In The Leftovers recap, Kevin tries to figure out what happened as the search for John’s daughter begins…
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
Can you even imagine the horror of having breakfast with your family one day, turning to look for something and then turning around and everyone you’ve ever known or loved is gone.
Disappeared.
Ceases to exist.
That’s exactly what happened to Nora Durst a few years ago when the Sudden Departure claimed over 140 million people in a blink of an eye with no explanation and no reason for why it happened. Maybe it would be easier to comprehend the loss if you actually knew what happened to them, but Nora was only left the questions of why them and why not me? She was left alone with her thoughts and none of them were good.
So when she woke up during an earthquake in her new $3 million hovel, scared that the walls were shaking and found Kevin nowhere to be found, Nora’s mind wandered to the only place she’s known for the past few years — he’s gone.
Nora frantically checked and found Lily as well as Jill, but Kevin was missing and her first instinct was to call the cops and ask if it’s happened again. Did everyone vanish? Was Kevin part of the second departure?
A few minutes later when Kevin reappeared, Nora was flooded with relief but no matter how much she protests later in the episode that the Sudden Departure was a one time only show, somewhere buried deep down in her psyche, she’s waiting for it to happen again.
With that said, let’s recap the latest episode of The Leftovers titled ‘Orange Sticker’…
The Search for Evie
Following Kevin’s return home, he explains to Nora about his most recent bout with sleepwalking and how he ended up in the mud of the river bed just a few feet away from the car where Evie and her friends went missing. He’s not sure how he got there and he dropped his phone in the process, but Kevin wants to tell Nora exactly what happened — while leaving out key points like the fact that he had his ankle tied to a cinder block in what we can assume was a suicide attempt.
Kevin wants to go to the cops to confess what happened because if they find out he was in the same riverbed where those girls disappeared, he will undoubtedly be the prime suspect. Nora tells him that’s a rather stupid idea and to avoid that phone call all together.
Funny enough, the cops come calling on their front door instead but it’s not in a search for Kevin. They need trucks to drive out into the river bed to help with the search and Kevin is more than happy to volunteer, especially when Nora reminds him that he can look for his phone while he’s there and also just in case someone else finds it, he can claim to have dropped it while looking for Evie.
Nora is distraught but she’s not stupid.
Kevin is ready to help with the search but a park services trooper needs to verify that he’s supposed to be there. Only residents are allowed at this river, much less to help in this search, but Kevin is so muddied in his own head that he can’t remember his address. Thankfully, Kevin’s new pal and neighbor John Murphy is there to bail him out. John vouches for Kevin as they begin the search for the missing girls, but bigger problems are about to arise for the former Mapleton police chief.
The cops searching the scene have found the muddy palm print on the car where Evie and her friends disappeared — the same palm print Kevin left there when he found the car after waking up with a cinder block tied to his leg.
Kevin has plenty to panic about but one problem at a time — the biggest one is finding his phone while trying to ignore Patti’s incessant ranting in his head. When the search comes to an end at dusk, the vultures just waiting outside the caution tape are allowed to filter through to get the remaining water left from the river. Remember this is supposed to somehow be special water!
Kevin is ready to give up on his own search, but Nora suggests that he keeps looking. She drives off in his truck, which pretty much means he’s going to stay and look whether he wants to or not.
Back down in the dried up riverbed, Kevin continues to look while Patti makes another appearance and taunts the troubled Texas newcomer that she can help him find his phone and she can even tell him what happened to Evie and her friends — all he has to do is ask.
She does manage to lead him to his phone, but before he can actually acknowledge her presence with his own words, the lights from a truck shine down onto the riverbed. Patti warns Kevin do not get in that truck, but he refuses to listen.
When Kevin walks to the top of the embankment, he spots John Murphy, who is back there after a long day searching for his missing daughter. He offers to give Kevin a ride back home, but he’s waiting for Nora (aka he’s listening to Patti). John insists and the two of them are headed back to town.
