The Leftovers

“The Book of Nora”, Season 3 Episode 8

Requested by

Karasbroken on Discord

What do I know about this series going into it?

I’d never heard of it before. The reader who requested it told me only that the final episode is more of an epilogue than a conclusion.

While clicking through to begin streaming, I (as always) can’t help but instinctively read the blurb, which said that the series takes place several years after a Rapture-like event in which millions of people around the world vanished.

Previously On

“The events of October 14,” I’m guessing the day people disappeared. Nora Durst meets Kevin. They’re both divorced. People record videos saying they agreed to go on “the same journey [the others] went on”. Something zaps those people with radiation and they vanish. Nora has a kid. Or more? Her kids are not dead, just gone – were they raptured?

Recap

Unusually, the opening credits are both immediate and surprisingly long. It’s country music, overlaid on pictures of couples and families, in each of which one person is half-airbrushed out. I recognize a few names in the cast, and Damon Lindelof as creator (which doesn’t bode well for the Closure rating).

The episode proper begins. Nora¹ is recording a video in which she testifies that she indemnifies people for the procedure she’s about to undergo. Somebody says, in Russian, that she has to do it again because she’s “lying”. She protests: I have been following you around desperately to convince you to let me into your machine, I’m not lying!

“…because I have no interest in what you’re offering.”

They tell her to redo the statement and this time explicitly name her kids, Aaron² and Jeremy, as the reason she wants to get in the machine; they had disappeared in some previous iteration of the Rapture.

As she’s walking towards the truck where sciency things happen, she passes some technicians rolling out a rock with an imprint of a person in it – the previous person who underwent the procedure. Other technicians give her a briefing: she needs to strip naked, enter the “event chamber”, and crouch with her knees to her chest. The chamber will fill with a metallic fluid that will solidify when irradiated, after which the procedure will make her vanish and send her to wherever it was the raptured people went.

Thanks to these conversations, I think I can piece together some of what’s happened. Some natural event made random people throughout the world disappear. It was somehow verified that the disappeared people aren’t dead, only “somewhere else”; it was also verified that they’re healthy and probably happy, but there’s no way to bring them back. And since then, scientists have discovered how to duplicate said event, to send people to this afterlife (or whatever) on an individual basis.

While waiting for the procedure, Nora plays Mad Libs with an older relative. Her uncle or father? Ah, no, he calls her “dear sister” near the end of the conversation.

Nora disrobes and enters the truck. As she approaches the “event chamber”, we get flashbacks from her life with her kids, interspersed with full frontal nudity, which is very uncomfortable as I’m currently watching this on a train. Time to switch windows and go to audio-only for a while until it’s clear she’s in the chamber.³

She’s in the chamber. The scientists prep her by radio. The liquid begins to fill the sphere.

Cut to birds flying against a heavenly backdrop. It’s a fakeout, though, as the camera scans downward to show a small home in a rural environment, with an elderly woman who is caring for the birds. As the woman removes undelivered messages that had been tied to the birds’ legs, the camera carefully avoids showing us her face - so I’m guessing this is an elderly Nora.

Elderly Nora gets on a bicycle and rides into town, approaches a church. So is the afterlife just another copy of Earth?

When she knocks on the door, we finally get a look at her – and it is an elderly Nora. She’s going under the name of “Sarah”. A nun tells her that a “Kevin” (presumably the Kevin from the previously) came looking for her. Nora is clearly avoiding him, and claims she doesn’t recognize the name.

That afternoon, Nora suddenly goes into a panic. She starts packing bags in a hurry. Is she running to Kevin or from him? My guess: From him, but he’ll knock on the door just as she’s about to leave.

Told you so.

Kevin introduces himself. “I don’t know if you remember me,” he says. “We only talked a couple of times.” That’s odd; the Previously made it seem like their love story made up a large part of the series.  

There’s an Australia in the afterlife?

Although Kevin is acting like she’s a casual acquaintance, he is clearly lying: he’s desperately in love with her and has been searching for her for years. But at the same time her reaction is not that of someone who danced with a guy twice and is surprised to see him on her doorstep. Rather, she is a woman afraid to open herself up again to somebody she desperately loves. Why is he lying about their relationship, and why is she so afraid of him?

Also, how does the afterlife figure into this? Did the machine fail to work? Did she find a way back? Did Kevin find out decades later that she had gone through the afterlife machine and followed her? Did the afterlife machine take her to a parallel universe with another Kevin, who really was only casually acquainted with her?

