The Leftovers Lie

HBO's The Leftovers ended Sunday night in beautiful, stunning fashion. This was television as art and catharsis, emotions hooked up to the TV dials and turned slowly to the max. It was nothing short of breathtaking and the finale poses a question to the viewer as to whether or not Nora is lying in her explanatory speech to Kevin.

I believe she is, just as every other character tells their own lie throughout the series. When 2 percent of the world's population suddenly disappears, how does anyone learn to cope? What does moving on ever look like when so many mysteries remain unanswered? For most, it starts with that lie. That God has a plan. That the missing can't quite possibly be dead. That everything is fine. We discover most of these to be untrue. Matt meets God (in a manner of speaking) and finds his service has been misguided all along. Kevin believes his visions to be real rather than a symptom of the psychotic break we know him to be having. Kevin Sr. believes that he is some central piece in stoping a forthcoming flood, but that too, is an elaborate lie. John tells himself Evie is out there alive somewhere. He and Laurie quite literally feed mourners lies to help them come to terms with loss.

Nora though sets out to uncover truth at any cost. Sure, she lies to others and certainly is not fully transparent about her own inner turmoil, but she rejects religion, rejects the lifelike models that are supposed to bring closure, rejects Kevin as divine, rejects everybody and everything to such a degree that ends under self-imposed isolation. She wants the truth about what happened to her children, the truth about where they went, and none of the lies that people tell themselves will do.

In the beginning of the finale she tells the Swedish scientists that she doesn't lie, even though we know this to be untrue. A lie in and of itself. It isn't so much that she doesn't lie but rather, as it pertains to the departure, no lie is suitable enough to digest as truth.

The scene where she yells at the nun convinced me that this is not a Nora who traveled to "the other side," came to some great epiphany and found peace because of it. She is still angry and scared. She lashes, not as someone who has discovered an answer, but as the same someone we know to be forever searching for one. Or rather, she has forgone that search for something more simple.

When Kevin arrives at her door in Australia, he of course is spinning a different lie about the nature of their relationship, one that Nora naturally rejects. As he later explains to her, the lie enabled him to approach her without having to unpack all of their messy history. As the nun tells Nora just before, "it's a nicer story." Again, the lies we tell ourselves to move on, to start over, to return to normalcy.

And then Nora tells what I believe to be her great lie. That she went to the other plane and returned, concluding that her children had learned to cope and she should, too. Kevin believes it, or says that he does, because to him, reconciliation is more important than the truth. What we make of ourselves after the tragedy is more important than the wounds it inflicted upon us. Everybody in the entire world has told themselves whatever they needed in order to turn the page, and in that final scene, Nora gives in. Her story is crazy. It's elaborate. It has holes. But it also builds that bridge between them once more. It was necessary in that way and this is what The Leftovers ends up being about: the necessary things that people do to mend themselves whole.