Along the way, John asks Kevin why he uprooted his family and moved them to Miracle, Texas. Kevin stumbles around his words but eventually blurts out that they needed a fresh start after everything that happened in Mapleton. John knows better.
He’s seen this before. John warns Kevin that Miracle is no different than any other place on Earth, despite the claims that 9,261 people lived there the day before and the day after the Sudden Departure.
“There are no miracles in Miracle”
Remember, John is not one of the true believers and he’s gone out of his way to disprove the fakes and charlatans who have descended down upon this town claiming to have some knowledge about why they were spared or what led them to salvation. Before heading back into town, John is stopped by some flashing lights and he’s forced to stop his truck to talk to some of his other firemen buddies.
Inside the cab, Kevin rolls down a window and hears part of the discussion and it sounds like John knows exactly who left that palm print on his daughter’s window. Patti appears out of nowhere again and tells her new best friend that he may have just inadvertently made some poor other sap the key suspect in Evie’s disappearance.
John gets back in the truck and they drive off into the night, but they go directly past their street and onto a seedy motel where he finally stops. Inside that motel sits Isaac — the palm reading fortune teller, who told John that something bad was about to happen to him just before the fire chief burned his house down. Now something bad has happened and John believes it’s Isaac who did it.
Kevin is able to talk him down from the ledge and says that he’ll speak to Isaac to get a beat on whether he had something to do with this — he was a cop after all in his former life. John agrees and Kevin goes off to find Isaac’s room.
Along the way, Patti begins telling Kevin about her failed marriage to a guy named Neil and how she once confessed this to his wife Laurie when they were doctor and patient before the Sudden Departure and before they become teacher and student in the Guilty Remnant. Apparently Neil had a feces fetish because when Patti finally found him cheating on her, he was in a motel just like this one with a woman standing over him taking a dump on his chest. She was angry and upset, but also wondered why in all those years of marriage, he never bothered to ask her to do the same thing?
Flashback to season one and you’ll remember Patti made a bag of shit and addressed it to Neil while sitting at lunch with Laurie one day when she finally joined the Guilty Remnant. Now we know why she was making that particular ‘present’.
Finally, Kevin arrives at the door but when he knocks and some woman answers, who is clearly not Isaac, he knows John sent him on a wild goose chase. A few doors down, John starts screaming and slamming a baseball bat against the wall to try and get Isaac to come out to confront him. Instead of a confrontation, John catches a bullet after Isaac opens fire through a window.
Kevin gets there just in time to defuse the situation from escalating any further, but now he’s dealing with a bleeding neighbor and a whole lot more questions than answers.
She’s Just Gone
While Kevin and Nora are out searching for Evie, Jill stays at home to care for her little sister Lily when she notices the water faucet is broken after the earthquake earlier that day. She looks outside and sees Michael Murphy sitting on his porch, reading his bible and quietly sitting alone.
Jill goes over to talk to him and then asks for help fixing the sink, which he’s more than happy to do for her. Michael fixes the sink, but this isn’t the real reason Jill wanted him over there. She’s more curious about why he’s at home while his parents are out searching for Evie.
He attempts to give a false excuse about being around just in case the phone rings but she finally forces him to explain why he’s not all that concerned about his sister’s whereabouts. Michael explains that Evie is just gone — she’s not coming back and they should just deal with the fact that she disappeared just like those 140 million people did after the Sudden Departure.
Jill doesn’t exactly look convinced, but it’s clear Michael believes what he’s saying.
As further proof, before the episode ends, Michael chips away at a sticker on the front of his house — the same sticker authorities placed on all the houses in Jarden, Texas after the Sudden Departure to mark that no one disappeared from that location. With Evie gone and not coming back, Michael can’t leave that sticker there in good conscience.
The Flood
After leaving Kevin to search for his phone, Nora goes to a local liquor store to pick up a bottle of Wild Turkey and a carton of cigarettes for her boyfriend. She realizes once she’s at the counter that she forgot her wallet, but no worries — a friendly local named Virgil offers to put it on his tab instead.
