There are a few reasons to indulge in a re-watch of HBO’s supernatural drama, The Leftovers. It’s a winding mindf*ck of a saga birthed from the synapses of the great Damon Lindelof (Lost, Watchmen, the brand new series Mrs. Davis). It boasts some career-high performances by the likes of Justin Theroux (who happens to be popping up on HBO’s new series, White House Plumbers this weekend), Carrie Coon, Liv Tyler, Christopher Eccleston, and Ann Dowd. But, possibly the biggest thing The Leftovers has going for it is this: It’s a damn good show whose poignant philosophical musings and twisted, supernatural cliffhangers will alter your brain chemistry – if you let it.
With just three seasons and 28 episodes, the series paints a harrowingly plausible dystopia. An event known as the Sudden Departure strips the world of 2% of its population, leaving the remaining inhabitants of Earth in a kind of grief-stricken limbo. (The show flirts with many imagined purgatories but perhaps the real Dante’s Inferno is the one we’ve been living in all along?) Three years after this bastardized Rapture, survivors in a nondescript town in upstate New York are just trying to make the best of things. Theroux’s Kevin Garvey is a broken police chief trying to maintain order (and his own sanity). Coon’s Nora is the town’s resident albatross, a woman who lost her entire family in one fell swoop and now must parade her grief at every anniversary celebration while her reverend brother Matt (Eccleston) marks the Departed as sinners in order to soothe the fears of the still-living. There are also white-robed, chain-smoking cult members with their own exhaustingly nihilistic agenda (led by a cruel and wicked Dowd), after-life fantasies that double as Jason Bourne sequels, lion-worshipping sex cults, Wu-Tang Clan needle drops, and just enough animalistic mysticism and biblical mythology to remind you that, yeah, this is a Damon Lindelof production.
So how does one possibly assign a numerical value to a show sublimely chaotic, so full of highs and higher highs, so creatively distinct and viscerally moving? When we have a definitive answer, we’ll tell you. For now, here’s our attempt to name and order of The Leftovers best episodes.
10. The Garveys at Their Best (Season 1, Episode 9)
Maybe it’s the ingrained nostalgia but we love a good flashback episode and this one from the show’s first season feels especially important. There’s something about witnessing what these characters were like before the snap that makes the Departure even more tragic. Sure, the Garveys had their marital issues, Nora was exhausted by motherhood, and Patti was harping on about ominous feelings of dread and despair. But guys, Jill as a happy, well-adjusted teen who likes cat memes? Kevin Sr. winning man-of-the-year awards? What is this life? The best reveal though is the one centering on Laurie, who was always meant to go through it if her weird behavior here is any indication. Laurie had problems but those problems became unfixable once the Departure took her unborn child and forced her to mourn that loss alone. The whole cult thing kind of makes sense after a trauma like that.
9. Pilot (Season 1, Episode 1)
Without fail, every episode ranking of a TV series that includes its pilot laments the difficulties of establishing a story on the small screen. Even truly great pilots have something wrong with them and The Leftovers is no different. What is different about its inclusion here is that it’s not just an obligatory shoutout, one of those “yeah, it’s probably not among the show’s best episodes but without it, where would we be” entries. No, The Leftovers pilot is good. It’s darker, more melancholy, and less morbidly funny than later episodes, but still, good. It kicks off on the day of the Sudden Departure, Oct. 14th, with a woman frantically searching for a baby that vanished from her car seat and then slingshots us three years into the future to witness the emotional malaise and societal collapse this rapture-like event has wrought on a small town in upstate New York. It introduces characters we’ll come to love, despise, and begrudgingly root for as flawed, helpless nobodies trying to establish a new sense of normal now that their closest friends, family members, co-workers etc. have been ripped from their lives leaving holes still unfilled. It gives us antagonistic cults, weird animal symbolism, laugh-out-loud pop culture references, and an excuse for lighting up a cigarette that’s so ridiculous, we can’t believe Big Tobacco didn’t co-opt it for marketing purposes.
