Part of our human experience on this planet is finding peace in an existence defined by the unknown. Although we may seek calm in religion, in science, we'll never know the answers to those existential questions which have driven humanity since they crawled out of caves. Yes, we've unlocked a deeper understanding of physics and chemistry and comfort in Christianity or Buddhism, but that greater question—"why?"—will always be there.

The Leftovers never set out to answer these bigger questions. It's a TV show—that would be ridiculous. Instead, The Leftovers was about the journey that we all experience in contemplating mortality, confusion, religion, loss, grief, and our own mind. Yes, there were a ton of metaphors and dogs and cigarettes and naked dudes living on towers and Justin Theroux's abs, but they were just pieces of a story.

That story ended Sunday night, with a beautiful and intimate final episode focused on Nora and Kevin 12 to 15 years in the future. Like life, it didn't provide all the answers. Instead, it brought these characters to a touching conclusion and left open the mystery of the unexplained.

"Not to oversimplify it, but I think that the worst possible outcome for any finale is that it doesn't feel final enough," co-creator Damon Lindelof told me of the finale. "To create an episode where the audience sort of felt like, 'Ok, I'm ready, I'm ok with leaving the characters here,' without some sort of sense of like, 'Oh, my God. That's it?' That more than anything else was our north star."

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Laurie is alive and well. Matt died of terminal illness. The kids are good. Nora has been living out her days as a hermit in a small Australian town. And Kevin Garvey, the possible messiah, has been living alone in Jarden, Texas, returning to Australia every year for the woman he loved.

Or so it would seem. There have been theories predicting this was all taking place in an insane asylum, that they're all dead, that they all vanished themselves, that there was some sort of subatomic particle swap. And there's enough mystery in this finale to warrant deeper analysis. But, after Lost proved too mysterious for some viewers who misunderstood it, Lindelof was very clear during our conversation about what exactly happened in "The Book of Nora."

Some of the answers are clear, some will be left to the viewer, and others Lindelof will take to his grave. But this is the best explanation of The Leftovers you'll get.

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Kevin is NOT dead.

Damon Lindelof: I know that there are some popular theories out there that are incredibly inventive and great that seem to suggest that Kevin actually died early in Season Three when he put the bag over his head. And I would say as great as that idea is, it sort of eliminates the agency of all the other characters on the show. So, it's like, well then how did the Matt Jamison episode happen? Kevin isn't even there for any of that.

But is Kevin the messiah?

Everybody brings their own baggage to the word "messiah," but all that Kevin really did was die and come back to life. But he didn't do anything else messianic. Messiahs tend to say, "God wants you to do this and God wants you to do that. This is how you should live your lives, and I would like to organize a religion around myself." Kevin didn't want to do any of those things, so the question is more why is it that this guy was able to die and come back to life multiple times, and what's the meaning of that. That isn't the question that the show is really particularly interested in answering.

I think what's more important is that the audience understands that at the end of the seventh episode of Season Three—when Kevin basically nukes this place that he's been escaping to when he dies—that following that event, he is now mortal. We try to kind of make that clear by the fact that he talks about an undiagnosed heart condition, and that he's given up smoking, and that he's aging like all mortals do. He doesn't have the ability to walk across water or mimic loaves and fishes, etc.

The Guilty Remnant is dead.

I think they were defeated when they got hit by the drone strike in the first episode of Season Three. Kevin is still carrying them around in either his own psyche or whatever this space is that those episodes have them, but for the most part the Guilty Remnant was a fad that burned out. By the time we get to seven years after the departure, they're really just not in play anymore.

This finale is taking place in the real world.

I think that different people are going to have different opinions as to what's concrete and what's interpretative, and I think that that was our intention. I think that there is a very face value presentation of this finale, where you just kind of take it at its word and it is what it is. Then there's another interpretation where there's a lot going on, there's a high degree of interpretation, and you're not entirely sure what to believe and what not to believe. What I would say that is critical to us is that everybody understands that this finale is taking place in a real space.

