We cut to a tense family dinner in the Garvey household. Mom’s absent, as is Tom. It’s just Jill and Kevin now, with Emily crashing. Conversation is sparse, with Jill clearly reserving a lot of her anger for her dad. Why, we don’t yet know. Emily pipes up and explains that Jill has been under a lot of pressure, convincing Kevin to let them take his car to a party at a boy’s house across town to blow off some steam. In exchange, he tells them not to go to the Heroes’ Day parade, expecting that it may get ugly. Emily pauses on their way out the door, looking back at Kevin with a look that suggests some very forbidden feelings towards her friend’s dad. “You’re doing your best,” she assures him.
At the party, they play an app version of spin-the-bottle, and Aimee winds up getting “Fuck” for Nick. They head into another room, much to Jill’s obvious disappointment. Luckily, Jill isn’t one of the kids who gets “Burn” and proceeds to brand themselves. Instead, she spins it and gets “Choke” for a boy named Max (Danny Flaherty). At first, it’s not clear what that means, but they go into a child’s bedroom in the house (Max theorizes that it used to belong to the host’s sister, who disappeared in the Departure) and undress. After some awkward conversation, he begins to jack off and she chokes him, which he gets some kind of sick sexual satisfaction from. We see tears well up in her eyes. This isn’t our society’s spin-the-bottle – it’s clear that the Departure has sent all of society into a morbid depression, and that these teens are all bearing the resulting psychological scars. Society as a whole seems to be, for lack of a more polite expression, completely and truly fucked up.
Our next character introduction is Meg (Liv Tyler), a woman who has doubts about her impending wedding and who finds herself targeted by the Guilty Remnant. One of the two members watching her is Laurie. When she’s followed to dinner, the fiance goes outside and gets them to leave. On the way home, the pair have a light moment as Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” plays on the radio (a deeply ironic choice considering how suddenly and uncontrollably all the departed were ripped away). When the two cult members are waiting outside their house, however, Meg snaps, running to hit Laurie. “You’re fucking everywhere,” she screams, “Go away!” Her husband’s able to pull her into the house, and the two GR members solemnly look at one another.
After her encounter with Max, Jill walks through the house and spies Nick going down on Emily, who’s clearly loving it. Angry, she leaves, only to find Adam and Scott outside. Apparently, they lost their keys when one of them reached down to grab a baby’s shoe off the sidewalk and didn’t see the other tossing the keys to them. Jill is a little suspicious but goes to the car to get a flashlight out of the back. To her horror, when she opens it, she sees the dead dog, which Kevin evidently forgot to take to Animal Control. Scott and Max are weirded out, but Jill insists that Kevin wouldn’t kill a dog. They bury it somewhere, as the brothers reflect on the urban legend that dogs who witnessed the Depature “snapped” and ran off into the woods to form a pack of wild dogs. “Go primal, man, same thing’s going to happen to us, just taking longer,” one of them says.
Tom and Witten arrive at a compound, where the blindfold is removed and Witten’s phone is handed off to a guard. Witten comes face to face with Wayne, a man with a British accent who appears to be in charge of the compound, and asks for his help. Tom heads to a pool, where he talks to a girl named Christine (Annie Q.) and brings her gummy worms, which she had requested he get for her. He clearly has a romantic interest in her, but her role at the compound is a big question mark (though so is the compound as a whole).
Instead of heading back to town, as per usual, Tom is stopped by someone who says that Wayne wants a word. Tom is both flattered and terrified. That night, while Tom is sleeping in a barracks-style area, Wayne slips in, wielding a large knife (I gulped). “We need to talk about Christine,” he says, a hint of malice in his voice. “Some bad shit’s coming and there’s no getting around it. Keep her close, keep her safe and keep your fuckin’ hands of her.” Sorry, Tom, looks like that romance is off the table before it even started.
Looking to intimidate him further, Wayne tells Tom about a recurring dream he’s been having: his young son, who vanished in the Departure, appears to him and says, “We’re gone, daddy, and all the people who stayed, they’re pretending it never happened, they’re asleep. But they need to wake up now.” Then, the son continues, “Therefore, watch, and remember that, by the space of three years, I ceased not to warn them, night and day, with tears.” What does it all mean? The three-year mark clearly means something big, but just what is still unknown. Wayne’s as lost as Tom, but he knows it isn’t good. “Grace period’s over, Tom,” Wayne says. “It’s time to go to work.” But just what is this work that Wayne has in mind? Is his compound somehow tied to the GR, or is this a different group that has risen up in the wake of the Departure? Something tells me it’s the latter, and that Wayne’s group may be even more dangerous that those mute, white-clad weirdos. Of course, like with everything on The Leftovers, we’ll have to wait and see.
