In The Leftovers recap, Laurie and Tommy try to help people escape the Guilty Remnant but they both discover leaving the cult isn’t as easy as saying a few words….
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
In the third episode of The Leftovers season two, we finally get a deeper look into Laurie’s life after she exited the Guilty Remnant following the houses being burnt to the ground in Mapleton and her daughter nearly turned into a charcoal briquette.
Much like episodes one and two, the latest intertwines with those — although in a much looser manner this time around than the others — while we discover what mother and son have been up to since each of them lost their way.
When the Sudden Departure happened, everyone felt a certainly level of emptiness. Whether it was loved ones who disappeared or just the thought that what we knew to be certain was no longer true, everybody on Earth was affected by this event in one way or another.
For Laurie, it meant letting go of everything. As she explained later in the episode, no one drove her to the Guilty Remnant — they were just the best alternative for someone who believed what she believed — that the world already ended when two-percent of the world’s population just upped and vanished without a trace.
For Tommy, he sought out spiritual guidance and he thought he found it in a man named Holy Wayne — a self-described prophet who could take the pain away of anyone willing to pay him a fee and give him a hug. Tommy believed in Wayne so much that he followed him to a compound and then helped one of his pregnant prodigies escape capture and give birth to a baby. But when Wayne left this world as well, Tommy was lost once again.
Now Laurie and Tommy have found each other but is that enough to fill the void left in their lives?
Let’s recap the latest episode of The Leftovers titled ‘Off Ramp’ to find out….
Fresh Start
Since leaving Mapleton in ashes — both literally and figuratively — Laurie and her son Tommy have been doing everything in their collective power to get people out of The Guilty Remnant.
Tommy ends up planning himself inside one of the random chapters of The Guilty Remnant across the east coast where he finds the people he sees struggling most with the decision to leave everything behind for a life dressed in white, stained by nicotine and routinely reminded how they don’t matter at all.
He then brings these folks back to a support group lead by his mother Laurie, as she conducts an intervention of sorts. She helps them to regain their voice while the group shares experiences as a whole of what it was like to get into and out of the Guilty Remnant. The people who escape end up staying at Laurie’s makeshift office for days on end sometimes while she quietly types away on her laptop, putting the finishing touches on her novel that tells the story about her journey back from the cult.
The latest convert is a woman named Susan, who Tommy sees struggling day to day and he pulls her out and promises to take her ‘somewhere safe’. It turns out Susan was in the Guilty Remnant for two months, but it felt like a lifetime as she barely seemed capable of forming a sentence much less handling a reunion with her family. She’s visibly shaken when some members of the cult invade one of Laurie’s meeting and attempt to show the group a message. Instead, Laurie crumples it up and tosses it on the ground — unbeknownst to her at the night that Susan picked it up.
Days later, Susan is back at home, sleeping in the same bed as her husband and watching her little boy grow up again. And yet something is still missing and what happens later is one of the most horrifying moments on the history of this show.
Like a duck on the pond, Susan looked calm and serene on the surface but beneath the water her legs are churning at a million miles a minute just trying to stay afloat. The same could be said for Laurie and Tommy, who support each other as best they can, but neither is ready to discuss what’s no longer present in their lives.
Meeting with Jill
The one crossover from the previous episode is Tommy’s meeting with Jill, who he sees before she moves to Texas with her father and pseudo step mother Nora. Laurie wants nothing more than to see her daughter in person, but Tommy says she’s not ready for that quite yet.
He does promise to pass along a note to her (which Jill promptly ripped into pieces) but he tells Laurie that she took it, which gives his mother the satisfaction she needed.
Not What It Seems
As much as Laurie tries to fill her life with coffee, nicotine gum, counseling and book writing, she’s still missing out on something that she can’t quite put her finger on. What she ultimately has to worry about is an asshole landlord that wants $200 more a month because he knows Laurie has people sleeping in the office and when she doesn’t pay, he padlocks the room shut, puts all of her stuff out into the hallway minus the laptop that contained every, single page she scripted of this book she’s dying to finish.
When Laurie confronts the landlord, he refuses to budge and inch and then takes it a step further by refusing to acknowledge that he took her laptop in the first place.
Laurie gets her vengeance when she stalks the landlord down to his residence, breaks in and finds his kid typing away on the laptop like it’s been his for years. She grabs the computer and quickly jets out of the house and once she’s back in the car, Laurie feels vindicated because she got her book back while essentially telling the landlord to fuck off.
Laurie even fills the deafening silence with loud, thumping music but when she spots two members of the Guilty Remnant standing in the middle of the road, she stops dead in her tracks. She revs the engine and they don’t move. She pauses a moment and they don’t move.
Finally, Laurie puts the car into drive and floors it, but the Guilty Remnant members don’t move and she plows them down in the middle of the road. Laurie washes off her car like nothing happened, goes to get more nicotine gum so she can run meetings out of her house and then sends her book off to prospective publishers — and she does it all with a smile on her face.
Onto Something
As Laurie leads intervention groups, Tommy is the one who has to spend every waking moment of every day pretending to be a member of the Guilty Remnant in one house or another. He seeks out the one person there who looks lost and then tries to bring them to his mother to escape the cult.
The problem is Tommy’s days and nights spent there are starting to get to him. He’s seeing the signs all over the house about how he’s a ‘living reminder’ and that his pain doesn’t matter and it’s beginning to sink in why this group is such a draw to someone in need of direction after feeling so empty and so alone following the departure.
The only thing that helps him feel better is watching old videos of Holy Wayne inspire people with his ‘gift’.