Kevin claims he just happened to see her riding by on her bicycle (an obvious lie) and invites her to go to a dance with him tonight in town. Nora gets rid of him, then rides her bicycle to a phone booth and calls “Laurie”. Nora is furious: “Did you tell Kevin where I was?” And aha, Nora is also confused about why Kevin pretended that they were just casual acquaintances.

Laurie denies having given Nora away to anybody, much less Kevin, but Nora doesn’t believe her; she hangs up, returns home, and locks all her doors and windows as if Kevin is a serial killer.

Gotta close those blinds, too, so he can’t use his line-of-sight teleportation powers.

That night, Nora decides to go to the dance after all. She searches for Kevin while pretending she isn’t, then finds him and approaches him. She’s accusatory: this isn’t a dance, it’s a wedding. And you’re still lying about why you’re here.

Still, though, they catch up on people they knew, what happened to Kevin’s children, Kevin’s dad, and why Kevin never got married again: he’s still in love with her.

For truly no man hath ever lived to reach such a venerable age.

The wedding has some custom where they write messages of love, tie them to birds’ legs, and release them into the world. I’m guessing these are the same birds that Nora collects, removes the notes from, and delivers to the nun to be released again in the next wedding.

Then, another strange custom: they cover a goat with beads symbolizing sin and send it off into the wilderness.

Nora finally agrees to dance with Kevin. She leans on him, her face covered in warring desperation and comfort. She asks him again how he found her, and he lies again. So she leaves, returns to her bike, and rides home.

Does this entire scene take place in the afterlife? Is she imagining being reunited with Kevin after decades? Did the procedure fail and she fled to Australia in embarrassment, somehow surviving being drowned in metallic water?

Once home, she notices her birds are missing and cycles to the church in anger. There she encounters a man climbing out the window of the church before knocking on the door. The nun answers, and Nora is accusatory: Why haven’t my birds returned? The nun claims she did the same thing she always does: give them the right food at the right time, refrain from giving them their food, etc., so the birds return home as trained. Nora believes neither her protestations nor the nun’s denial that she had sex with the man who climbed out the window.

“Hey, neighbors! I’m doing something suspicious! Everyone come and notice me!”

The nun retorts that Nora clearly lied about not knowing Kevin, as if those two lies are in any way comparable.

On the way home, Nora’s bicycle takes a tumble. She discovers the beads from the goat, lying in the middle of the road, having tangled up her wheels. And she hears the goat crying out for help, its remaining beads tangled in a fence halfway up the mountain. She climbs up and rescues it, releasing the beads from the goat and putting them on her own neck. The soundtrack swells, declaring this to be massively symbolic.

Nora brings the goat home, and it begins eating the collected messages of love from the pigeons. She takes the messages away and gives the goat carrots to eat instead, then her curiosity overcomes her and she starts reading.

These clearly didn’t come from one single round of pigeon releases. Why is she keeping them all?

Kevin drives up, belligerently. “You want to know how I found you?” he says, almost as an attack. He refused to believe that she was dead, even after she didn’t show up at the funeral for her brother Matt (presumably the Mad Libs guy). So each year, during his two weeks of vacation, he’s been coming to Australia and randomly showing people a picture of her, asking if they’ve seen her.⁴ And finally this year he happened to show the picture to that nun.

I’m still not clear why he’s been looking in Australia. Does the afterlife machine have a failsafe that sends you to Australia if you don’t make it to the afterlife? Maybe the scientists were fraudsters and she was so embarrassed to have fallen for it she fled to Australia?

She invites him in for tea. They catch up on more people they know. She mentions that Laurie’s her therapist. And then finally, finally, Nora explains everything.

She went into the machine. The water filled it up, and - she went through. The next things she knew she was in the same parking lot that the trucks had been in, except there was nobody around, and no trucks either. She took clothes from an abandoned store on an abandoned street, and saw nobody else alive – until night fell, and she saw lights in a house. The house she walked to took her in, a man and a woman. The man told her that seven years earlier, he had been in a supermarket and everybody disappeared except for him.

So it turns out that what happened during the disappearance was this: the world was duplicated - split into two - with some small percentage of the human population on World B, and a much larger percentage on World A.

She took a boat from Australia-B to New York-B (which at least explains how Kevin knew to look for her in Australia; it’s where the afterlife machine was located). From there she returned to the town where she lived, and there found her son and daughter. And her husband. And his new wife. He had remarried, he had moved on. They didn’t even know she was looking for them. They were happy, and she didn’t fit in that other world.

