The Leftovers (HBO)

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JOEinPHX
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Re: The Leftovers (HBO)

#41 Post by JOEinPHX » Sun Jun 04, 2017 10:06 pm

Six7Six7 wrote:There is no way in hell we're going to get a reasonable ending in only three seasons. I feel like there are way too many layers of this.
I stand corrected.

That was fantastic.

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crater
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Re: The Leftovers (HBO)

#42 Post by crater » Sun Jun 04, 2017 10:16 pm

Just finished the final episode. I thought it was incredible. That last bit with Nora describing everything. I loved it.

I'm going to miss this show.

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Re: The Leftovers (HBO)

#43 Post by creep » Mon Jun 05, 2017 3:23 am

My only minor complaint was that they should of left Laurie dead.

Was Nora telling the truth?

blackula
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Re: The Leftovers (HBO)

#44 Post by blackula » Mon Jun 05, 2017 4:55 am

Great show, thought the ending was perfect.

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farrellgirl99
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Re: The Leftovers (HBO)

#45 Post by farrellgirl99 » Mon Jun 05, 2017 7:13 am

creep wrote:My only minor complaint was that they should of left Laurie dead.

Was Nora telling the truth?
I agree about Laurie - I think that episode was my favorite of the season because of its emotional weight. I'm not super upset she's alive because maybe the phone call with her kids changed her mind, but I think it would have been better to leave it open ended.

Midway through the finale I was a little ??? but I think they pulled it together with that last scene. I don't know if Nora is telling the truth, but I love that it doesn't matter for this show. It just matters that people believe each other and connect with each other.

Gonna miss this show, it was so good.

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chaos
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Re: The Leftovers (HBO)

#46 Post by chaos » Mon Jun 05, 2017 11:17 am

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/04/arts ... eview.html

In Its Series Finale, ‘The Leftovers’ Crosses Beautifully to the Other Side of Grief
By JAMES PONIEWOZIKJUNE 4, 2017

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Carrie Coon in “The Leftovers.” Credit Ben King/HBO

“The Leftovers” cycled through several theme songs in its final season. In its wonderful series finale, “The Book of Nora,” it returned to “Let the Mystery Be,” by Iris DeMent, whose lyrics begin:

Everybody is wonderin’ what and where they all came from
Everybody is worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done
But no one knows for certain —

“The Book of Nora” asks, in a fittingly tricky and full-hearted way: Suppose you did know? Would certainty fix anything?

For three seasons, uncertainty was this HBO series’ address. It was set in the aftermath of the Sudden Departure, in which 2 percent of the world’s population instantly vanished.

We never learned why the 2 percent departed. We may or may not have learned where. (More on that in a moment.) What we do know is that 100 percent of us will depart this life. Coming to terms with that knowledge is the burden of love, the font of religion and the true subject of “The Leftovers.”

The finale returns to Nora Durst (Carrie Coon), whose husband and two kids departed seven years ago. She’s become a professional skeptic — her job is debunking bogus departure claims — with a secret: She still, achingly, wants to believe.

In the final season, she comes to Australia, ostensibly to expose a group of scientists who have built a device — let’s call it the Departurizer 3000 — they claim can zap occupants to wherever the departed went.

It may be a fraud, a suicide machine. But she wants in.

The machine is a kind of birth-death device. To leave this world, you curl up, naked and fetal, in a sphere of irradiated fluid. We begin the episode with Nora readying to surrender to it. We return to her, decades older, living alone in the Australian countryside, wearing a haunted look.

Can we talk about Carrie Coon’s eyes for a minute? They should be registered as emotional weapons — deep sapphire lasers that simultaneously suggest intense outward focus and inner emotional vertigo. In the alternative universe where “The Leftovers” is justly recognized by the Emmys, she would be a lock.

The script, by the show’s creators, Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta, from a story by Mr. Lindelof and Tom Spezialy, is an elegant construction, directed luminously by the “Leftovers” veteran Mimi Leder. It’s a sci-fi tear-jerker, “2001” as a rom-com.

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Carrie Coon and Justin Theroux in the series finale of “The Leftovers.” Credit Ben King/HBO

When Kevin (Justin Theroux, in silver-fox mode) finds Nora, he claims at first that their romance never happened. Are we in another reality? His appearance — and that of Laurie (Amy Brenneman), who had seemed to commit suicide in an earlier episode — briefly suggests a “sideways” universe, as in the final season of Mr. Lindelof’s “Lost.”

“Lost” was one of TV’s most thrilling entertainments, whose finale provided emotional closure but not enough answers for many fans. “The Leftovers,” one of TV’s most moving meditations, used some of the same devices and sly wit to examine how we muddle through a life that denies our most longed-for answers.

It seems at first that we will get a more definitive explanation than I would have expected. Nora tells Kevin that she did cross over to where the departed are — an Earth, the other half of a cosmic locket, that lost 98 percent of its people. Having spied her older, healthy children and husband happy, she decided she was a “ghost” there, and came back.

I will confess that my left brain had issues with the Departurizer’s actually having worked (as I innocently assumed it did on first watching). Would it never have occurred to its inventor, before Nora found him on the other side, to build a machine for the return? Would no one from the blighted orphan world have crossed back?

But maybe none of it happened. Nora’s scene in the tank is edited so that we hear her just begin to cry out. Did she say, “Stop,” then make up a cover story? Is the book of Nora fiction?

The episode, after all, includes a pattern of lies. Kevin lies; the scientists accuse Nora of lying; Nora’s brother, Matt (Christopher Eccleston), agrees to tell people whatever she wants him to about her disappearance. Even the nun — on top of her suspicious denial about the fellow climbing down from her window — bases the wedding-pigeon business she runs with Nora on the fib that the birds are “delivering messages of love to the world” when they’re really just high-tailing it back to Nora’s. “It’s just a nicer story,” she says.

You know what? It is a nicer story. And while we could spin out dissertations for or against Nora’s tale — à la “Is Tony Soprano dead?” — this is the point at which my left brain can take a hike.

The episode frames the ending to emphasize not the facts of the story but its telling and its audience. You can believe Nora or not. What matters is that Kevin does, instinctively. He’s a ghost too, and that makes them kindred spirits. “Why wouldn’t I believe you?” he says. “You’re here.”

You can call that faith. You can call it love. The final answer of “The Leftovers” is that those are two words for the same thing.

Image
Carrie Coon and Justin Theroux in the series finale of “The Leftovers.” Credit Ben King/HBO


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