The Leftovers’ Laurie Garvey is all of us
If you take “us” to mean television watchers.
This blog will contain spoilers for The Leftovers through S3E6: “Certified”
Laurie’s on a boat
The world of The Leftovers (2014-2017) is fucked up. One normal afternoon turns into tragedy as 2% of the world’s population disappears in a single moment. After the opening scene of the pilot depicts that instant in a scene that will stick with you for forever, the “Sudden Departure” is history for most of the remainder of the show outside of several instances showing it from different characters’ perspectives in later episodes. It is not a show about the Sudden Departure but rather those who are the titular leftovers. A woman whose whole family departs. A man whose wife is the victim of a car accident caused by a suddenly driverless vehicle. A whole town where nobody departed. A woman who found out she was pregnant and then that the baby departed during the same ultrasound.
This last one is Laurie Garvey, a psychiatrist who, following the Sudden Departure, attempts to return to her job but cannot find a way to respond to her clients who have lost people. Her tragedy is like theirs and different. What do you say to somebody who had a loved one disappear anyways? Does it matter? It’s a tough job even without her strange experience with it. So she joins a nihilistic death cult, as one might. For most of the first season—which closely but not exactly adapts a novel with the same title by Tom Perrotta—Laurie is silent, clad in white, and constantly smoking, following the requirements set out by the Guilty Remnant. The cult believes that the world ended on the day of the Sudden Departure and everyone who has tried to return to a life resembling what came before it is fooling themselves. Laurie eventually leaves the cult when her teen daughter joins and is attacked along with the rest of the cult in a climactic scene towards the end of the first season.
Laurie is peripheral in much of season 2, only occasionally showing up to try to reconcile with her daughter and help her ex-husband deal with his visions of a dead woman. In the one episode that focuses on her early in the season, she is trying to deprogram other members of the GR and writing a book about her experience in the cult. Neither are successful until she realizes that people need to replace their grief with something rather than just stripping them of whatever they’ve clung to in order to make sense of the world. Is a helpful lie better than a harmful one? Better than the truth? Laurie seems to think so.
But by the midpoint of season 3 things have started to go even further off the rails. Her ex-husband is now a Messiah figure developing a small following of his own against his will. His new wife is oscillating between suicidal and homicidal tendencies as she investigates a company promising that they have the technology to send people to wherever the departures went. Laurie and her new husband perform therapy by pretending he’s a medium with her giving advice for how to move on from loss in his hidden earpiece. Lying to help, again. She takes this strategy to Australia as most of the characters converge at a small house in the outback where her ex-husband is expected by his acolytes to kill himself so he can travel to a mystical realm where his actions might have metaphysical consequences in the real world that could save everyone from a new biblical flood.
In “Certified,” the sixth episode out of eight in the show’s third and final season, Laurie becomes, in part, the closest thing the show gets to having an audience surrogate character. Most tv shows are unrealistic, by which I mean they are exaggerations of real world dynamics, events, and character types. This is how drama works. Even the most down-to-earth shows are still shows, still require incident of some kind, still cut out most of the mundanity of life. The audience surrogate is often a relatively normal person who can help tv viewers adjust to the terms of the created world the show takes place in. They can react to strange happenings as we might if we were suddenly thrust into extraordinary circumstances. But they can also be used by writers to voice audience concerns. They can be the ones who say maybe we shouldn’t break up the group to investigate different parts of the scary house alone. Or, in the case of Laurie in “Certified,” she can be the one-eyed king in the land of the blind.
Laurie must have been a good psychiatrist. She is incredibly perceptive. The ability to see other characters beyond the lies they tell themselves and each other is a powerful tool for the audience surrogate. As The Leftovers weaved its increasingly absurd story over the first two and a half seasons of the show things only got weirder and worse. The GR were one of many new cults, scams, and religions that were birthed in the aftermath of the Sudden Departure, and the two groups of teens that were featured in the first two seasons demonstrate that the kids were not going to be much better at dealing with the new world than the adults were as they gave into hedonistic impulses and magical thinking. Nothing is normal past the Sudden Departure and that seems to be the point of the show. Grief is weird and can warp the world into a fun-house mirror version of itself. Maybe you can come out the other end with a clearer perception of yourself and your place int this strange world, or maybe you can’t. Maybe you can at least fool yourself into thinking you can once again Become Normal.