Virgil is the same man who first greeted Kevin when they arrived at the visitor’s center before Nora started bidding on the $3 million house and he’s also the same guy who was praying with Michael in the debut episode a few weeks back. It’s been my assumption that he’s Michael’s grandfather, but as of now he just seems to be a spiritual leader who knows an awful lot about people.
Before leaving, Virgil tells Nora that he’s so sorry for her loss — and she’s immediately taken back by his presumption that she lost anything or anybody. The clerk tells him to scram, but it’s clear Virgil knows more than he’s letting on even if he’s never actually met Nora before this very moment.
Back at home, Nora talks to Jill about what she believes happened to Evie and how there’s a much more rational explanation than some mystical force lifting her and her friends out of the car without a trace. Nora explains in her former job where she approved insurance claims for people who experienced the Sudden Departure, part of her job was investigating false claims and she saw a lot of them. Some people did it for money, others left while looking for a fresh start (sound familiar?), but ultimately the only ones who actually disappeared where gone when the Sudden Departure happened. That was the great cleansing from God — Noah and his ark being spirited away and the remaining people left on Earth were just waiting for the flood to arrive.
Nora has one more stop to go before her day is finished and that’s visiting her brother Matt, who is now acting as pastor for the town while spending most of his time talking to his wife Mary in a vegetative state.
When Nora arrives she wants to know why Matt told her to come here — especially considering she moved to Miracle because this place was supposed to be special. Now she’s experiencing earthquakes, Kevin went wandering and doesn’t remember it and three girls have come up missing and this has all happened in the first 24-hours after arriving.
Matt finally comes clean about the night he arrived in town — it was the same night his wife Mary awoke from her comatose state. He thought it was a dream, but instead the two of them stayed up all night talking and having long conversations until they finally fell asleep in each other’s arms. The next morning when Matt awoke, Mary was back in the same state she was previously and now he’s just waiting for another miracle to occur.
Never Gonna Give You Up
Kevin rushes John to his wife’s urgent care clinic where she removes the bullet and sews him up again after giving him a shot to knock him unconscious (against his will mind you). Erica explains to Kevin how much Jarden has transformed into Miracle since the Sudden Departure happened and no one disappeared, but it was just a matter of time before the wheels fell off the wagon and the mystique around this town finally faded away. With three girls gone missing with no trace, those changes might be happening sooner rather than later.
Kevin leaves the clinic after John is patched up and he wanders into town square where he finally sits down next to Patti. Kevin finally acknowledges her after constant badgering where she tells him that the cinder block tied to his ankle wasn’t there by accident — he woke up, went to the river, tied on a cinder block and tried to kill himself. She was there after all.
Kevin denies it happened that way because he loves his family and he doesn’t want to die. Whether he likes it or not, Patti seems to know a lot more about what’s going on than he does and now that they are talking, maybe she’ll give him answers.
The first being the whereabouts of those three missing girls.
According to Patti, they are gone — they just vanished — and that’s the end of that. She then wanders off into the street, proud of her accomplishment that she finally got Kevin to speak to her, as she begins singing the 1987 classic Rick Astley song ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’. If there’s one thing clear so far during this season it’s that Patti is never giving up on Kevin even if he gave up on himself a long time ago.
Finally before going home, Kevin looks up in the tower where that man has been sitting ever since the season started and he looks down and asks the troubled former police chief — ‘hey, who’s your friend?’.
Could the tower man actually see Patti or did he just witness Kevin’s strange screaming to somebody who wasn’t actually there? You know — just like his father did before being committed.
Back at home, Nora explains to Kevin that she can’t wake up with him missing anymore so they will now sleep together handcuffed wrist to wrist. The two of them climb into bed, but inside Kevin’s head he has to wonder was Patti right? Was he looking for an escape from this situation he claims is love but might actually be damage control? And what happens when he follows his dad’s lead and stops ignoring the voices in his head and finally starts listening to them?
Kevin will find out because Patti is never gonna give him up. She’s never gonna let him down. She’s never gonna run around and desert him.
Don’t miss the next episode of The Leftovers when the series returns next Sunday night at 9pm ET on HBO!
