Call it the best short film Ridley Scott never made. And this was a creepy-beautiful work of set design and direction: the “fossil” that was wheeled by, the doll in the fishbowl, the door of the truck pulled shut, Nora naked and alone walking down a sci-fi hallway, the egg-like pod, the fetal position, the whirring noises, the gunk filling up, and Nora’s final, truncated scream. It also, with the “bravest girl on Earth” anecdote, explained why Nora was going through with this. The mad-libs conversation between Nora and Matt touchingly honored the fact that this was their last moment together. “I’m ready to go now.” Were you crying already? Her steeliness dissolved, though, when asked to say her children’s names. “I don’t lie,” Nora said through gritted teeth, a statement worth revisiting later in the episode. The Finnish physicists gave her one last test: skepticism about her sincerity. To start, Nora held a newspaper and looked into a video camera, stating her desire to leave this world. Below, I’ll try to recap and parse an episode that seems to want to resist recapping and parsing. If it had a message, it was that grief creates madness but also can inspire love, that inner peace lies somewhere between faith and reason, and that Justin Theroux will remain dreamy a decade or more on. It opened terrifying and closed heart-wrenchingly it was, at no point, predictable. Chasing the ‘Holy Grail’ of Baseball Performance Ben RowenĪ one-of-a-kind, utterly committed work of art and philosophy, the finale was a microcosm of The Leftovers itself.
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