So when Laurie, having had her unique experience of the Sudden Daparture, joined a cult, got out, tried to save others from it, and then decided to join in on the grifting on the side of good, gets the call that her family and friends are converging on the other side of the world to witness her ex-husband’s suicide (temporary, hopefully), she decides to tag along and at least attempt to reduce the harm that might come from such strange convictions. Audiences, too, might be holding onto strange convictions. We did in fact see her ex-husband’s trip(s!) into the mystical other place following what should have been his death. Maybe those were metaphors, maybe they were real (within the world of the show). The truth is as much in the air for the audience as it feels it is for the characters. Except Laurie. Laurie knows how cults work, she knows that people need something to believe in when the world feels like it is falling apart at the seams. She knows delusional reasoning, suicidal impulses (the episode opens with her aborted suicide attempt following her inability to help a client whose screaming child departed in the show’s opening scene and her subsequent joining the GR), and coping mechanisms. She is grounded where others are adrift.
The structure of the episode, following the extended cold open, consists of one-on-one moments with almost all the remaining characters. She tries at first not to rock the boat too much, sitting back and observing just how much these people have gone adrift. She watches them, in other words, and maintains the kind of distance we as the audience have access to but often surrender for the thrills of drama. We more often get wrapped up in the out-there plans and inexplicable tribulations the characters face. The show’s structure encourages this, asks us to get into the heads of our increasingly unmoored characters as it focuses on one or two of them an episode. Laurie’s skepticism is annoying when she’s seen from the true believer’s perspective. But when the episode is focalized through her perspective it allows us to see just how far everyone else has gone from a more rational point of view. She speaks with her second husband who fears his delusional belief that his dead daughter might still be alive could actually be a delusion. She confronts her ex-husband’s dad, his true believer, self-proclaimed Peter the apostle, for his casting of her as Doubting Thomas. She maybe helps her final client, the woman whose whole family departed and is now oscillating between suicide and homicide as her rage at those who take advantage of people like her becomes overwhelming.
In the episode’s penultimate scene she has a discussion with her ex-husband, back after a trip out into the outback to ponder his upcoming third death. They tell each other the truth, first about small things. His hatred of their house when they were married, her slacking off from a work conference for an expensive spa weekend. Eventually she tells him that she was pregnant when the Sudden Departure happened and that the baby departed as she watched on the ultrasound. He seems shocked, as you would be, but she explains that she never wanted another child, having raised two to near-adulthood already. Is it the truth? Does it matter?
She asks him if he’s scared for what he’s expected to do the next day and when he replies that he isn’t, almost surpising himself with the revelation, she smiles and says that she isn’t either. It’s weirdly the least absurd and contentious discussion she has in an episode full of them, despite the stakes and the larger bizzare events the conversation is ostensibly about. She passes no judgement nor tries to change his mind about anything. Instead she reminds him—and shows the audience—what their marriage used to be like and perhaps gives him a moment of gentle reflection that his acolytes can’t or won’t give him. It’s beautiful.
None of this works without the absolutely stellar cast that populates this show with a roster full of heavyweights. Carrie Coon is the breakout star, having only been in a few plays before this and giving one of the best TV performances of the decade, but Amy Brenneman’s Laurie is a marvel, too. The range she plays across the show is astonishing. TV is often thought of as a performer’s medium, with actors playing characters for much longer than in most other performing arts, and performing new variations on the characters based on plot developments that just can’t fit into a 2 hour movie or play. Many call it a writer’s medium as well, given the primacy of the writers room in the creation of most TV while directors often come and go between episodes. But as Harrison Ford reminded George Lucas on the set of Star Wars, you can type this shit, but you can’t say it. With the difficulty of creating a real-feeling world that is as absurd as the world of The Leftovers becomes, the performance of conversations about which apostle each character is or how two people reconcile their normal past with their mystical near-future is crucial to the show’s effectiveness.
Laurie is a stand in, in this episode, for us, allowing our questions about how far these people have gone in the pursuit of preposterous goal to come to the surface within the show itself. But she maintains agency in the show as well. She is not a passive observer as we must be. In the end, she goes out into the ocean off the Austrailian coast to scuba dive on the seventh anniversary of the Sudden Departure, the day that might also be the start of the next biblical flood event. She was told by another character how one might painlessly complete suicide in a way that looks like equipment failure while scuba diving and in the episode’s last moments we see her fall backwards into the water in full scuba gear. Is she doing it? Does it matter?
Perhaps what matters most is what happens just before her plunge, when her daughter and son call to remember a meaningless little nugget of family history. Here she smiles fully and without the doubt that clouds her expressions throughout the rest of the episode. She need not worry about her kids, finally. She can just enjoy the moment. It is what TV viewers get out of watching TV. We follow people for years. Watch them change and evolve as the experience their little exaggerated world. We remember the good moments as the world gets worse. We smile when characters who had left return, even if only over the phone. Maybe the help us remember why we’re watching in the first place. And then things go on, as the drama requires, and we wait to see what happens.
