The Leftovers Episode 3
Below, co- creator and executive producer Damon Lindelof discusses how “The Leftovers” pulled off that shocker, what the HBO drama did differently in its excellent second season and how the show is and is not like “Lost.” He also discusses TV’s “fakeout death” trend and season two’s exceptional eighth episode, “International Assassin.” Here is Part 2 of this interview, and Part 3 of Variety’s conversation with Lindelof, which covers the show’s second season finale, is here. Variety: Obviously, the big takeaway of episode nine is that Evie is alive, the girls are alive and they’re in the Guilty Remnant. Was this a long- planned thing? Can you talk about how that came about?
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Damon Lindelof: I don’t want to totally demystify the writing process of the episode, but with that particular reveal, there was a trajectory of ideas that fell . One of the things that I think that the first season certainly lacked was a backbone of, “This is the story of the season.” It was a little bit more about watching the condition of these people’s lives, and I was really interested in exploring that territory, but it lent itself more to a “day in the life” form of storytelling, versus .
The Leftovers' second episode for Season 3 has premiered, and fans are already excited about next week's episode, "Crazy Whitefella Thinking.". The Leftovers: See You on the Other Side. Nora and Kevin take a long-haul flight. Josh Wigler and Antonio Mazzaro recap episode 3 of season 3 of HBO’s The Leftovers, “Crazy Whitefella Thinking”. A review of the third season of The Leftovers could probably focus exclusively on musical cues and needle drops in the series, including the transition from Max.
The Leftovers Episode 3 Season 2
When you watch a season of “Justified” or “Breaking Bad,” you basically go, “Oh, this is the season where Jesse and Walt are working in the Superlab and this is what they need to overcome.” There was a real shape to it. And so very early on, we knew that we were going to move the show to Miracle and I was very passionate about the idea of starting the storytelling through the point of view of the Murphys and then bringing the Garveys into that world, et cetera. Because I thought about that movie all the time when I watched the first season of your show.” So I watched it again.
The first thing I had in my head was that “Picnic at Hanging Rock” was based on a true story . But the reason that I had that in my head is that the movie basically opens with a title card that says, “In 1. And then the movie starts. So I’m like, “That has to be a true story, because why would a title card tell me that they were never found?” But what was particularly amazing about that form of storytelling is that you’re now about to watch them disappear and the movie just told you you’re never going to find out where they went. How can you make this movie work knowing that it’s going to withhold the answer from you? It’s going to explore the question and people are going to be blamed but you know that those are going to be red herrings — I had completely and totally forgotten about this.
So we emerged from the “Hanging Rock” experience with the idea that these girls are going to disappear. Evie Murphy is going to be one of them. Now the question becomes, “Is the audience going to let us get away with what Peter Weir got away with, especially when we’ve already told them we’re never going to tell them what happened with the Departure? Now we’re just rubbing salt in their wounds . Is it viable or acceptable to just have these girls depart?
The Leftovers Just Answered Some Big Questions About a Mystery From Last Season. Did the final moments bring anyone else to tears?
Is that going to be a satisfying answer?” And we have to answer for ourselves as writers, you know. Possibility number one, they departed.
They went where the two percent went, where everybody else went and it’s . Number two, foul play befell them. Somebody came and attacked them, dragged them off into the woods and they’re buried, they’re dead or kidnapped somewhere. And possibility number three is they staged it. These girls basically manufactured their own disappearance. Number three was far and away the most appealing choice for us.
It felt like it wasn’t even a choice, because we wanted to tell a story about Miracle, and we wanted to talk about what would it be like to live in a town that it is deemed holy and it attracts all these people who are looking for salvation or relief or answers. You just live there and you see these people come in with wristbands every day searching and searching and searching. But you don’t know what it is that spared your town in the first place. And let’s say your town is just as f—ed up as everywhere else is. So it’s exceptional for the fact that nobody disappeared from it, but when you look around you’re kind of like “Why? I don’t know why this is.
I don’t know what’s so special about where I live.” What kind of emotional effect would that have on you? We were having all those conversations very, very early on and we decided the girls were really angry about the exceptionalism. Watch Shadow Warriors II: Hunt For The Death Merchant Online IMDB.
They sing the Miracle anthem but they sing it snidely and snarkily and with some degree of teenage rebellion. We’re like, “Yeah, they faked it.” And obviously this is a horrible thing to do — it goes well beyond a teenage prank, to put your parents through this. Not to mention you’d need a significant degree of resources in order to pull it off. Where would you go in a media? How could you even disappear? How big of a thing would this be? When we started kind of kicking the tires ?
A pseudo- religious cause? Jackie Hoyt, one of the writer/producers, suggested they joined the Guilty Remnant. As soon as she said it, we were like, “Of course they did.” There was a bit of fear and trepidation on our part in terms of pulling that lever down because I think that if there’s one sort of unanimous gripe about the first season of the show, it’s the Guilty Remnant. And if there’s one sort of unanimous “Hallelujah!” about the second season, it’s “At least the GR is not in the show that much anymore!” We had them in episode three, but Laurie is running them over. That coincided with this larger idea that Jill articulates in the fourth episode, which is, wherever you go there you are. So the GR was . Our story has been set in Miracle, and what if the juice that’s been running under this entire season is that the GR is basically figuring out how they’re going to f— up Miracle too — how they’re going to make Miracle remember.
There’s a high degree of risk in terms of pulling that off. Obviously we kind of needed to keep Meg on the bench, because if we were threading that idea all throughout the season, I think that the audience probably would have been way ahead of us. We’re in a media culture where the audience is so sophisticated and they can crowdsource and Reddit this information — if they get a twist, you know, like the Edward James Olmos . By the time it airs a month later, the audience just goes “Duh!” That’s not the storytellers’ fault. It’s just the sophistication . It’s like, we’re up against this incredible creative algorithm. So if “The Leftovers” is going to have a twist, if we have any chance at surprising people at all, we really have to hide it but we have to make it fair.
There are things in the premiere like the girls driving in silence. You see them goofing around and listening to music and kind of busting the balls of the guy who’s gathering water. And then they get in their car and they’re driving silently and stone- faced. And there are little moments, like when they’re singing the Miracle song with some sense of cynicism, and the oddness of the knock- knock joke, and obviously the gift that Evie gives to her father.
We’re going to revisit that in the finale. We had to set it up in the premiere and then just let it go and just hope that nobody figured it out, because if one person went on Twitter and said.
By the time we revealed it at the end of episode nine, there would have been a big collective “Duh,” versus hopefully a collective gasp. My hope is that when the door of that Airstream opens up at the end of episode nine, the audience goes, “The writers knew. Of course they knew. It was all there.”At the same time, for me it’s most exciting when I’m feeling like something could be a complete and utter disaster. I felt that way about episodes seven and eight. The whole idea of the fake- out death, as it were, is this horrible trope in TV now. How could we do that story and let the audience know that we knew we were doing that story?