So instead she looked up the person who invented the machine, and who had also himself used it to travel to World B. And she asked him to make another machine to send her back to World A.

And why didn’t she go back to the US, to be with Kevin? Because so much time had passed, she believed it was too late to restart the relationship; she was afraid he wouldn’t believe her story.⁵

But he does believe her. And as she smiles, the released birds of love from the wedding finally return to her house. The symbolism here is as subtle as a cartoon anvil.

Unresolved questions

• Even after the decades-long timeskip, just how much do the people of World A know about what happened to those who disappeared? Consider:

  • Nora expressed surprise in describing how she found World B. It sounds like the only thing she knew in advance of her trip was the fact that it led to somewhere-generic-else, where those who disappeared were still alive. She – and by implication the general public - didn’t know in advance that it was an identical Earth to the world she knew.

  • Since she had to personally convince the inventor of the afterlife machine to build another machine to send her back, she must have been the first to return from World B to World A.

  • Since she is living anonymously in rural Australia, and Kevin was never able to find her despite his unceasing search, she clearly didn’t tell the people of World A about World B; otherwise she’d be famous.

  • Since the description of World B was new to Kevin as well, that implies that the inventor never sent anyone other than Nora back to World A. So does World A ever find out about the existence and details of World B? Are the two human populations ever reunited?

• The afterlife machine is inside a truck, which means it is several feet off the ground. Does every single person who uses the machine fall three feet, naked, onto concrete? Were any travellers from World A to World B considerate enough to drag a mattress to that spot for the benefit of those who would come through later? And maybe leave a sign with some free clothes and an arrow saying, “this way to civilization”?

• How did Nora get involved in the cynical birds-fake-spreading-love business?

• Why did Kevin pretend to barely know Nora, and why did he lie so transparently about how he found her?

Ratings

Story: 2/10. There was very little plot in this episode: Nora takes the machine through to World B, comes back, spends decades in hiding, and waffles about reuniting with the love of her life before deciding to let herself be happy with him. I don’t judge the romance of the plot here (that comes later, under Characterization); the episode clearly made a conscious decision to explore the character of Nora, not depict a concrete and coherent series of events.

Writing: 7/10. There is a risk when writing a work loaded with symbolism. As a writer, you want to be 100% sure that the audience gets the message you’re trying to convey. But if you make the symbolism too heavy-handed, it breaks suspension of disbelief: the audience rolls its collective eyes at the obviousness of it all.

This episode contained both good symbolism and bad. Start with the good: Elderly Nora’s occupation – essentially, grifting newlyweds – very neatly matches how she no longer believes in the perseverance of love. She first lost her husband and children; then her relationship with Kevin fell apart (I don’t know much about it, but it clearly ended despite both parties wanting it to work); then the discovery that her children and husband have essentially replaced her. But it’s not enough that she grifts newlyweds – she’s put herself in a position where she has to actively dispose of other people’s expressions of love on a regular basis. The way the writers designed a local custom just for the purpose of giving the character this very specific and very symbolic job was neatly done.

The other local custom is symbolism of the heavy-handed kind. The groom makes a very over-the-top speech contrasting the concepts of “mistakes” and “sins”, then they release a goat – with everybody’s sins but Nora’s, who refused to wear beads – which later gets tangled in such a way that Nora falls over the “sins” in the middle of the street and then has to rescue the goat by removing its “sins” and taking them upon herself (even though there was literally no reason for her to put on the beads). It’s not only ham-handed, it’s also confusing. Does Nora accepting the community’s sins make her Jesus? Or does it represent her accepting the fact that she has sins? It’s all heavily symbolic – overly symbolic – but I don’t think even the writers have worked out symbolic of what.

But the best type of symbolism is that which is actively disguised – exemplified by the scene where Nora accidentally locks herself in the bathroom. At first, her struggle to close the door seems like some nice attention to detail: the writers or set carpenters realized that she probably hasn’t closed that door in the decades she’s lived alone, so they decided to make it a broken door that she never bothered to fix. But then she can’t get it open again, and you think, aha, it’s not just attention to detail, it’s plot-relevant; she’s in genuine danger, the lack of other people in her life means it could be days or weeks before her absence is noticed. But then the obstacle is overcome fairly quickly: after a few tries, she simply breaks down the door. So what was the point of that scene? It was this: In-character, she has suddenly realized the physical danger that she is in due to her isolation, and out-of-character her breaking down the door represents breaking down the walls she’s put up between her and the possibility of loving again. The combination between the two is why this is the moment she decides to go to the dance with Kevin after all.

