Created by: Damon Lindelof & Tom Perrotta

Premieres: Sunday, October 4th @ 9:00 P.M. on HBO

Three episodes watched for review

“Everywhere I look, all I see is what’s gone.”

Tom Perrotta’s novel The Leftovers, and the first season of the TV show based on that book, end on a note of uplift. The brief positivity, and it is slight, merely a passing moment of potential, is hard won. Both share the final line, “look what I found”, hinting a blinking, muffled light in the foggy tunnel of depression. The show leaned on that metaphor of emotional disorder even more richly, but both examine the precise ways that grief seeps into the everyday and warps the most common of experiences and locations. Everything is a reminder of what came before, and the series unforgivingly stewed in that swamp. If the first season of The Leftovers was about the burden of stasis, then the second is shaping up to be an ode to the impossibility of change.

Any particulars, from here on out, come with a fragile warning. Few specifics of plot and character will be revealed here, their slow-burning surprises best left untouched. For example, you may know that much of the cast of season one returns here, and that the central location has shifted from Mapleton, New York to Jarden, Texas. But the ways in which the characters first reappear is blissfully done, and even then the show has more ground to build underneath them.

Suffice to say that the premiere episode is heavily disorienting in a way that breaks known qualities into fragments and stuffs them between new elements. The most vital arrival comes in the form of a family, born and raised in Jarden. The Murphy clan is introduced via a flirtatious and curious daughter, Yvette (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and quickly expands to include her brother Michael (Jovan Adepo), her father John (Kevin Carroll) and her mother Erika (Regina King). Michael treks into town, often it seems, to give away vials of water and invite tourists to the local church.

Jarden has a heavy influx of visitors because, on the disappearance day of October 14th, nobody vanished from their city. Thus it has been dubbed “Miracle” and transformed into a national park, while maintaining its identity as a community. Those two goals seem at odds with one another, but that particular conflict simmers on the sidelines for now. The premiere mainly reveals that no matter how odd Mapleton may have seemed, Jarden is even further in Twin Peaks territory. Unless your town also has an old man sitting atop a watchtower sneaking home baked food from the locals.

That setting becomes the center around which the rest of the first three episodes orbit, though that trail grows very long at times. Each of the first installments plays like something of its own premiere, all of them concerned with establishing a baseline and tossing around perspective. One could easily affix “(Parts 1, 2, 3)” to their titles, given the way the narratives inventively overlap and manage a constant conversation with one another. This may, for some, bludgeon any forward momentum, but the show more than makes up for that with yearning patience and brilliant character work.

The third episode in particular is a series standout, vivisecting the religious ideals that have always fascinated The Leftovers. That push and pull between religion and cult is as present here as it was last year, even if the forms have morphed and moved around. Spirituality is fully baked into the textures of the series, so even sequences devoid of literal talk of God often find themselves concerned with notions of soul and morality. That gives a welcome layer of continuity to the most perplexing moves in the season premiere and beyond. A cricket here may have replaced a bagel as a metaphor, and wounds have grown and shrunken over time, but the heart of The Leftovers has remained consistent. How, exactly, is one expected to get over an unknown quantity?

These episodes both double down on that mystery and largely promise an endless absence of answers. Scientists bring up more literal examinations of the mass disappearance, and Jarden raises many disputes of its own. But all of these queries remain rooted in the people delivering them, and the rot that grows as no solutions become present. To expect explanations from The Leftovers is to fundamentally misunderstand the intent of the inquiries. These are the things grabbing at the characters, much like how those in real life ponder, “how could my loved one have died”? No clarification can fill that hole eating away at the human heart.

All of this feeds back to the season’s mission statement mentioned in the first paragraph. The first year was stuck in Mapleton, any exit signaling a swift and purposeful turn for the show. That was intentional, rooted in how stuck all of these people felt, suffering from emotional injuries that repeated in their heads on an endless loop. Season two sees these characters attempting to do something about it. Many relocate to Jarden, some find other paths in an effort to shape the world for the better. But across all lines there is so much more doing going on here, all of it stemming from a desire to shake off the pains of the past.

That can come across as denial, and certainly does for some like Kevin (Justin Theroux), whose breaking point grows ever closer and more tangible. A few actually are growing, their shifts in the first season finale blossoming into dedicated personalities, like the much cheerier Jill (Margaret Qualley). But each person still present has made a change, and wants to use that to fuel a new life with the scars left behind. The Leftovers knows better, though, than to think any of this will be easy, or even possible. In the premiere episode, John grows enraged at a local man, someone calling themselves a prophet in an endless line of messiahs. “He’s selling a lie & folks are buying it,” he accuses. Yet that’s all that people are doing, picking and choosing what to believe in this time, even if it’s something as simple as the thought, “tomorrow is a new day”.