust and resentment between the two bubbling instantly to the surface. Kevin has been chasing a crazed deer around town that he, to the bemusement of his fellow officers, wishes to trap and release rather than kill (wildly contrasting his contemporary stance of dealing with wild dogs), and when the deer is hit by a car driven by a comely woman, the state of his marriage leads him to have that affair we’ve heard tell of previously. The affair ends abruptly when the woman disappears, to Kevin’s disbelief.
Everything about Laurie is, of course, extremely different just by virtue of whom she still is at this point in the timeline. She works as a psychiatrist and one of her patients, Patti, is having difficulty dealing the stressful fallout of an abusive relationship. Patti also senses a sea change in the air, approaching rapidly, one that she claims that Laurie feels as well, though Laurie denies this. Laurie also is hiding some mysterious health issue from her family, and even from herself to a degree, that we learn at episode’s end is a pregnancy, one which she doesn’t keep for long when the child disappears from her sonogram when the Departure hits. All of a sudden, Laurie’s GR origin story starts to make some sense.
“The Garveys at Their Best” abuses dramatic irony a bit. The moments when the characters are happy, as they all are when gathered at Kevin Garvey Sr.’s surprise birthday party, are played at full volume, with everyone shown as joyous rays of sunshine, many a far cry from what we know they will become. Kevin Sr. can’t just be more together than we know him to be in the future, he has to be the cornerstone of the entire community. Similarly, Jill can’t just be less forlorn; she has to be the giggliest bracefaced teen the world has ever known. Only Kevin Jr. consistently seems to possess a similar overall demeanor in the past as he does in the future. The series also continues to ask us to wade through its murky symbolism (e.g. that deer), none of which is provocative or substantial enough to be worth parsing out.
But despite the somewhat shaky execution, this is one of the stronger episodes of ‘The Leftovers’ aired thus far. Seeing everyone in their previous lives and gaining a stronger grasp on who they used to be before everything changed is undeniably intriguing, something this show doesn’t often lay claim to being. Moreover, going back to the day of the Departure was a fine choice. This series is so set in its foolish belief that this phenomenal, world-changing event is of less interest than its miserabilist stable of characters and their dreary lives. Actually watching the event occur through the eyes of the characters (most of whom are going through huge, life-altering moments of their own at the time) goes a long way toward reminding us of the hook that ostensibly made this series alluring before we grew accustomed to its plodding house style.
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