Other Doctor Lives: The Leftovers: Season 1, Episode 8 – “Cairo” (2014)

An uneven episode. Some stuff I really liked, some that’s very intriguing, and some that doesn’t work for me all that well. Christopher Eccleston is used sparingly but effectively.

Kevin has his biggest lapse yet and is forced to reckon with something he did when he wasn’t in control of his faculties. His daughter Jill investigates Nora, skeptical that the woman’s purported new lease on life is genuine. And Meg, a recent G.R. recruit, confronts a challenge to her new way of life.

We’ll start with the Kevin plot, which is more of the same that we’ve been getting from him and also just more. We get a bit more in the way of concrete info and not just teases, so I appreciate that, but I’m still not a huge fan of this storyline. There are a few interesting tidbits that are dropped today – I won’t get into details for the sake of spoilers, but the way that Kevin’s story pulls in the G.R. is the most it has to recommend it.

I said last week that I enjoyed the self-destructive Jill plot from that episode, and that pattern continues here. I like that she’s immediately distrusting of happiness or “normalcy,” wanting to prove it wrong because she doesn’t want to believe anyone’s capable of being okay in this world. One thing I like about her characterization is that, as far as I recall, she didn’t lose anyone close to her on October 14^th. She’s been impacted by subsequent ripples, but I don’t think any of her loved ones were among the actual departed. But she’s still messed up. She still doesn’t know how to cope and doesn’t exactly pretend that she does. That’s a beat that feels very pandemic-relatable to me, as someone who hasn’t gotten sick/lost a loved one/been furloughed/forced to work in a frontline position. I know how fortunate, and how privileged, I’ve been throughout the last 16 months, but that doesn’t mean I’m okay.

Meg is the G.R. recruit played by Liv Tyler. In this episode, she faces an attempt to woo her back into her old life, and she completely loses her shit in a non-G.R.-approved way, leaving Laurie to try and clean up the mess. Even before she was thoroughly indoctrinated and stopped speaking, I feel like we haven’t gotten to know much of Meg, so it’s nice to get some hints about her here.

Eccleston’s screentime finds its home in her storyline, as Matt’s new crusade involves his efforts to reach out to G.R. members. It’s not as provocative as his old “they weren’t all angels” campaign, and it appears to only be unwelcome to the G.R. and not the town as a whole, but that’s not to say it doesn’t still earn him plenty of vitriol.

One thing that’s interesting to me about Matt is how he’s so willfully divisive in his public campaigns, very intentionally riling people up and not really caring about the spite he receives in return. Because at the same time, he’s often so gentle and understanding in his one-on-one interactions. It’s an interesting dichotomy – in the last several episodes, I’d nearly forgotten about Matt’s flyers because so much of his recent screentime has been focused on the softer interpersonal side of him. He’s very caring, a classic “shepherd to any lost sheep” type. And yet, when we first met him in the pilot, he was getting in people’s faces airing the dirty laundry of the departed. I can’t say at this point how much of that is a deliberate balance versus plot-driven inconsistency, but Eccleston wrings as much internal logic out of it as he can.