Not my favorite episode. While I forgave last week’s skimping on Christopher Eccleston due to the interesting character and world development, this week repeats the Eccleston-liteness but doesn’t have much other stuff to recommend it.
Kevin learns that his dad, the former police chief, has left the mental health facility where he’s been living since an apparent breakdown several years ago. But his efforts to recover his dad lead him down a path he doesn’t want to reckon with: his dad’s insistence that both of them are prophets being called to do what’s necessary. Elsewhere, Kevin’s son Tom is still in hiding with Wayne’s acolyte/paramour Christine, and in a desperate moment, he gets a rude awakening about secrets Wayne has been keeping from him.
We’ll start with what I like best. Kevin’s teenage daughter Jill is interesting to me as a character who’s struggling to find any meaning in the world after everything that’s been happening. Some of the nihilistic partying she and her friends get up to falls flat for me, but I like what they get up to here. It hits the fatalistic button of quite a few of their trends while also incorporating an element of teenage ritual in a misguided tribute to a departed kid. I’ve also enjoyed Kevin and Nora getting to know one another over the last few episodes, and they have some good interactions in this one.
The Tom-Christine-Wayne stuff offers up some decent intrigue, but it also rests heavily on the fact that, pre-raid, Wayne’s compound was home to a bevy of nubile young Asian American women. Although I want to learn more about Christine and what she has going on, this episode goes in hard on that gross fetishization without doing much to counter it. There’s one particular moment, and with it one particular line of dialogue, that nearly turns my stomach with its dehumanization. In other words, not exactly enjoyable to watch.
The plot with Kevin and his dad isn’t a whole lot better. I get what they’re doing, and I’ll admit to having affection for my share of “society thinks they’re crazy, but they’re actually receiving vital messages/visions!” characters in genre works (Jennifer Goines from 12 Monkeys still has my heart.) But that character type has grown to have diminishing returns for me, and the beats of the trope feel pretty predictable in this case. I’m not all that invested in Kevin’s dad trying to convince Kevin that the time has come for him to take up the mantle, and while I’m sympathetic to Kevin’s fears that his mental health is starting to deteriorate too, I’m not excited about this am-I-going-crazy?/am-I-a-prophet?/let-me-resist-the-call-while-the-signs-grow-increasingly-adamant plot that appears to be setting up. At this point, I’ve seen it enough times and it’s both tropey and inherently-problematic enough that a show has to really do something different with it to capture my interest, and so far, The Leftovers isn’t managing that.
As I said, it’s another episode with far too little Christopher Eccleston. Matt is only in a few scenes, with most of his screentime spent wordlessly reacting a little outside the action and most of his dialogue occurring voice-only over the phone. (Side note: after two episodes in a row where I’ve mostly just heard his voice on the phone, there are definitely still a few rocky places in his accent. It’s not terrible or anything, but I can never fully relax into him playing an American – there are just these little tells that something’s not quite right.)
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