8. Axis Mundi (Season 2, Episode 1)
We’re not in Mapleton anymore. The season two premiere of The Leftovers introduced fans to an entirely different show, tonally at least. It’s chipper in that bleakly comedic way that can make funerals such a riot. And, it introduces a handful of new characters in a divinely-blessed locale that set the groundwork for the kind of expanded sense of storytelling the show needed after its season one finale. Some questions are answered. Kevin, Nora, Jill, and the orphaned baby have migrated to a place called Miracle, Texas where no one vanished during The Departure. They buy a house, set up shop, and are forced to mingle with the town’s sinister fire chief and his strange family. The Murphys are The Garveys of Miracle but with their secrets firmly under lock and key in this episode. The tension between John Murphy (Kevin Carroll) and literally anyone he interacts with – be it locals or Miracle interlopers looking for their own heavenly sign – is the visual equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. Nauseating. All-consuming. Never-ending. He immediately feels like a villain, but the episode’s twist ending paints him in a confusingly sympathetic light. And look, we haven’t even touched on the excellent Kubrickian opening introducing this supernatural setting via prehistoric pregnancies, errant snake bites, and tribe-wiping earthquakes.
7. Two Boats and a Helicopter (Season 1, Episode 3)
Christopher Eccleston has some terrific moments over the course of this series – see the lion-worshipping sex cult entry below – but this episode early in the show’s run was the first promise of great things to come from Rev. Matt Jamison. A man so consumed with his imagined holy war that he can’t see he’s the subject of the episode title’s parable, Matt scrambles to find ways to save his church. His congregation has left in a crisis of faith spurred by the Departure which is why he constantly dubs the vanished as sinners, comforting the left behind with sermons that assure them they’re not cursed. His church building is in foreclosure, about to be sold to an LLC if he can’t dig up tens of thousands of dollars to foot the bill. Ironically, he does unearth that money, remembering that Kevin Sr. buried some cash before being shipped to the loony bin, but, despite all of the ways Matt could’ve lost that windfall in this episode – by gambling with it to increase the pot, by getting caught up in a parking lot brawl, by helping a GR member, by his extended hospital stay – the reason he’s ultimately unable to save his church is brutally simple. He wasted too much time.
6. The Prodigal Son Returns (Season 1, Episode 10)
Few shows have matched The Leftovers ability to pull off a cliffhanger so maddening, so exquisitely warped, and so filled with both promise and frustration. The season finale of the show’s initial run is the first entry in that tradition. Sure, the episode before this features a blistering monologue by Ann Dowd and a gasp-wrenching plot twist that leaves you dumbfounded when the screen fades to black, but what’s always more interesting when a TV show drops that kind of bomb is when the writers sift through the fallout – and The Leftovers is rooting through the rubble for even the faintest signs of life in this episode. A spooked Kevin buries a body but misses the burning of Mapleton after the town’s residents riot against the latest act of emotional terrorism carried out by the GR. (They really bought lifelike replicas of The Departed and set them up all over town in the exact spots they vanished, huh? This show is just so f*cked up.) But even though some happy endings are found – for Kevin, Laurie, Jill, and Tom – more questions are asked, and bigger threats (hello Liv Tyler) loom.
5. I Live Here Now (Season 2, Episode 10)
The Leftovers was at its best when it simply posed existential questions, but there were a few times it pulled us back from the cliff’s edge with answers that felt so banal and obvious, you couldn’t help but laugh at yourself for conjuring such silly theories. This season two finale was one of those times. Of course, Evie wasn’t a late rapture, or the victim of some new supernatural phenomenon that drained an entire reservoir and stole away a couple of teenagers in the process. No, she was just a damaged, rebellious, psychotic young girl sick of living in a town that believed itself to be divinely favored, among parents so good at strapping on blinders to their own issues that they didn’t even notice her contempt and disillusion with life. Her plot with Meg (a deliciously evil Tyler) to throw Miracle into chaos is a highlight of the episode, as is Kevin’s eventual reconciliation with John – who shoots him and leaves him for dead before inviting himself over for a post-riot nightcap. We also get another glimpse of the afterlife and Theroux crooning a Simon and Garfunkel classic. What more could you ask for?
