The Leftovers season finale: The Prodigal Son Returns

The first season of “The Leftovers” ends just like it began — miserably. This time, there was a lot more violence and arson, but still, there are some remarkable similarities.

The opening shot sets the tone for the episode as Kevin sits next to Patti, who is dead and covered in her own blood. Because if you’ll remember, she slit her own throat at the end of Episode 8. Kevin contemplates what to do. Technically he’s not the one who killed her but he did black out, kidnap her and tie her to a chair, so he could be implicated. He decides to sit there and smoke a cigarette.

Meanwhile, the rest of his family is falling apart. Tom and Christine are driving aimlessly with Christine’s new baby (fathered by Holy Wayne). They’re slowly starting to realize that Wayne, with his “magical healing powers,” is a sham and will probably never contact them. So now they’re stuck with a baby that neither of them want. The cranky infant screams and Christine looks devastated and Tom assures her that everything will be okay. Somewhat predictably, she weakly agrees with him and then ditches the baby in a bathroom the second Tom pulls over at a rest stop. Sorry, Tom, you’re a single dad now.

Jill is also experiencing some sort of life crisis, as she has decided the answer to her problems is to move into the Guilty Remnant cult house with her mom. Laurie doesn’t look thrilled to see her daughter. She refuses to speak a word, per usual, and instead writes Jill a note on a piece of paper: “Please Jill. GO HOME.”

She doesn’t explain why, and an impatient Meg snaps fingers at Laurie, writing down that it’s time to go. Laurie explains via the notepad to Jill that it’s not safe to be around the GR right now, but Jill doesn’t care and decides to stay, even swapping her clothes for the white GR uniform. Meg shrugs. “At least you’ll be together,” she writes to Laurie.

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Together for what? Oh, the aftermath of the most horrible thing the Guilty Remnant has ever done to the poor town of Mapleton. Remember all those stolen family photos and wax corpses of departed loved ones? Our fears are confirmed as the GR decides to keep on with their mission — remind everyone every single day about the Sudden Departure — and create wax reincarnations of everyone who disappeared, strategically leaving them around town for their families and friends to find.

It’s as horrible as it sounds, and the person who gets the worst of it is Nora: She wakes up, brushes her teeth, goes downstairs and sees a wax dummies of her departed husband and kids sitting around her kitchen table, just as they were the moment they disappeared on Oct. 14. Nora catches a glimpse of the scene and is appropriately horrified, looking as if she’s about to scream and cry but she can’t actually make a noise.

While that chaos is brewing, let’s pivot back to Kevin, the police chief who watched someone die in front of him. In that situation, who you gonna call? Reverend Matt, of course, who cheerfully shows up and starts helping Kevin dispose of the body. Really, he’s practically giddy, possibly about the fact that someone’s life is worse than his. Kevin tries to take responsibility for what happened but Matt won’t hear of it: Matt reminds Kevin that Patti was trying to goad him into doing something he would regret, and that he’s a good man at heart. Then they bury Patti’s body in a shallow grave.

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Matt lets Kevin change into new clothes and the duo starts to drive home. Kevin dozes off — and when he wakes up, he’s being strong-armed by two giant guards at the same mental institution where his father resides. So that’s a turn of events. Matt waves and says he had no choice, speeding away while Kevin is thrown in a cell.

Kevin fights and protests that he’s not crazy and doesn’t deserve to be there, which is exactly what crazy people say, so he’s out of luck. Kevin mutters to himself in his cell that everything will be okay. Soon, someone slips him a National Geographic Magazine with a note inside that says “Stop talking to yourself and they’ll let you watch TV.” He takes this helpful advice and sure enough, the guard comes in and drags Kevin to a room with a TV — where his father is sitting there watching.

Kevin and his father have one of those exhausting conversations about what being “a good man” truly is. Kevin’s father goes on a long rant about how on Oct. 14 when certain people were left behind, they knew exactly why they didn’t disappear: They weren’t good people.

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Kevin looks like he wants to protest but then turns around and comes face to face with Patti. Well, maybe her ghost. Patti’s ghost smirks at him and then straddles him. The whole thing is wildly uncomfortable and Kevin panics (“I buried you!”) as she starts kissing him and the whole disturbing spectacle finally ends when he’s shaken awake by Matt. The whole mental institution thing was an insane dream. Matt, chipper as ever, says he needs a cheeseburger.

They head into a diner, where Kevin is still traumatized by the creepy dream. Matt starts grilling him about what really happened with Patti, and all Kevin will say is that she understood the real reasons why people got left behind on Oct. 14. Then Kevin spills his biggest secret: The day of the Sudden Departure, he wished to be free of his family. And that’s exactly what he got, even though no one physically disappeared.

