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The Leftovers Review: “B.J. And The A.C.” (Season 1, Episode 4)

As soon as the snow arrived in Mapleton a few episodes back, I had a sneaking suspicion that The Leftovers was heading for a Damon Lindelof Christmas Special, and just the concept of that made me laugh a little. This week's installment, titled "B.J. And The A.C." (presumably just because "Baby Jesus And The Antichrist" wouldn't have flown, even on HBO), is that episode, but not how you might think. Sure, it's set around the holidays, but this episode of The Leftovers is ruthlessly cutting in its treatment of the holiday spirit and of religion as a whole.

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Oh well. He can’t even do that, being bugged by Jill’s words when he’s in the store picking out a replacement. So instead he goes hunting for whoever took it. Strangely, on the way back, Kevin loses control of his car. The brakes just stop working, as if they’ve been cut, but we don’t get to see Kevin’s investigation of that near tragedy. Instead, he gets in the pick-up truck left behind by Dean/The Bald Man/a fragmented part of his own screwed-up brain, and decides to pull over Adam and Scott, Jill’s friends. That he so immediately fingers his daughter as being involved is a little odd, but I’m guessing that he’s gotten a good sense for when Jill’s up to something over the years. He tells them to return it, and no questions will be asked.

We later see Jill, Adam, Scott, Aimee and others around a fire, with the missing B.J. in attendance. Though they take turns messing with it, Aimee’s a little less into the whole sacrilege thing than the others. “Your dad’s obviously looking for it, and he’s got enough shit on his plate,” she tells Jill, reminding us that Aimee has it bad for the chief (a lust that seems to be requited on some level). However, Jill’s still angry – about her mother not being around for the holiday season, about Kevin generally not understanding her, and about a whole slew of teenage problems – so she suggests dousing the B.J. in gasoline, floating it out onto a river on a wooden pyre, then shooting a flaming Nerf arrow onto it, giving him a classic Viking funeral. Apart from Aimee, who sits in silence, the rest of the crew is game, and they whoop in glee as Jill takes aim. At the last moment, however, she lowers the bow, to an assortment of boos from her “friends.”

In the world of The Leftovers, Bibles don’t seem to be worth the paper they’re printed on anymore, and religion is less a lifestyle than a quirk some of the weirdos in town still possess. The kids just don’t give a shit. That’s sort of an abrupt way to categorize their behavior, but I think it sums it up quite nicely. All of them appear ready to “explode,” as Kevin said back in the premiere, but in lieu of “going primal” (one of the Frost brothers, also in the premiere), causing some trouble in town is their new normal.

Over in the Tommy and Christine story (the A.C. part of the title, evidently), it’s been six weeks since Wayne has checked in. Laying low doesn’t prove very successful – after talking with a random crazy, Christine gets attacked by a disheveled, pants-less guy, who says, “Why are you in my dream? You walk over the dead, they’re all in white,” and then finally, as he starts to strangle her, “I know what’s inside you.” Tommy pulls him off in time, but Christine needs to go to the hospital. If it wasn’t clear last time we saw these two, it is now – she’s pregnant with Wayne’s baby, and so is concrete proof of the charges against him by the authorities that he has sexual relations with underage women. That’s why she’s “special,” as he told Tommy. However, if the crazy is correct (and though we don’t see his dream, we do know that dreams always mean something in this show), Wayne and Christine’s baby is the antichrist. Double bummer for Tommy – he had a crush on her, but now he’s both not allowed to pursue her romantically and is being forced to safeguard the evidence of her relations with Wayne.

At the hospital, the doctors think Tommy roughed her up, and he’s forced to run. On a bus bench, he considers leaving Christine, only for the smiley-face cell phone Wayne gave him to finally ring – with a spam caller asking, “Have you lost someone?” He laughs at the timing but winds up going back for Christine. To remain undetected by the staff now on watch for him, he paints a bull’s-eye onto his head, pretending to be crazy and claiming that he needs it so that the Lord can find him during another Rapture. With that disguise, they flee and board a bus. However, the bus soon screeches to a halt, and they disembark to see that a cargo container up ahead has overturned, blocking the road. It was holding corpses, all clad in white, as part of a service called Loved Ones that transports dead GR members back to their families [UPDATE: a more astute viewer than I has pointed out that Loved Ones ships replicas of people lost in the Sudden Departure back to their families for burial, not GR members.] Christine is a little too happy by this development: “They’re all in white! It’s just like the dream!” He nods, no doubt wondering whom he’s actually chained himself to.