Kevin Garvey, the chief of police, dies and is resurrected multiple times. Illustration by Rune Fisker

In 1966, at an event protesting the Vietnam War, Anne Sexton read, in a quiet voice, “Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman,” a meditation on her daughter’s eleven-year-old body. As Adrienne Rich recalled it, Sexton’s poem stood out from the men’s “diatribes against McNamara, their napalm poems, their ego-poetry.” By evoking, indirectly, war’s victims, the poem reframed the question of what makes art political.

Right now, it’s hard for TV viewers not to see duplicates of civic turmoil everywhere, in satire and melodrama, in sitcoms and superhero fantasies. People joke that “Veep” is a documentary; maybe “The Americans” is, too. But Damon Lindelof’s “The Leftovers,” in its third and final season on HBO, is a different sort of show of the moment: it reflects global anarchy, but soulfully, through an aesthetic side door, as Sexton’s poem did. It’s about a world crisis—the aftermath of the Sudden Departure, in which two per cent of the world’s population disappeared, without explanation—but it’s not a thriller. It’s not a science-fiction show, either, despite supernatural elements; it’s not a puzzle narrative, like “Lost,” Lindelof’s previous show. It’s stranger: a deep dive into something like the social chaos that the Hopi refer to as koyaanisqatsi, a life out of balance. It shows us intimate grief—midlife divorce, a child’s death, mental illness—lit by the flare of worldwide cataclysm. It’s about the apocalypse, taken personally.

The first season, which was adapted from a novel by Tom Perrotta, struck many viewers, not unreasonably, as a huge downer. It was gorgeous and ambitious, but watching could feel like listening to Portishead while on codeine, recovering from surgery. (Which I’ve done; it has its charms.) A switch flipped in the sixth episode, a wrenching, witty gem called “Guest,” which focussed on Nora (played by Carrie Coon), a woman who lost her entire family in the Departure. “Guest” had a dreamlike plot—Nora, who works for the Department of Sudden Departure, realizes that her identity has been stolen—that felt newly confident, imagistic and musical. In the second season, the show levelled up again, injecting dark humor and a rude visual playfulness, much of it the contribution of directors like Mimi Leder. Now, in Season 3, “The Leftovers” has become the everything bagel of television, defying categorization. It’s at once intimate and epic, giddy and gloomy, a radical emotional intoxicant. It’s still a hard sell. You try telling people that a drama about dead children and suicidal ideation is a hilarious must-watch, then get back to me. But, as an online acquaintance put it, it’s gone from a bummer to “a bummer party.”

The final season is set seven years after the Departure. The characters are mostly still living in Jarden, Texas, a spiritual-seeker tourist trap. There’s the suicidal town chief of police, Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux); Nora, now his long-term girlfriend; Kevin’s ex-wife, Laurie (Amy Brenneman), who, with her new husband, John (Kevin Carroll), runs a con game to comfort mourners; and the preacher Matt (Christopher Eccleston), who is writing a new New Testament, with Kevin in the lead role. The Guilty Remnant, a cult that followed around the survivors, has been wiped out by a government drone strike. But there are rumors that a new disaster is on the way: a second Flood. Soon, our characters are off to Australia, on a shambolic road trip, hunting gods and gurus.

A set of bizarre plots center on the characters’ often desperate search for faith. There’s a popular theory, which leaps virally from person to person, that Kevin must die and be resurrected, to prevent the apocalypse. (He’s already died and been resurrected multiple times.) There’s a sinister team of Dutch scientists who offer mourners a chance to join their loved ones, aided by Mark Linn-Baker, playing himself, the one member of the sitcom “Perfect Strangers” not to Depart. One episode features what may be HBO’s only non-gratuitous orgy, on a ferry of kinky cultists who worship a hyper-fertile lion named Frasier.

False prophets clearly fascinate Lindelof; “Lost” ’s best arc, the life story of the wannabe prophet John Locke, was all about whether being conned by your dad set you up to be conned by God. “The Leftovers” is full of grifters, too, among them Kevin’s father, Kevin, Sr., a manipulative narcissist with a prophet’s beard. There’s also a bully who calls himself God, and who hands out business cards like a put-upon celebrity. The slipperiness of perception is everyone’s pitch: when conspiratorial thinking pervades the world, doors open for storytellers, a theme that, in the age of Pizzagate, feels very modern. And yet the show itself never feels like a con. For all its baroque contours, its wild musical score (this year, the selections range from A-ha to “Avinu Malkeinu”), it never feels ironic or gimmicky. Its central motif is feverishly sincere: the key figure of Kevin, who keeps on dying and coming back to life, our own personal Jesus.

In an era of TV tough guys, Kevin is fascinatingly atypical. He’s reactive rather than active, a labile, intensely emotional man who is shredded by his own inability to discern what’s real. Defined by his relationships, he jumps from a divorce into a rebound relationship. His is by far the most objectified body on the show: his abdomen is treated almost as a special effect, and the camera lingers on Theroux’s perplexed eyebrows as though they were a landscape of misery. He’s a fetish figure of sensitivity. In “The Leftovers” ’ penultimate episode, “The Most Powerful Man in the World (and His Identical Twin Brother),” we get not one Kevin but two: a fragile man imagining the burden of power.

The episode, directed by Craig Zobel, is a bookend to “International Assassin,” a standout episode from Season 2, which was also directed by Zobel. Like that one, “The Most Powerful Man” is packed with absurdist humor—and, in a rarity for the show, it addresses politics directly. In “International Assassin,” Kevin, who had taken a lethal dose of poison, woke up in an alternate universe, maybe Heaven, maybe a hallucination, although it resembled a luxury hotel. He entered through a bathtub. Then, step by symbolic step, he came to terms with the angry spirit of Patti, a Guilty Remnant leader, who killed herself in front of him. In this mirror universe, though, Patti was running to be President of the United States—and Kevin had to assassinate her.

“The Most Powerful Man in the World (and His Identical Twin Brother)” repeats these motifs, then torques them. Kevin dies again and becomes an assassin again. He’s seeking closure for a different relationship, after an ugly breakup with Nora. The episode starts in a bathtub. But this time the scene is a real-life memory: Kevin and Nora soaking, flirting, the lovers as twins, at the height of their love. They’re bantering about death, about how they should handle each other’s corpse. Kevin insists that he be stuffed; Nora says that’s fine, as long as she can put a beard on him. “I’m the one who has to have sex with that abomination,” she jokes. It’s a tender reverie that frames what follows: a dream about the end of intimacy, folded into one about the end of the world.