Absolutely hated the show and every single character lmao. Was only able to finish it by speeding it up to 3x. At least now I know to stay away from anything Lindelof makes.
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thanks for putting in the effort to understand the latest H3 drama. report back when you’re finished.
Lmao good bit
Yeah I hated it too. I don’t like how ‘HBO-edgy’, ‘can you believe this is on TV?’ it is. I don’t like any of the characters either. I find the premise interesting, but the premise is from a book and from what I looked into afterwards the book does it better anyway. Although when you have a mystery like that that’s a clear stand in for religion and existentialism, it’s generally stupid to actually answer it in fiction because the metaphor breaks down.
I was sure I was gunna’ like it based on the recommendations people gave it, but I don’t like it.
I greatly enjoyed it. It combined the religious examinations of the book with a meta commentary on mystery box shows that felt very cathartic. Every mystery actually contributed to the story and for once their lack of explanation was on purpose. Everybody in the show has a theory on why shit happens and like fans of mystery box shows they never get their answer. It’s a show about how people deal with not knowing the answers they need to make them whole. Some of them never stop searching until they find (or hallucinate while drowning in a tub) the answer they were looking for. Some find a substitute answer instead (religion). Others just learn to live with the emptiness, like Kevin.
The world building around the departure was so interesting, the scientists who want to buy Norma’s house in s1, the census department going around making random connections, the whole plot of season 2 (Moving to a “safe zone” town where no one got departed). I see alot of people in this thread describe it as a world where “magic exists” but we are shown at season 2 with the cavewoman (another really interesting bit of storytelling) that the “magic” has an explanation, it’s just beyond our current knowledge. But something the show asks is, even if it was explicable, would knowing how make it any less miraculous? When the pastor gambles everything and wins, does it matter if it was god or just luck? It’s a miracle either way.
Honestly I’m probably gonna go rewatch it now.
The world building around the departure was so interesting, the scientists who want to buy Norma’s house in s1, the census department going around making random connections, the whole plot of season 2 (Moving to a “safe zone” town where no one got departed).
The things they suggest are kind of interesting, but because it’s all just hinted at background I didn’t really get enough exploration of the world, at least in S1. Like the ATF being expanded to include cults is kinda fun but narratively they just exist to shoot Wayne and any agency would have done. On the note of cults, it feels like a huge miss to make all the cults secular when it’s pretty clear that they’d be some sort of christian offshoot.
The scientists buying Nora’s house isn’t in S1, so can’t comment on that (or the safe zone).
Enjoy the rewatch!
A lot of the complaints people have about the show seem to come from a very different set of expectations for it than I had, as someone who really enjoyed it. It is intentionally misdirecting about what kind of show it’s trying to be, so that makes sense. I just wanted to give my perspective on what it’s trying to achieve, that I think it does a great job delivering.
It’s about a world that is struggling and mostly failing to move on from a traumatic global event. Everyone has their own individual way of trying to live with the grief and the trauma, and the cacophony of all of these approaches clashing with each other has destabilized society just a bit. It’s about watching characters trying to get back to a “normal” that’s always a little out of reach. It matches this with continually shifting the nature of the show to keep the audience from ever feeling fully comfortable in how they’re supposed to watch it. It changes its tone, it changes its genre, it changes its pacing. Some “mysteries” get explained. Others are events that seem odd, but maybe there’s nothing more to them, and there’s nothing to explain. Some mysteries seem like there must be an easy explanation, but you never get to see it because there’s too much other bullshit going on, and you can’t keep a full handle on reality for more than five minutes. The show keeps the feeling of “getting it” on a string, and yanks it away anytime someone gets close. It’s asking the characters and the audience, how long do you keep chasing it before you give up, and what do you do instead?
It’s a show that I found entertaining at the time, and has really stuck with me in the years since. I can see how for some people it would land as just a badly executed mystery box, but what do you do when that’s the reality your character has been written into, and you have no way out and have to learn to live with it?
Barely made it through the first episode. I feel like mediocre writers resort to genre gimmicks when a good writer could do without. Like, you can do a story about loss and religion and all that without resorting to supernatural events
Or you could do a story about loss and religion where you actually investigate the supernatural events in an interesting way!
Maybe my wife and I are weird but we decided to watch The Leftovers a while back and we loved it. We got completely hooked and finished it in a few days. I definitely have my issues with it and Christopher Eccleston’s American accent is atrocious, which annoyed me for a long time.
Nah, that seems to be the general consensus. Glad you enjoyed it! Just wish I did lol
I get your point about magic being real but also boring but there’s barely any of that in season 1 if I remember correctly. There’s more supernatural stuff in season 2 and 3 but it never gets more clear or magical so it would probably just bother you more haha
S1 has the pigeons guiding Eccleston to gamble, Wayne who either has magic powers or just gives good hugs, and all the ambiguity around Kevin, his dad, the mental illness/dream sequences, etc. Oh, and there’s the dog hunter guy who is apparently a legal ghost with no ID of any kind who says he’s a “guardian angel”. I think my biggest problem is that so much of this ambiguity could be trivially resolved if any characters just sat down and spoke plainly, but they can’t because then you’d have no show.
