Other Doctor Lives: The Leftovers: Season 2, Episode 6 – “Lens” (2015)

I tend to like episodes that focus more on Nora, and this one offers up some new insights into the world. Not much Christopher Eccleston, unfortunately, but still interesting.

Nora’s already-tenuous feeling of security in Miracle is threatened even more when a government official comes to town, investigating the disappearance of the three girls as a potential “secondary departure.” She’s resolutely clinging to the notion that secondary departures are impossible, but the evidence is mounting. What’s more, some of the questions being asked suggest that her presence may have had something to do with it.

This whole season, Nora has been fighting to put the past behind her and start a new life in a safe place, but the universe seems to have other ideas. She’s firmly in the contingent who are denying that the girls departed, not just because “it can’t happen here,” but because she used to work investigating so-called secondary departures and found them be invariably fraudulent. Here, though, is someone working for the same department saying he’s never seen anything like this, and everything she’s trying to tell herself is threatening to come crashing down around her. Her very attempts to refute it only seem to confirm what she doesn’t want to believe.

The whole idea of secondary departures is something that only got brought up this season, and I’ve enjoyed exploring it. There’s some other good show mythology introduced here too, tied to some theories about why certain people departed and others didn’t. For Nora, who lost her entire family, that’s a deeply-personal subject, and the more people pick at the reasoning behind it, the more hostile she gets.

On the whole, I don’t think the Murphys have been used as much or as well as I’d hoped they would back in the season premiere. Their involvement in the plot tends to be used more to reflect on the Garveys and Nora than on them. But in this episode, we finally get a good, meaty scene for Erika. In an extended scene between her and Nora, Regina King and Carrie Coon both deliver well.

Like I said, minimal Christopher Eccleston. There’s just one relatively short scene between Matt and Nora, in which he gently pokes at her issues while cheerfully ignoring his own. He also displays an impressive talent for making the best of his situation regardless of his circumstance.

*           *           *

New Shang-Chi featurette on the stunts/fight sequences, and it includes Tony Leung Chiu-wai! Only for a few seconds in the whole thing – brief shots of him filming and 1-2 sentences of him talking about it – but as with the Elle Men Singapore interview, I’ll take it. I like that, in talking about training and the fight sequences, he specifically brought it back to the character and the acting.