The Leftovers is set in October 2018, but it feels like the Old Testament, a world rife with false idols and prophets and the promise of a Messiah, when men and women felt a certain closeness to their creator and all the fucked up shit He or She is capable of. In Episode Five, "It's a Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World," we meet the creator, or at least someone claiming to be him (who we actually met in Season Two).

Most of the episode takes place at sea, aboard a ferry traveling from the island of Tasmania to Melbourne, Australia. Aboard are Matt, John, Michael, Laurie, a sex cult that worships a dead lion, and a former Olympic bonze medal winner who insists he's "the one true God." Only in The Leftovers does this make perfect sense.

HBO

There's a lot of distraction in the episode, and it comes in the form of sex—"debased and sinful from port to port," as the organizer of the sex cult explains—but it has little bearing on the plot of The Leftovers. It's all atmosphere. The purpose of this episode is to show a pivotal turn in Matt's journey. The question is whether or even how this will affect the show's outcome.

This episode, as the title suggests, is all about Matt Jamison, a minister and brother to Nora. His story throughout the series is steeped in Biblical metaphors. The most basic reference is Job, because Matt is a glutton for punishment. In Season One, he also played the Good Samaritan, helping members of the Guilty Remnant—his nemesis—only to be knocked unconscious for three days, inadvertently allowing the Guilty Remnant to buy his church.

Matt is dying, and in his search for meaning—and possibly a cure for his cancer—he's put his faith in Kevin. By the end of Episode Five, Matt seems to have found peace.

In Season Two, he lives among the unwashed masses outside Jarden, Texas, agreeing at one point to hit a man repeatedly with a paddle while calling him Brian in exchange for money to smuggle himself and his miraculously pregnant wife into the town. A rainstorm thwarts his entry, and along the way he loses his wife's wheelchair. Afterwards, he agrees to take a man's place in a stockade—naked in the beating sun.

So that's Matt.

Halfway through the show's final season, his situation hasn't really improved. His wife, who last season awoke from a years-long coma, has left him with their son. And now the leukemia that afflicted him as a child has returned. (That leukemia was brought on, he believes, because he prayed to God as a child for the attention to return him after his sister Nora was born.)

Ben King/HBO

But he does have renewed purpose, in the form of Kevin Garvey. Matt is the primary author of the Book of Kevin, which portrays Kevin as the Messiah. Matt is a true believer in Kevin's Messianic qualities, a self-declared prophet, so he's leading his friend John, John's wife Laurie (who's Kevin's ex-wife), and John's son Michael to Australia to find Kevin and bring him back to Jarden in time for the seventh anniversary of the Sudden Departure, which is four days away at the start of the episode. Such a tight timeline produces an anxious pulse as the ferry chugs toward Melbourne.

On the flight over, Matt is reading the Bible, specifically the book of Daniel, Chapter 6, verses 21 and 22:

"Then said Daniel unto the king, O king, live for ever."

"My God hath sent his angel and hath shut the lions' mouths that they have not hurt me: forasmuch as before him innocency was found in me; and also before thee. O king, have I done no hurt."

Nice touch, considering Matt and his pilgrims are on a ferry with a lion-worshipping sex cult. Aboard the ferry, Matt meets David Burton, a bronze-medal winning decathlete turned sports announcer who claims to be God after dying in a rock-climbing accident and then rising from the dead. That happened three years earlier—just outside Perth, where Kevin Garvey, Sr., ended up after taking a drug called God's tongue—around the time Kevin was having his own resurrection experience. A clean-shaven Burton actually shows up twice in Season Two, once on the bridge in "International Assassin" as Kevin heads to the well, and again in the season finale, "I Live Here Now," at the karaoke bar. In both instances, Kevin has died and is in a kind of a purgatory. At the karaoke bar, Kevin and Burton (who doesn't identify himself) chat:

Kevin: Just tell me what I need to do to get back.

Burton: Why do you want to get back?

Kevin: Because I have a family, because I love them, because I need to see them.

Burton: Yes, you love your family. It's not your time. you've still got so much to live for. Come on, be more original mate, why should you go back and no one else.

Kevin: Because I deserve to!

Kevin then performs "Homeward Bound" and returns to life. So maybe Burton actually is God—or at the very least did die in the rock-climbing accident as he's said and returned to life (much like Kevin).

Burton, who's reading a Louis L'Amour novel called Lonely on the Mountain, hands Matt a card that says, "Yes I Am God." The card mentions the story of Abraham and Isaac, and says he asked Abraham to kill Isaac "just to see if he'd do it." It seems likely that The Leftovers is barreling towards its own Abraham and Isaac moment with Kevin Garvey, Sr. and Kevin Jr.

Matt watches Burton throw a man overboard—Old Testament God would most certainly throw a man overboard—but Matt's the only witness to this incident, and no one seems to believe him. So he ultimately ties Burton to a wheelchair and forces him to talk (in front of a lion who's locked in a cage). That's when Burton admits that he, God, is the one responsible for the Sudden Departure.

Matt: Why?

Burton: Because I could.

Matt: You're gonna have to do better than that.

Burton: No I don't.

Matt: You do.

Burton: Why?

Matt: Because there has to be a reason.

Burton: Why?

Matt: Everything in my life I've done for a reason.

Burton: Why?

Matt: To help people, to guide them, to ease their suffering, even though I suffered myself. I sacrificed my happiness. I let my family abandon me.

Burton: Why?

Matt: FOR YOU!

Burton: Everything you've done because you thought I was watching, because you thought I was judging. But I wasn't. I'm not. You've never done anything for me. You've done it for yourself.

Matt: Is that why you're killing me?

Burton nods and tells Matt to untie him. Matt complies and kneels before Burton who snaps his fingers and walks away. But the action didn't heal Matt, it snapped him out of it—it woke him up from the spell of false idols and from the need to bring Kevin back to Jarden.

(There's also a Moses thing happening here. When Moses went to the top of Mt. Sinai to talk to God—Lonely on the Mountain—the Israelites are fornicating and worshipping a false idol.)

Matt is dying, and in his search for meaning—and possibly a cure for his cancer—he's put his faith in Kevin. By the end of Episode Five, Matt seems to have found peace. When the ferry captain asks Matt, who was intensely focused on finding Kevin and returning to Texas, if he has "any pressing business in Melbourne" and can make a statement about Burton pushing a man into the sea, he answers, quite contentedly, "No, I don't." That sounds a whole lot like a denunciation of Kevin, the Messiah.

Then Matt tells his friends for the first time that he's dying—not unlike Moses gathering the Israelites to show them the Promised Land before he dies, unable to step foot on it himself.

Ben King/HBO

The episode ends with a rogue group freeing the lion from his cage. Burton, who sees the police coming for him, tries to escape and is eaten by the lion. Everyone sees this, and as the lion is feasting on Burton, the camera slowly moves in on the back of Matt's head—his neck already looking frail—while gunshots ring out. Matt turns around and says, "That's the man I've been telling you about."

It's the man he's not only been telling John, Laurie, and Michael about in this episode, but also the God he's spent his life preaching about. As the seventh anniversary looms, Matt is now at peace—what's up for interpretation is whether that peace is a result of losing his faith or having unburdened himself of the responsibility of paving the way for a Messiah. The Leftovers is partly a show about the search for meaning when something terrible happens. Matt's search appears to be over.

Michael Sebastian Michael Sebastian was named editor-in-chief of Esquire in June 2019 where he oversees print and digital content, strategy and operations.

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