Production: 4/10. There is a reason Carrie Coon receives accolades as an actress. Her performance as Nora⁶ is nuanced, layered, powerful, simply stellar. The aging makeup used on her was also very well done.

Unfortunately the rest of the episode didn’t really live up to her standards. The music was jarring and out of place. Nora’s climb up the slope to retrieve the goat was either a failed attempt to make a gentle slope look steep, or was so badly filmed that it made an actually steep hill look fake.

A toddler could walk across this lawn without stumbling.

And somehow everybody in the production - from the location scout to the lighting techs to the editor to the director - failed to object to the absurdity of that shot of the guy climbing out the window of the church. Somehow the writers forgot that the reason teenage paramours sneak out of windows is because they want to avoid running into the girl’s parents. A grown man climbing down a rickety, creaking ladder and getting onto a motorcycle is not subtle!

Characterization: 8/10. It’s clear there is a lot about Kevin and Nora’s relationship that I’m missing, due to not having seen the previous episodes. So I might be unfairly penalizing the episode for not adequately explaining Kevin’s behavior. But the in-depth look into Nora’s character more than makes up for it. And the minor characters in the wedding? There was such a depth of shared in-jokes, hints that this couple are the stars of a different television show we’re not watching, that I would readily believe the writers had those characters’ entire lives mapped out even though they were on-screen for scant minutes. They felt like real people, who just happened to wander onto the set by accident, talked to the main characters, then wandered back off. And I sincerely mean that as a compliment.

Clarity: 7/10. A higher rating than I expected to give here, but I get the feeling that this series is a lot less about the mystery of the vanished people and a lot more a character piece exploring the lives of those who had to deal with the aftermath. I don’t understand very much at all about World A and World B, but it’s also clear that the show considers that pair to be a lot less important than the pair of Nora and Kevin. There’s plenty I still don’t get, but I walked away mostly satisfied.

Closure: 8/10. There are plenty of leftover questions about the two worlds, and while the Nora/Kevin love story was clearly a central part of the series I doubt it would have been compelling enough to make up the whole series. Perhaps that is what my reader meant when they said that this episode is “more of an epilogue”: I’m guessing there were a lot of other plotlines that were wrapped up in the previous episode, and this one is just here to tell us how Nora ended up.

It's a shame that she burned more than half of her life in deciding to become a hermit, but it’s a testament to Carrie Coon’s performance that I genuinely want Nora to finally find happiness – despite only knowing her for a single episode.

Do I want to watch the series now?

The disappointment that was Lost means I have very little trust in Damon Lindelof; I abandoned that show in the third season when it became clear he and Carlton Cuse had no intention of ever actually delivering answers to the series’s central questions. (My decision to stop watching has definitely been vindicated by history.)

Does a single well-written finale – written, I see, by Lindelof himself – make up for that? It could… if I were certain that it didn’t leave massive gaps in the series unresolved. The trouble is, I have no way of knowing if there are such gaps, no way of knowing if somewhere in the first or second season of The Leftovers there’s a kid named Walt who is kidnapped by bad guys, who return him a few episodes later without ever explaining their interest in him, after which Walt never shows up again. (Not that I am bitter.)

I will have to ask the reader who recommended the series – or perhaps other readers of this post – how satisfied they are with the finale and how much closure they believe the series actually provided. If the answer is positive, I may well decide to try the series from the beginning.

1. I saw Carrie Coon’s name in the opening credits, and I think this is her.

2. This mistake is entirely my fault. I forgot to activate subtitles until halfway through the episode.

3. In retrospect, I should’ve put two and two together. They said she needed to disrobe, and this is HBO. Of course we were going to see it.

4. This is absurd. Australia is enormous. Ridiculously enormous. 3 million square miles. 26 million people. Even if every person in Australia knows 99 other people, and he meets 100 people a day for 14 days, and is lucky enough that he has never shown the picture to two people who know each other, it still would take an average of 93 years before he meets somebody who’s met Nora.

5. This is a reason to cut yourself entirely off of all of her friends and family? To refrain from going to your brother’s funeral? And to permanently move to Australia? Because maybe the guy you love might not believe you if you happen to run into him again? That’s what we call an overreaction.

6. I looked it up after the episode to confirm.