Kevin starts telling Matt about how on that day, he went to Jill and Tom’s school to find them, and both his kids looked so grateful to see him that it took him to another level of guilt. Especially because he slept with a random woman moments before the Departure. Kevin breaks down and Matt pulls a “Good Will Hunting,” looking into Kevin’s eyes and saying, “it’s not your fault.”

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That’s apparently just the closure that Kevin needs, except things are about to blow up because he heads into the bathroom and who does he find? Well, a man bleeding from his stomach and about to die. It’s none other than Holy Wayne. No word on why he has a fatal wound, just that he knows he only has a minute left and asks Kevin to stay with him. “Will you do something for me, stranger to stranger?” Wayne asks. Kevin, thinking this day can’t possibly get any more bizarre, agrees. Wayne tells him to make a wish — because now that he’s on his deathbed, he realizes that he might have been a fraud. But just in case he’s not, he wants to grant one last wish for someone.

Kevin makes the wish silently, Holy Wayne gives a fantastically creepy smile and says “granted.” Then he slumps over and dies. Suddenly, a SWAT team bursts in and tackle both Kevin and Wayne, who is still bleeding over the ground. And, apparently, still on the run from the law.

Once Kevin establishes that he doesn’t know Wayne and just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the police send him on his way. As always, Kevin can’t catch a break — it’s complete chaos back at home. Riots are breaking out in the street. He and Matt pull back into Mapleton only to find a hysterical woman brandishing a gun and shooting wildly at Guilty Remnant members in the street.

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Remembering he’s the police chief, Kevin jumps out of the car and begs the woman to put the gun down. She starts screaming at him about something that the GR did and refuses to stop shooting. Matt yells at Kevin to come over to see what he just found — it’s Meg, bleeding from her head and tied to a pole. “What did you people do?” Kevin growls. Meg defiantly writes down her answer on her notepad when Kevin unties her hands: “We made them remember,” she writes.

They sure did — and as a result, Mapleton is burning to the ground. Dozens of distressed people are tearfully throwing the wax dummies of their loved ones into a fire, while the two GR homes are going up in flames. Others are beating GR members with baseball bats and trying to kill them all, while the police are completely helpless. Kevin tries to organize them and it’s useless.

That is, until he sees Laurie getting attacked and dragged out of the house by a furious man. Kevin runs over to save her and Laurie utters her first word to her ex-husband in years: “JILL!” she screams, gesturing to the burning house. Kevin drops Laurie to the ground and frantically runs in the house to save his daughter, where he finds her collapsed from smoke inhalation. He carries her out of the house as Laurie lies on the ground, watching the scene unfold.

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Cut to: Nora Durst, who managed to escape the madness. She’s sitting at her kitchen table, quietly holding the hands of the wax dummies of her children. She realizes what she has to do. She gets out a piece of paper and starts composing a letter to Kevin, which we hear via voiceover.

The gist: She realized that she can’t stay in Mapleton anymore pretending that she hasn’t lost everything — she’ll miss Kevin because they were good together, but she needs to go somewhere where no one knows about her loss. “I can’t go on the way I’m living and I don’t have the power to die,” she writes. “I have to move towards something.” She adds: “I think I loved you, Kevin, and maybe you loved me too.” But it’s too late — she can’t keep up the facade that her life isn’t ruined.

While Nora writes, we see scenes of Kevin and Jill walking home together (they even found their dog, who has stopped barking incessantly) and Laurie going out to look out at the water. What’s she going to do? Even her cult is clearly a mess. We don’t get a chance to find out because all of a sudden, she turns around and there’s her son, Tom. Without a baby.

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That leads to the final scene as Nora, with her suitcase, goes to Kevin’s house to drop off the letter. Then she sees it: The abandoned baby, on Kevin’s front porch. Fascinated, Nora forgets everything as she goes and picks up the baby, who is quite content and generally being adorable.

That’s when Kevin and Jill come walking up to the porch, and Nora looks up, her eyes filled with wonder as Season 1 ends on a hopeful, yet incredibly confusing and depressing and emotional note.

“Look what I found,” Nora says. End scene.

PREVIOUS RECAPS

Episode 9: What really happened Oct. 14

Episode 8: Kevin vs. The Guilty Remnant

Episode 7: Father’s Day

Episode 6: Nora’s day out

Episode 5: Nothing like a grisly murder to kick things off

Episode 4: Who had the most miserable Christmas?

Episode 3: The most interesting character? Not one of the main ones.

Episode 2: Only two breakdowns, and that’s impressive

Episode 1: After a Sudden Departure, things are grim

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