For someone who wrote a show where there was a misdiagnosis of they were dead the whole time attributed to the end of it, I would have to be a masochist to try to do that here in The Leftovers. I will just say this finale takes place in the same reality that all other episodes of The Leftovers take place, probably with the exception of the "International Assassins" episodes, which very clearly are not taking place in this reality. But, I would say that's as concrete as I want to be.

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This was also not where the departed went.

They're referring to characters who stayed in the real world like the Murphy's and places in the real world like Miracle, and Matt Jamison went back to Mary and obviously succumbed to cancer. So, those things couldn't have happened in any other reality than the one that we've spent all of our time in. And we tried to be very purposeful when Nora makes her call and talks to Laurie, that Laurie in fact did not commit suicide, and they have a very explicit conversation over the phone about what the boundaries were. But she's in a playground surrounded by people, and although the area that Kevin and Nora are in is not like what people they go to a wedding where you would think that, if seven years earlier or even 20 years earlier that 98 percent of the world's population disappeared, somebody would make a reference to that. So, there isn't any chicanery in place, and when we do episodes like "International Assassin," it's so clear not our reality, because things are happening that are so wacky. I do feel like the finale doesn't engage in any of that wackiness so that the audience has real clarity: "No, this is the real world."

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We don't know if Nora's story was true.

If we showed it, you would know that it was true. By not showing it, you have to believe that it's true, if that makes any sense. I think that what's important is Kevin says that he believes her, and she seems surprised by that. She says, "You do?" And he says, "Why wouldn't I? You're here." That's kind of everything we have to say about how relevant the truth is, because if a belief system works for you, if it brings you together with the people that you love, it's actual veracity is secondary to what that belief system basically gets you. That's not like self-help guru promise bullshit, that's the way that I think things work. I think that this finale and this season and this series is packed with people who are telling stories. Part of the territory, the very rich territory that we wanted to explore was: Are any of these stories true? Or do these stories have an added veracity because they're told in a world where this crazy supernatural event happened? Or are they all bullshit? We want the audience to be thinking and feeling and wrestling with all of those questions.

What our intention was in writing the scene is 100 percent clear. I would never be like, "Well, that's up to you to decide. It's all in the eyes of the beholder." No. The writers had a clear intention. I will bring with me to my dying day exactly what our intention was in whether or not Nora's story is true by the metric of "did it actually happen." That said, Carrie Coon and I never talked about that. She just read the script and then played it. Mimi Leder and I never talked about whether or not it was true. She just read the script and directed it. And so the more interesting question is: When the same scene is basically interpreted by multiple artists, what is the truth, even? I think it is sort of a fascinating Rorschach test in a sense that if you're an agnostic or an atheist and you didn't want an answer to where all the departed people went, you're probably not going to believe Nora's story. Even if you had been multiple times that you weren't going to get the answer, but when Nora gave it to you and you felt relief, you're probably going to want to believe her story. Again, all that matters to us is that Kevin really does believe it. There's no ambiguity about that. And his belief in her story is going to allow them to be together, because now they're both present, probably for the first time.

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At its heart, The Leftovers is a love story.

I think that when I read Tom [Perrotta]'s book, the question that I really wanted to answer kind of coming out of it was not where did the two percent go and what forces were responsible for this major supernatural event, but in a world where that happened, how could anybody ever feel stable or safe in a relationship again knowing that at any second people that they care most about would be gone. We've all been in relationships where we build these walls to kind of protect ourselves from being vulnerable and insulating ourselves from pain, and I feel like those walls would just basically be made of pure steel and fortified over and over again in a world where the departure happened. And therefore, it felt like the journey of The Leftovers was ultimately going to be about people saying, "Fuck it, I'm knocking those walls down anyway, because this is not a way to live my life. I would rather love and lose than never to have loved at all." To quote the great poet. Ultimately, it felt like the calculus of the show without being corny and reductive ultimately was going to be a love story, and the first season of the show was about the disintegration of family. The subsequent episodes and journey would be about putting a new family together again, even though you did so at tremendous risk.

Matt Miller Culture Editor Matt is the Culture Editor at Esquire where he covers music, movies, books, and TV—with an emphasis on all things Star Wars, Marvel, and Game of Thrones.

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