It’s a great place for The Leftovers to be as it sets up its endgame. In my mind, it was an interesting decision for Lindelof to center a show about an inexplicable mass disappearance on a family that actually remained physically intact afterwards. None of the Garveys were raptured up to wherever – it was only their minds that became altered, and it’s hard to directly trace any of their problems back to the Sudden Departure. But in “Cairo,” more than ever, we get a sense of just how important Kevin, Jill and Laurie are (Tom remains off-screen, though he’s nursing the bastard child of a self-proclaimed holy prophet, so we should keep that in mind) as symbols in the post-Departure world. Seeing as Kevin has the juiciest stuff this week, by far, let’s cover his story.
Kevin, as the town’s police chief, is meant to be a force for order and good. His downward spiral into insanity has been a center point of The Leftovers. Whether, as Kevin Sr. says, Kevin has been “chosen” by a force to “wake up” and see the world for what it truly is, or he’s simply succumbing to mental illness, there’s no happy ending in sight for him. As he foreshadowed in the premiere, “Cairo” finally sees Kevin “explode.” To Patti, he says, “You kept fucking pushing me and I reacted.” Patti won’t let him get away with it that easily; at every turn, she undermines Kevin, goading him into killing her. One of the central tenets of the GR ideology appears to be that they can only ever take punches, never give them out (Laurie’s reaction to Meg beating up Matt Jamison for his Save Them campaign is good evidence of this). And Patti is happy to be Kevin’s punching bag if it leads Mapleton closer to all-out chaos.
One of Patti’s main goals appears to be corrupting Kevin, destroying his opinion of himself as a good man. As soon as Kevin abducts her, she resigns herself to the outcome that she’s going to die in Cairo. She wants that to happen, so that she becomes a martyr for the GR cause. After all, Patti doesn’t give Kevin any other options, telling him that she’ll report the abduction and take apart his life should he bring her back alive. He’s agonized by his dilemma here, having very little recollection of having taken Patti in the first place. “The other guy,” as Dean calls him, has decided their path, and Kevin is just along for the ride.
But what does the other guy want? Is he Kevin’s animalistic id unleashed? That could be it, but the other guy seems more focused on going down a specific, preordained path than simply focused on fulfilling Kevin’s appetitive desires. The other guy seems to want to kill Patti – “you said it was time to end it,” Dean reminds him – which would utterly annihilate Kevin’s self-identification as a good man. “You can only go so far” with that moniker, Dean says. What Dean says about being a guardian angel for Kevin struck a chord with me, but it’s still hard to tell whether Dean is a flesh-and-blood individual working to influence Kevin (like Kevin Sr.) or a manifestation of the id part of Kevin’s mind. The latter is definitely a possibility, but if that’s the case, Kevin has gone much farther down his own rabbit hole than previous episodes had suggested, given that he and Dean brawl over the fate of their captive after Dean puts a plastic bag over Patti’s head.