4. It’s A Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World (Season 3, Episode 5)
We’ll admit it, we’re suckers for a good cold open and this episode has what might be the best of the entire series. A French sailor is slo-mo sprinting through the narrow hallways of a submarine, naked as the day he was born, his genitals flapping in the wind as he murders his crewmates and performs his best Reed Richards impression, twisting a pair of keys at the same time in order to set off some nukes. This is the roadblock a dying Matt (with John in tow) must work around in order to make it to Australia. With flights canceled thanks to nude Gumbys antics, they board a Tasmanian party boat that’s cruising with a bunch of sex cult members on board hellbent on orgy-ing their way Down Under and worshiping a lion named Fraiser. That same lion ends up mauling their leader Burton – a man with a terrible God complex – by the end of the episode, but plenty of strange sh*t happens in between.
3. The Most Powerful Man in the World (and His Identical Twin Brother) (Season 3, Episode 7 )
A Mission Impossible-esque romp through Limbo, this near-death almost-death post-death adventure is just as wild, confusing, and darkly funny as the first (see below), though the stakes are undeniably raised. Gone are little girls and wells. Instead, Kevin Harvey’s got a new assignment: kill the president before he can launch some nukes. How did we get here when the episode started with Kevin and Nora naked in a bathtub whispering sweet nothings about their preferred method of body disposal? We still don’t know. But amidst all the shots of a soaked-to-the-bone Justin Theroux flailing in and out of bathtubs like a fish on roller skates, gunning down past enemies and literally burning the afterlife to the ground, the show poses a central question: What does Kevin Garvey want? We won’t spoil the answer here.
2. The Book of Nora (Season 3, Episode 8)
Like Nora, who struggled with the choice of whether to attempt interdimensional travel at the risk of incineration in order to see her family again, we too had an impossible decision to make when it came to the placement of The Leftovers’ series finale on this list. Did it stick the landing in a way that broke our hearts and melted our brains? Absolutely. Was it a playful rebellion of the storytelling adage, “show, don’t tell,” that secretly delighted us to no end? Of course. Did it give us so many close-ups of Carrie Coon that we couldn’t possibly find a fault in it? Well, no, but then again, a show can always use more Carrie Coon close-ups. In the end, “The Book of Nora” was a surprisingly sentimental bow wrapping up a grandiose philosophical query that left just a few loose strings – enough to plague us with doubts for years to come. It cemented itself as both an epic love story and a puzzling musing on the purpose and futility of life. Still, the greatest mark against it is that this is the episode that marked the end, and it’s hard to look back fondly on goodbyes – even perfect ones.
1. International Assassin (Season 2, Episode 8)
Purgatory has been imagined on TV before – as a Utopian neighborhood littered with delicious food puns, a TV-equipped torture chamber that plays the worst day of your life on loop, a diner that doesn’t serve flapjacks, and an island filled with underground bunkers, Egyptian ruins, and polar bears. But Purgatory as a hotel that tasks its guest with donning a tuxedo and carrying out an assassination attempt even James Bond would balk at? That’s a game-changer – not just for storytelling on screen but for the world of The Leftovers. This episode marks Kevin’s first foray into the afterlife (though it certainly won’t be his last) and it also acts as a kind of launching pad to the next (metaphysical) level Lindelof and company end up taking the show. Theroux switches effortlessly between befuddled terror and suave confidence as he bashes skulls and carries out a bit of Godfather homage-ry, all while Kevin wades through a mind-bending gumbo brewed by his own subconscious. He eventually does the right thing and pushes that little girl down the well, but it’s the journey to that murderous act that feels more revelatory and, weirdly, fun.