The irony of Abrams’ TED talk is that the reason he brought the literal mystery box with him was to prove how much more powerful a mystery is when it is not solved. But the ending of his and Lindelof’s show tried to solve its main mystery (in however ethereal a way), and when they could not do that in as revelatory and satisfying a manner as fans had hoped, it felt worse than a wholly mid-air ending would have been. It retroactively made the time invested in the show feel like time wasted, because here was the much-hyped ending, the climax, the point of it all, and it was sort of what you thought from the beginning. They opened the box and it contained, as advertised on the outside, somewhere between $15 and $45 worth of magic.
Season one of “The Leftovers” ends much as the book does, in that it doesn’t really end. It actually suggests a new beginning. And it would have been a fine close to a one-season wonder — hey, we could have called it a miniseries — an adaptation of a novel that finished when the story material on which it was based ran out. But a second season was greenlit and suddenly all bets were off, and in one of the more remarkable moves of modern TV lore, Lindelof and Perrotta made the decision to drastically retool the show (and we should note that across seasons one and two, there is only one single episode on which showrunner Lindelof is not also credited as co-writer, so he can be regarded as the key creative driving force behind the TV incarnation). The show came back in season two completely rejuvenated, as though, having got season one out of the way and having established as firmly as you possibly could that this is one mystery box that’s going to remain unopened, they were free to let the show become the show it always wanted to be.
Season two leapt over the relatively high bar of the first to become pretty close to masterpiece TV. In the aftermath of its own Sudden-Departure-style event in which the original cast were decimated, the location was moved to a small town in Texas and the entire tone was changed to something sunnier and yet somehow just as sinister. And letting go of the strictures of the mystery box liberated the show’s narrative completely (“Guess I’ll jus’ let the mystery be,” warbles Iris DeMent in the new credits roll, and you can practically feel Lindelof brushing the dirt from his hands as he walks from the graveside of his “Lost” finale demons). “The Leftovers,” also boasting perhaps the best balance yet achieved between episodic and season-arc storytelling, was free to become the intelligent, philosophically provocative, frequently hilarious, often disturbing, grounded yet surreal character-based drama of your dreams. Well, mine anyway.
It did all that from the very first scene of season two, which is inexplicably and brilliantly set in prehistoric times, stars a pregnant cavewoman whom we’ll never see again, and is a perfectly contained little potted tragedy that refers to everything and nothing that’s about to happen. It still kind of leaves me breathless at its audacity, and it signaled from the first fetal heartbeat of this second season that it was going to do everything differently. There have been further conundrums and disasters and disappearances, trips to a hotel in the afterlife, a suggestion of immortality and a constant underlying investigation of faith and whether the comfort it can bring is worthwhile if it might be a lie. It is beautiful, it is profound, and it is silly, often all at the same time. And the mystery that it explores, time after time, episode after episode, character after character, is nothing about that supernatural event that starts it all off, but about calamity and how we survive it. How will I live now when I am still me but everything around me has changed and none of the old certainties remain? How will I be?
To return one last time to Abrams’ prop: Everyone, even he, talks about the mystery aspect, but maybe it’s all much more about the box. The box is control and containment. The box is secrecy (in which Abrams famously loves to shroud his new projects) and then revelation. But that is where “The Leftovers,” in its second season, evolved massively not only from its first but also from the “Lost”-era of storytelling that Lindelof’s TV career had been defined by before. It doesn’t just let its mystery be, it sets its mystery free. The questions “The Leftovers” dares to probe are as a big a person’s psychology and as small as the universe. They are cosmic and wonderful. They no longer fit in a box.
“The Leftovers” season three starts on Sunday, April 16th.