What a journey.
The Leftovers didn't
have to explain exactly what happened in the departure, when a small percentage
of earth's population suddenly disappeared. But it did, sort of, in its final
episode. Or at least it gave us enough of an answer.
A lot of time in this
series was spent dealing with the fact that the people left behind may never
know what happened to be people they lost, and that they couldn't know. All
they could do was deal with it and try to get through the pain somehow, in a
variety of ways. But if Nora's story—told completely in monologue by Nora, with
no accompanying visuals—is to be believed, we now know that all the lost people
are fine.
In tonight's finale,
Nora decided she was going to try and go to the place where her entire family
had gone when they disappeared. She said goodbye to her brother Matt, got into
a giant terrifying machine, and was transported to another parallel universe in
which the relatively few people who had been "lost" were fine, but to
them, it was the rest of the world who disappeared.
In their world, they
were the lucky ones. They hadn't lost as much as they'd been spared from
whatever fate everyone else had suffered, but they had also lost so much that
all they could do was be happy that they were still there.
Nora had made it all
the way from Australia to Mapleton on a series of boats over an extremely long
period of time, only to hide behind a tree outside her old home and see that
her family was happy. To them she was a ghost, and she didn't belong there, so
she found the man who made the machine and had him send her back.
When she returned, so
much time had passed and she was so unsure that anyone would believe her that
she just stayed in Australia. She lived alone without her own phone, grew some
glorious long grey hair, and raised pigeons for people who wanted to send notes
of love around the world (even though the pigeons actually just went back to
Nora's). Her only connection to her old life seemed to be her weekly calls to
her therapist Laurie, who promised she didn't tell Kevin where Nora was.
Eventually Kevin found
her anyway, and at first he asked her to a dance, pretending that nothing had
ever happened and that they had only ever met once, in an effort to erase
everything that had happened before. Then he showed up at her house and admitted
that every year, he had spent his full vacation time in Australia trying to
find Nora, determined to prove she wasn't gone like Matt had said she was.
Finally, years after Matt had died and Nora hadn't even gone to the funeral, he
happened to show her picture to the right nun, and tracked Nora down.
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