The Leftovers challenges viewers yet again to grapple with the emotional fallout rippling through Mapleton, NY. Read our full recap for all the details.
Tonight’s season 1, episode 2, “Penguin One, Us Zero,” set up the trajectory for a majority of the main characters, while keeping an air of mystery surrounding others. The balance between the known and the unknown is, once again, handled with great care and consideration by the creators of the show. There is still plenty to learn about the Garveys and the citizens of Mapleton, but let’s explore what we learned tonight.
Un-Holy Wayne:
At the close of last week, the holy work of Wayne’s compound raised a few eyebrows. The FBI does not blink at the work of the former Pennsylvania rapist. The compound undergoes a raid and Tom saves Christine, Wayne’s top priority. However, the heroic act comes at that price of killing an agent.
Taking Christine to a seemingly abandoned gas station, Tom finds a murdered mechanic in the garage. Before Wayne shows up, traveling in the trunk, Tom phones his dad, but abruptly hangs up as a car approaches. Wayne checks in on Christine and informs Tom that she is under his watch. After snapping Tom’s phone in half, Wayne hands him a burner phone and quiet a lot of cash, hoping the two will disappear until given further instruction. Frustrated by the mess he got himself into, Tom refuses to allow Wayne to “hug away” his pain and instead takes it out on the steering wheel of the car.
The Pledge House:
There is a saying, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a noise?” Laurie is off to a rocky start with Meg, who is in the throws of a quasi orientation to The Guilty Remnant. Still able to hold onto her speech, Meg is led into the woods by a silent Laurie, who charges her with the task of chopping down a tree.
The task proves to hold too much unexplained symbolism for Meg, who yells and turns back to the house. What does the tree represent mean exactly? Meanwhile, back at the Pledge House, Kevin Garvey pays a routine visit to deliver missing persons papers to another initiate Ron Jenson. Kevin sees the latest addition, Meg icing her hands. He offers her help and hands over his card, before taking a photo of her to add to his tally of new members. Investigating further, Kevin learns that from her husband that he does not want her back.
Meg’s training continues, despite warnings that Laurie’s work is pushing her away. Every night Meg gives up a possession, tonight’s is her mother’s sweater. Meg asks Laurie if she still remembers what it feels like to care for another person. Laurie scribbles out, “I remember.” (Is the writing, when it is on a notepad hard for anyone else to make out at times?)
At dawn, Laurie receives a message that Meg is gone. However, she is merely in the woods, attempting to chop down the tree.
The Dogs, the Penguin, and the Bagel:
Kevin Garvey may be going a bit insane. Besides having fever dreams (the purpose of which are to show off Theroux’s body) involving killer dogs and fire, Garvey lucidly tries to track down the truck the precinct believes to be fake. Lucy has ordered Kevin to see a shrink, one who has an inflatable penguin in his office for children to release their aggression.
Their sessions are as fruitful as Kevin’s attempt to convince everyone that he did not murder all of the dogs, but that a mystery man in a pickup truck does exist. However, the man is not the only thing missing from Kevin’s vision, his bagel does not come out of the toaster! Mondays, am I right?
Convinced he is going insane, Kevin’s friend calls to report that the pickup truck was found in Garvey’s driveway. Apparently, as we learn later, the mystery man, who tracks the pack of dogs on the edge of town, will be staking out an area by the school. He no longer has a use for the truck, but he could use a friend. Kevin’s daughter sees the man, so we know that he is not a hallucination.
At the end of a long day, Kevin visits his father and tries to figure out if he is on the same trajectory as the man who now argues with the voices in his head. As it turns out, the voices warn Kevin to make sure that the man who visits him (that they sent) remains a secret.
Hit the Power Button:
Nora Durst, the woman who lost her entire family to the departure, takes on an interesting role in the town. Jill and Aimee follow her after noticing a handgun in her purse at the coffee house.
The Frost twins are outside, and the two girls commandeer their Prius for the day in pursuit of Nora. When they stop outside of a suburban house, the action on the inside proves more valuable than Aimee stealing Nora’s hand cream.
Nora conducts 150 question interviews on families of the departed who are seeking to claim “Departure Benefits.” Anything from travel to Brazil to sexual partners is asked of the people struggling with their loss. In this week’s case, the subjects are a couple whose son had Downs Syndrome.
For someone who lost their entire family, this particular line of work raises a few flags. Perhaps the girls’ joke that Nora killed her entire family and blamed it on the departure is not so far-fetched.
Stray observations:
•Kevin’s beat up fridge- continuity!
•How old is Lucy? She seems to have a history with Garvey Sr.
Watch The Leftovers season 1, episode 3, “Two Boats and a Helicopter,” Sunday, July 13 at 10:00 p.m. ET on HBO
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