The Leftovers Series Premiere Review: “Pilot” (Season 1, Episode 1)

In another part of Mapleton, Tom Garvey (Chris Zylka), evidently distanced from the rest of his family, is waiting in an RV when another man shows up. We learn that he’s Congressman Witten (Brad Leland), and Tom is taking him to meet the mysterious Wayne (Paterson Joseph). Witten reluctantly hands over his phone to Tom and puts on a blindfold. On the road, Witten asks Tom about his past. We see a flashback of two people, holding hands, jumping off a building. It’s not much of an answer to Witten’s question of why Tom isn’t in college, but perhaps Tom was too traumatized by the Sudden Departure and its aftermath to stick to the academic path?

Back at the house, Kevin watches the TV. The Denziger Commission of scientists, put together to figure out what happened three years prior, has come up empty-handed. “You don’t know?” an angry-sounding man sitting on a board says, paraphrasing what the commission has concluded. Science is of no help to a population trying to make sense of an inexplicable event.

In the absence of science, some have turned to religion, such as the local members of a cult called the Guilty Remnant, who we see smoking in silence, all in white. “We don’t smoke for enjoyment. We smoke to proclaim our faith,” one sign in their headquarters reads. Laurie is among them, but Patti (Ann Dowd) is their leader.

After losing his cool, Kevin heads to the home of the woman whose dog was shot. On his way to the door, he sees a deer, standing stock still, in the bushes. Concluding that it’s taxidermized, he knocks on the door. The woman’s reaction is hardly common. “Dog’s been gone for three years, ran away and never came back,” she intones. “He was my husband’s – he’s not coming back either.” Kevin apologizes but she doesn’t want to hear it. She asks him if he was the guy who had a nervous breakdown (and a flashback of him streaking through a dark neighborhood confirms that), but Kevin insists it was his father. On his way out, Kevin looks back at the bushes. The deer is gone. However, he doesn’t have time to dwell on that oddity – he’s late for a meeting that was bumped up without his knowledge.

When he hurries into the meeting, Mayor Lucy Warburton (Amanda Warren) is in the middle of presenting plans for the next day’s memorial, which is being called Heroes’ Day. “I still don’t think they were heroes,” one man opines. “My brother-in-law disappeared and he was a dipshit.” (That’s about as close to comedy as The Leftovers comes.) Regardless, the federal government is calling for a nationwide remembrance, and Mapleton’s not going to stand in the way of that. “Everyone’s ready to feel better,” she says. Kevin brings up the Guilty Remnant. “The whole town, the same place, the same time,” we’re inviting them to show up, he argues. She reminds him that they have a right to be there, and he replies that they’re “trying to provoke us.” Lucy won’t cancel the event and tells Kevin that it’s his job to make sure that people don’t get violent. “No one’s ready to feel better,” Kevin growls, storming out of the meeting. “We’re ready to fuckin’ explode.” He does just that when he gets home, angrily smashing his missing wife’s face in a picture of their family that’s hanging by the staircase.

Right on cue, we snap back to Jill, who breaks a teammate’s nose in field hockey after she’s tripped by them. This is a girl who’s clearly ready to explode and in some ways is quietly doing so already. She gets off with a warning and goes to smoke with Aimee. They chat about Jill’s crush on Nick when Adam and Scott Frost (Max and Charlie Carver) show up and ask them if they want to get high and play ping-pong. Aimee disses them, and they shrug it off, driving away. Meanwhile, members of the Guilty Remnant look at profiles of town members.