HBO’s The Leftovers starts with 2 percent of the world’s population suddenly disappearing for reasons unexplained — and the plot just gets more bizarre from there.
Created by Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta — and based on Perrotta’s novel of the same name — The Leftovers starred Justin Theroux, Christoper Eccleston, Carrie Coon, and Amy Brenneman, among others, as the ones left behind when the Sudden Departure strikes. The series debuted on June 29, 2014, and ran for three critically acclaimed seasons, topping critics’ year-end lists of top 10 TV shows more than 20 times.
And as The Leftovers attests, there’s no telling what will happen after one of every 50 persons on this planet — and three out of four Perfect Strangers cast members — vanish into thin air. Some people want to be (non-fatally shot) in the chest. Some opt for orgies aboard ferries. And some start heralding the return of Gary Busey. Here are 10 moments we still can’t get over, 10 years later.
1. Nora’s unique fetish.
In Season 1, Episode 6, “Guest,” we see one of the ways Nora (Coon) mourns the disappearance of her whole family: She hires sex workers to shoot her in the chest. But she doesn’t have a death wish — she wears a bulletproof vest. Presumably, she wants an escape from her mortal anguish in those brief moments that she’s unconscious — or perhaps she thinks those brushes with death will bring her closer to her departed family.
2. Nora kissing companion.
That same episode has another eyebrow-raising Nora moment. When she encounters a salesman peddling $40,000 mannequins — meant to resemble customers’ departed loved ones — she acknowledges his affections by making out not with him but with his mannequin doppelgänger.
3. That prehistoric opener.
The Leftovers jumps around geographical locations and metaphysical planes, but the first scene of the Season 2 premiere transports viewers millions of years in the past, where a cavewoman survives an earthquake but dies protecting her newborn from a rattlesnake. Why? That’s for viewers to parse out, but Damon Lindelof said it was a tie-in to Kevin’s fate in the season.
4. That gutwrenching dream murder.
Kevin (Theroux) is so haunted by the ghost of Guilty Remnant leader Patti Levin (Ann Dowd) that he takes the advice of Virgil (Steven Williams) to kill her in the afterlife, too. In Season 2, Episode 8, “International Assassin,” a temporarily-dead Kevin eventually catches up to Patti, but she’s a young girl (Darby Camp) in that reality. Nevertheless, he has to take the young Patti to a well and push her in, and he’s absolutely gutted.
5. Gary Busey’s random cult.
The Leftovers’ series premiere reveals that Gary Busey was one of the celebrities who departed. And the Season 3 premiere, “The Book of Kevin,” reveals a cult of Gary Busey worshippers who believe the eccentric actor will be returning on the seventh anniversary of the Sudden Departure — and who inflate a Gary Busey balloon in the middle of Jarden, Texas, for good measure.
6. The Perfect Strangers subplot.
In the universe of the show, the entire cast of Perfect Strangers has departed, too, except for Mark Linn-Baker, who is discovered to have faked his disappearance. In Season 3, Episode 2, “Don’t Be Ridiculous” — named after a Perfect Strangers catchphrase — Linn-Baker approaches Nora with an offer. He’s working for an organization offering to use radioactive blasts to reunite those left behind with those who had departed.
7. Those Wu-Tang tributes.
Nora admits to Erika (Regina King) in that same episode that she got a Wu-Tang Clan tattoo — the logo for the “Wu-Tang Band,” as she calls the group — to cover up the inked names of her departed children. (“I pointed to the first thing I saw on the wall. It looked like a phoenix. I told the guy to give me that one instead.”) Later, she and Erika jump on Erika’s trampoline to the tune of Wu-Tang’s “Protect Ya Neck (The Jump Off).”
8. That ferry boat crowd.
As Matt (Eccleston) ventures to Australia in Season 3, Episode 5, “It’s a Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World,” he has to share a ferry with a hedonistic, lion-obsessed sex cult and a man named David Burton (Bill Camp) who claims to be God. But once the ship docks in Melbourne, activists free the lion, who then makes a lunch out of Burton. The whole thing is a zany spectacle and yet, in classic Leftovers fashion, it’s also incredibly poignant and emotionally evocative.
9. Kevin’s powerful twin.
Kevin returns to the afterlife in Season 3, Episode 7, “The Most Powerful Man in the World (and His Identical Twin Brother)” — but this time, his mission is to assassinate the United States president, who is, you guessed it, Kevin’s identical twin brother. And that POTUS is on the verge of launching a nuclear strike, so the show is jumping 10 sharks all at once, and somehow it still works!
10. Kevin’s, erm, identification device.
Last but not least, in that same episode, as Kevin toggles between the consciousnesses of both himself and his presidential twin, he has to put his penis on a scanner to access a bunker. “Due to advancements in plastic surgery, anyone with enough resources can copy a person’s face,” a smarmy Secret Service agent tells him. “But your, uh, your penis, sir — well, they’re not going to that length.”
The fact that this show got away with any of this and still reads as an all-timer drama is perhaps the wildest feat of all.
The Leftovers, streaming, Max
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