*Episode premise spoilers*
Kicking off the final season of The Leftovers with a time jump, shaking up the dynamics in major ways. It goes to some wild places that I wasn’t expecting and sets up what looks like it’ll be quite an out-there season.
Three years after the events of the season 2 finale, the Garveys, Nora, and Matt are firmly entrenched in the town of Miracle. Things are uneasy in town as the seventh anniversary of the departures approaches, with a number of people believing that it portends some great event.
In a way, this has a lot in common with the season 2 premiere. It opens with a non-sequitur far-flung flashback featuring characters from the distant past with no apparent connection to any of the characters we know, and then it pivots into a soft reset. While “Axis Mundi” introduced a brand-new setting and mainly featured all-new characters, “The Book of Kevin” uses the three-year time jump to reshuffle a lot of existing character relationships and the general state of life in Miracle. Neither premiere is all that interested in addressing the fallout of its explosive preceding finale – in the case of this episode, it offers up a quick scene that follows on the heels of “I Live Here Now,” then skips ahead to the impending seventh anniversary three years later.
There is interesting stuff here, seeing what new character connections have been made, getting hints of major things that have happened in the interim, and getting a feel for the new state of affairs. But it also feels like somewhat of a waste, squandering good plot potential from last season in favor of new surprises and a new countdown to doomsday/judgement day/the day of salvation/whatever the seventh anniversary may prove to be. In particular, there’s one character who emerged to be very intriguing towards the end of last season, and their story is wrapped up very summarily/dismissively in this episode. I was hoping for more.
So what is Matt up to these days? A lot. He is up to a lot. He’s fully embraced all it means to be a pastor in Miracle as the seventh anniversary of the departures nears, complete with devoted pilgrims listening to his sermons from a loudspeaker outside the church because the sanctuary is overflowing. For someone who rejected any early notion of the departures being “divine” (what with his season 1 “they weren’t all angels” campaign,) Miracle has really turned him into someone who’s ready for loud-and-clear signs from Heaven at all times.
Matt has always been an unusual mix of radical and level-headed, and the season 3 premiere finds him latching onto some genuinely wild beliefs. And yet, Christopher Eccleston finds a way to portray this new zealotry with just enough groundedness that you can almost see why Matt believes these things, even if you’re not ready to make that leap with him. It’s a delicate balance between “bold step out on faith” and “full-on tinfoil-hat-wearing mania,” but Eccleston manages to keep straddling the line.
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