And yeah, having read the episode descriptions for S2&3 I gotta say it just seems like I’d get increasingly mad as it gets more outlandish.
They do talk about it, don’t they? Matt keeps talking about how God is showing him signs and guiding him. Tommy wants to understand Wayne and his magic hugs, which becomes really important in season 2. Kevin’s mental state and hallucinations is important for the rest of the show and something that is discussed a lot. The dog hunter guy is not supernatural, he’s just a man who thrives in a collapsing society.
Not really.
Matt keeps talking about how God is showing him signs and guiding him.
I don’t recall much dialogue about this, might be more of a S2/3 thing. His whole thing in S1 is trying to find evidence it wasn’t the rapture.
Tommy wants to understand Wayne and his magic hugs, which becomes really important in season 2.
Tommy’s motivations in S1 are entirely undisclosed, and imo everything he does is portrayed as being done out of attraction to Christine. He’s clearly loyal to Wayne to some extent but isn’t interested in actually getting a magic hug for reasons that are, again, unmentioned.
Kevin’s mental state and hallucinations is important for the rest of the show and something that is discussed a lot.
The dialogue around this so far has basically just been Kevin repeating “I’m not crazy” to himself. He has yet to really talk to Nora or Jill. Even when he talks to his dad about it, he just denies that anything’s wrong with him. And sure, I get it, toxic masculinity etc, but 10 episodes in that had worn pretty thin.
The dog hunter guy is not supernatural, he’s just a man who thrives in a collapsing society.
That was my read as well but imo it’s left deliberately ambiguous. In his last appearance in the season, before leaving Kevin in the shack with Patti, he talks to someone who’s not there, just like Kevin’s dad.
All the ambiguity really sticks in my craw when the inciting incident of the entire series is so blatantly magical.
It kind of goes to show how good Christopher Eccleston is, that his American accent is thay bad but he acts the shit out of it so well that you kind of stop noticing after a while lol.
I watched it a decade ago. I didn’t like s01 much but for some reason I don’t remember I decided to give s02 a chance. These are notes for that season.
s02e01
0/10. It was annoying beyond belief. First there was the new theme music. Talk about ruining the mood! Then the intro with the pre-civilization woman made me yell at my screen. And more than once. I assumed that when the intro ended the “real” episode would start and at worst it would be decent. Nope.
The rest of the episode is slathered in religiosity and it had no connection to s01. The entire episode is plot confusion pretending to have deep meaning. The worst example: a guy sacrifices a goat in a restaurant by slicing its neck with a knife. The sacrifice has yet more levels of annoyance. Nobody is surprised. It remains entirely unexplained.
Yeah, I read the episode summaries on wikipedia and it seems seasons 2 and 3 double-down on the religious nonsense. Apparently the fans love the preacher character, but imo he sucks. Wow were those doves guiding him to gamble it all on red god’s will? Who fucking knows, this is a setting where magic is real. Which normally would be right up my alley, but they found a way to make magic boring.
I just - cough - wish I could remember the series. What I tend to do for stuff I haven’t seen in year is make a mental mashup of similar stuff or even stuff from the same genre. I get characters and plotlines all mixed together.
Ninja edit
I remember now that I wish s01 had been far better. I googled for a full length episode at ok.ru. I even found s01e01 in glorious 360p. I watched a few seconds here or there. Oh yeah - Whatshisname Theroux is the police chief… But then I realized that was about all I could remember. I checked Imdb and I saw that Christopher Eccleston was in it. The cast was probably the reason I started to watch it. But I couldn’t remember him speaking a single line. My s01 memories have gone to the void of forgettable media in my mind.
I didn’t like the series enough to remember it. But I also didn’t hate s01 enough to remember it either.
How can you say that when he literally meets God on a ferry trip in Australia.
That’s apparently in S3, a part I didn’t get to.
The goat sacrifice is explained later.
Did you like s02?
I liked the whole show. It’s a weird show but I like the fact that it isn’t obvious or on the nose.
After covid the idea that the world would give a shit if 2% of the population disappeared seems quaint.
Yeah, especially given that even though COVID is an ongoing health emergency the main strategy has become to just flatly ignore it. Really does seem like nobody would care after a few months. The only real wildcard is that the Leftovers has absolutely no explanation other than magic, which means people can’t get closure.
I also thought of the Korean War and how IIRC 10% of the population was killed by the Americans. Makes for a very interesting reading of “bad thing we did happens on a smaller scale but to a white american cop with anger issues and isn’t that sad?”.
Was only able to finish it by speeding it up to 3x.
and you finished the whole season?
Lol yep, I had it loaded on a device for a period I’d be offline and boy was that a mistake.
I binged watch it during covid and it blew my mind. Specially with the way the world was going insane at the time.
10/10.
I had a thing like that with Station Eleven, especially with the very beginning stages of the pandemic, and knowing it was written before the pandemic.
Severance by Ling Ma is also really good like that.
I did like it, but didn’t come back to it. The whole thing was pretty forgettable to me, and I can’t understand the praise it receives, but it was entertaining. I mean, Anna Torv is spectacular.
