How Will 'The Leftovers' End? Here Are the Eight Best Theories.
At its core, The Leftovers is about making sense of all that humanity wasn't meant understand: Death, life, fate, grief, purpose, and what comes next when we inevitably succumb to our own mortality. We find religion, we find cults, we find loved ones, and cigarettes, and self-abuse, and dog hunting, indigenous Australian rain dances-life is an endless search for answers through any means that might make us feel a little bit better.
As The Leftovers itself reaches its final episode, us viewers are expecting a satisfying conclusion to our own meta-search for answers. Like life itself, The Leftovers is unpredictable, confusing, and beautiful. No one knows exactly what will happen on Sunday. For three years, the show's dedicated followers have discussed, analyzed, and searched for meaning in this tragic saga of metaphors, bullshit, brilliance, science fiction, and scripture.
We go into the unknown together, but we're armed with theories. These are some of my favorites I've culled from Reddit, reviews, co-workers, and my own viewing. Believe in one, in all, or none-regardless, we'll have an outcome in a matter of days.
The One Without Answers
My theory is that there will be no answers. "Death is easy. People just want finality and end to their grief, but with departures there is no end," Laurie said in Episode Six. Maybe this would be the ending that the Guilty Remnant wants. Maybe the truth is that there are no answers, there is no ending besides death, the great unknown. Maybe in a show that's about our search for answers it shouldn't provide any at all. In the end, we get to choose whichever makes us the most comfortable. We get to choose faith or nihilism or science or cigarettes or Laurie or Nora or Kevin or Matt. Pick your own, the beauty is in the unknown. It's a show about people who live obsessed with what happens to everyone who vanished-but like life, the story is the journey itself.
The One Where It's Just a Love Story
During an interview in early April, Damon Lindelof said, "Not to oversimplify a very complicated show, but this is really just a love story between Kevin and Nora. That's where we wanted to push our story chips - into the middle of the love table." One Reddit post introduced the idea that the finale will only focus on Nora and Kevin as a couple, and abandon all the mysticism and religion. As one comment pointed out, "This show isn't about the mind blowing stuff anyway. That's the point. All these crazy things happen around us all the time and we focus on finding a reason for those events instead of focusing on where we're at right now. I'm alone on this but I hope that's what we get."
Considering, as Lindelof said, this is just a love story, we'd get some sort of answer here. Among all the chaos of life, the only thing we can find comfort in is love. The answer to all the pain and suffering to The Leftovers is in Nora and Kevin's love for each other. "We fucked up with Nora," Kevin tells Kevin at the end of the penultimate episode. Maybe that's really all that matters.
The One With the Lost Connection
Alright, maybe I've watched too many Damon Lindelof shows, but perhaps the place Kevin Garvey goes when he dies is somewhere on the island-or at that church in the end of Lost. That theory of limbo, of death, of mysterious realms blurring life, afterlife, fantasy and reality, would be perfectly fitting in The Leftovers as well. Could it just be a coincidence? Could it just be that he's, as a writer, interested in exploring these concepts? Yeah, it would be the craziest, most unlikely, twist in television history, but it's certainly possible. Even if they're not on the island, maybe Jack and Kevin and Locke and Kate will meet up somewhere.
The One Where Jesus Saves
"Jesus, you look just fucking like him," Meg says upon running into Kevin the Assassin in the second to last episode. In a Reddit post about last week's episode, "The Most Powerful Man in the World (and His Identical Twin Brother)," user Joaktree33 writes of Kevin's journey: "Maybe we just have to do the best with what we have - embrace the life we are given while it lasts and love the people around us. So he decides to destroy the place where he keeps going to escape from life, and return to face the consequences of being a coward and perhaps try to resolves things with Nora... or perhaps he will become a Jesus figure and teach this newly found wisdom and love to others."
The One Where Kevin Was Dead This Whole Season
This one comes from my colleague Michael Sebastian, who outlined his theory after Episode Seven. And, maybe, this is again "too Lost," but it could be a possibility. "Kevin died 40 minutes into the first episode, "The Book of Kevin," when he put the dry-cleaning bag over his head, wrapped the duct tape tightly around his neck, and suffocated himself," we surmised in our recap. See the whole theory here.
The One Where Kevin and Co. Actually Departed
Let's say, just for a moment, everything we've watched through this season has been through the perspective of those who have actually departed. Perhaps that's what makes the Guilty Remnant so important in Kevin's Limbo Realm. One theory I've read is that the cult stoned Gladys in Season One to return them to where they came from. This is why everyone who returns achieves such immense power because they're the only ones who came back. This explains the constant return of David Burton, who has appeared in multiple key episodes throughout the series and now claims he's god.
The One Where Nora Is the Messiah
We've seen Kevin go in and out of purgatory to find a world without answers. This show, in part, has been about the conflict between science vs faith. Nora and her brother represent both sides. After the departure, she dedicated her life to gathering data to solve what happened. Matt dedicates his life to religion-whether that be Christianity or The Book of Kevin. But what if to truly save the world, to truly understand the meaning of life, humans need both? If Nora has entered the machine, perhaps that will bring her to the same place, the place where she needs to do her part to become the savior of humanity.
The One With A Happily Ever After
It has to be an option, right? It would be pretty pessimistic to believe that there's no chance for these people to have a happy ending. And, though it's rare, The Leftovers is capable of happy moments. Kevin and Nora's life together was, for at least a brief time at the beginning of Season Three, pretty alright. Nora and Kevin, Laurie and Kevin, Matt and Mary-they can be together, and even if they never get answers and even when faced with the overwhelming grief of death, they can find solace in each other.
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