When he’s not hunting that deer, Kevin spends his time running around the block, which is intriguingly what the character was doing when we first met him in the show’s pilot. That Kevin always listens to the same song – Jody Reynolds’ wistful The Girl From King Marie, about a man running to his far-away love only to have her slip away before his very eyes (to wit: “Lightning flashed across the sky and when I opened up my eyes, she was gone, the girl from King Marie”) – really says it all. Kevin is stuck in a cycle, one which has him grasping at the idea of something more to life, and he can’t (or doesn’t want to) break free even enough to take the damned song off loop.
The stress of being unhappy takes a clear toll on him – those who have been keeping track of Kevin’s dreams this season will squeal in delight at the revelation that he stashes his cigarettes beneath post-office boxes. Actually, “The Garveys At Their Best” hints at answers to quite a few of Kevin’s dreams – and perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot of them have to do with his broken marriage.
In his dreams, the post-office boxes where he hid the secret cigarettes contain rabid dogs (take note of the fact that Kevin doesn’t want a dog, though Laurie does – more signs of a marriage turned sour?). That’s just the start of it, though. While taking a smoke break during his morning run, Kevin sees a manhole cover start to shake just before a pillar of flame sends it soaring skyward. What I thought of here was Kevin’s dream of his feet catching on fire – in Mapleton, on the day of the Rapture, there’s quite literally a fiery inferno beneath Kevin’s feet, threatening to surge upwards and engulf everything.
Additionally, the dream of the deer thrashing in agony in front of Kevin’s car was clearly inspired by Kevin seeing the deer he was chasing in this episode writhe in its death throes after being hit by a car. But because this is The Leftovers, it’s not that clear-cut. Kevin clearly relates the deer’s death to his infidelity, the moment when he gave up on trying to make his marriage work. The individual driving said deer-killing car turns out to be a beautiful woman in town for a conference, whom Kevin meets at such a low point in his marriage that he can’t resist when she invites him in for what seems like no-strings-attached sex. Sitting in the car outside her motel room, he becomes the figurative deer in the headlights, unable to break away from his impending self-destruction. Unfortunately for Kevin, the Sudden Departure comes during this sordid encounter, and his paramour is one of those to disappear without so much as a puff of smoke. What we’re left to assume is that, when he frantically tries to figure out what’s been going on, Laurie doesn’t take too kindly to hearing exactly how he learned something was amiss on October 14th.
Taking all that in, what ‘The Garveys At Their Best” is telling us is that Kevin’s guilt has taken root in his dreams. He is the deer – in that aforementioned dream, his marriage is like the dying deer, brutalized beyond help by his adultery/the woman’s car. Note also the “It’s A Girl” balloon mangled by the deer’s antlers – it’s possible that Kevin feels his adultery destroyed any chance at happiness that a newborn child could have brought him and Laurie. So all these dreams of dying animals – are they what Kevin sees when he thinks of his marriage falling apart? He’s being dragged down by vicious dogs on all sides, unable to survive in society, unable to comfortably inhabit any civilized area. Maybe, Kevin is suggesting to himself, he doesn’t belong in this world.
At the end of “Cairo,” Kevin had departed Mapleton. In this episode, we see that he was never really comfortable there to begin with. There’s a reason that his shirts are all in those woods (yep, in case you didn’t catch that in “Cairo,” Kevin basically held up a laundromat and stole a bunch of shirts a few weeks ago). He’s being drawn to that cabin, to the wild, to the past (he went there as a child), to anything that isn’t a stable, locked-in future.
