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The Leftovers Season Finale Review: “The Prodigal Son Returns” (Season 1, Episode 10)

I've gone back and forth on HBO's The Leftovers throughout its first season, which always felt like two shows forcefully pressed up against one another.

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That’s definitely the takeaway of “The Prodigal Son Returns,” which brings the focus back to Kevin’s season premiere declaration that no one’s ready to feel better – instead, he says, “they’re ready to fucking explode.” We could have predicted weeks back that the Guilty Remnant, those frustratingly mute and fashion-deaf terrorists, would be the ones to light the fuse, and this week they do that quite ably, creating replicas of lost loved ones and positioning them in citizens’ homes so as to provide a horrific physical reminder of the Sudden Departure. You can’t blame people for going ape shit in response.

“We made them remember,” Meg, bloodied and tied to a telephone pole, scrawls in desperate triumph to a shell-shocked Kevin. The Guilty Remnant has always been a strange sort of cult, seemingly formed out of a mass desire to sacrifice individuality and its pains in exchange for a numbing unity. In “The Prodigal Son Returns,” they carry out their master stroke, proving to the townspeople that none of them, despite outward pretenses, are really okay inside. It’s a petty, vicious demonstration, and one has to question why so many of the Guilty Remnant feel vindicated in the knowledge that their fellow townspeople are all as fucked up as they are.

One also wishes that Lindelof and Perrotta had included more of the townspeople’s reactions to the replica scheme. Nora is seen screaming in horror and pain at the sight of eerie facsimiles of her husband and two children gathered around the kitchen table; one woman pulls out a weapon and starts gunning down cult members in the street; and it’s seen that the Guilty Remnant’s compound has been set ablaze, with townspeople hurling the dolls into the fire with a great deal of anger. It can also be presumed that a fair number of cult members were savagely beaten to death in the streets.

Of course, as cathartic as watching Guilty Remnant members get pummeled is, that’s not what all the scenes of destruction are about. Intriguingly, amidst the chaos, “The Prodigal Son Returns” offers some redemption for Mapleton residents. Perhaps the fires allowed some a chance to finally bury, and in doing so finally bid farewell to their lost loved ones. Kevin finally walks into the flames that have so terrified him in his dreams in order to save his daughter. And he couldn’t have done that without Laurie, more villainous than ever in the absence of Patti and deciding at last to break her vow of sinister silence in order to alert Kevin to Jill’s predicament.