Tommy reaches his breaking point when he tells his mother that maybe the Guilty Remnant are onto something because he’s starting to feel what they feel (or don’t feel as the case may be). They know something he tells Laurie and immediately she wants to pull him out, but he’s not ready to go — yet.
During his next invasion of a Guilty Remnant house, Tommy approaches a possible convert but instead of following him out, she blows a whistle that alerts the others that she’s found the rat. The men in the house grab Tommy, smack him around and tie him up in the back of a laundry van.
When the vehicle stops, a familiar face climbs aboard — it’s Meg (Liv Tyler) and she’s clearly made her way up the Guilty Remnant hierarchy after the fire consumed the houses in Mapleton. Meg doesn’t flinch as she takes down Tommy’s pants and underwear before standing back up over him while removing her panties. She straddles Tommy and sexually assaults him and after a few thrusts, Meg climbs back off and opens the door to the outside.
The men climb back in and tear Tommy down and toss him to the ground before dousing him in gasoline. Meg leans over a half naked Tommy and taunts him with a lighter before burning a cigarette to life and exhaling a cloud of smoke. She looks down at her fallen prey and instructs Tommy to tell his mother that Meg says hello.
She claps the lighter closed and leaves him there alone. Meg sends a powerful message to her former recruiter — the Guilty Remnant knows what she’s doing and they can get to her or her son at any time they want. They can fuck him and leave him for dead if that’s what they choose. So remember that the next time you send him somewhere to infiltrate their cult.
On a side note — is there anyway Meg isn’t pregnant with Tommy’s baby now? Seems like a fitting twist to this already twisted story.
What’s In Australia?
One more thing to mention about tonight’s episode — during one moment where Tommy is watching television, a report from Australia says that a man just emerged from a cave claiming to be resurrected from the dead. The TV gets shut off before we can hear much more but don’t forget Kevin’s father said he was moving to Australia because that’s where the voices told him to go. Also the man on the tower in Miracle, Texas sent a letter addressed to Sydney, Australia. Who is this resurrected man? What’s so special about Australia?
Car Crash
Laurie finally gets the news she’s been waiting for that a publisher is interested in her book and wants to set a meeting. All she’s wanted in these past few months was to get her word out about the Guilty Remnant on a larger scale and this book will do worldwide what she’s been attempting to do locally by pulling members of the cult out and deprogramming them.
Across town, Susan is in the car with her husband and son and while she watches one play with an iPad and another fumble through a bag of groceries, she begins to feel that emptiness inside of her again. What is this all for? The world is over anyways, right?
So Susan yanks her car in front of a semi-truck and runs head first into the oncoming vehicle, killing all three of them.
Just before she goes into the meeting, Laurie gets the call about Susan and she’s taken back and nearly walks out just as the publisher asks for her in the room.
Inside, Laurie hears the publisher rave about her book but then finds out that everybody in the room feels like there’s something missing from the text. Laurie can’t quite explain why the members of the Guilty Remnant smoke and she knows that the reason they exist is because the world is already over, but what draws people to them?
What emotions become so overwhelming that people feel the Guilty Remnant are the best possible choice?
For Laurie, they want to know how she felt leaving her husband and daughter and then how she felt watching him save her from nearly burning to death while her mother stood by and said nothing. There needs to be more emotion because while she explains the trappings of the Guilty Remnant, Laurie never tells how she felt before, during and after she was there.
The questions finally become too much and Laurie lunges at the publisher and one moment later, she’s in jail waiting for Tommy to bail her out again.
When Laurie meets Tommy at the car after leaving jail, he reveals to her mother that what they are doing isn’t going to work because the people who join the Guilty Remnant aren’t there solely because they believe the world is ending — it’s because after the Sudden Departure happened, they were missing something. Maybe it’s purpose in life, maybe it’s faith, maybe it’s losing their loved ones — whatever it is, there’s a void and the Guilty Remnant helps fill it.
Laurie and Tommy were able to pull these people out but they never helped replace what the Guilty Remnant provided them.
So at their next meeting, Laurie explains her own personal story to the group and then turns the table over to Tommy, who tells them about a gift he’s been hiding for months.
He explains how he came to be in Holy Wayne’s service while watching him hug away the pain of people who sought him out. People would come from far and wide and Wayne was able to draw them in as he took away their sorrow once and for all. There was no void because there was no more pain. Tommy believed in Wayne so much that he helped one of his pregnant girlfriends escape capture for months.
But on the day when Christine gave birth and then abandoned her baby, Tommy was left pondering what to do next. He looked to the ceiling and asked for help and suddenly there was a knock on the door. When he opened it, Holy Wayne greeted him and explained to Tommy everything he needed to do to help the baby and how he was going to die in less than 24 hours. Wayne also offered to pass along his gift and with one giant hug, Tommy took it all in and now he’s able to do the same thing.
He’s just too afraid to use it. Until now.
So who needs a hug?
Tommy stands there with his arms wide open hoping to give these former members of the Guilty Remnant some sense of release so they can let go of their pain instead of masking it with a cult who tells them the world is already over. Maybe Tommy is a fraud because the entire story seems rather convenient, especially after he was just watching videos of Holy Wayne earlier in the episode, but then again maybe he does have the gift and he’s just been too afraid to use it? Maybe this is how he moves on and helps everybody else do the same?
Or maybe we all just need a great big hug.
The Leftovers returns next Sunday night at 9pm ET on HBO with a brand new episode as the worlds all start colliding together again.
