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‘The Leftovers’ recap: ‘Do you want to blow your life up?’

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Anywhere between 50 million and 80 million people died in World War II, still the deadliest military conflict in history, resulting in a loss of about 3% of the total world population. Part of the reason for the wide variance in numbers comes from what casualties you include, the higher estimates taking into consideration the deaths spurred by war-related famine and disease, as well as more standard numbers of death by military action.

When on “The Leftovers” people speak of the 2% of the population that disappeared during the departure, that doesn’t include those individuals lost in the resulting collateral damage. When we speak of the lives lost on Sept. 11, we don’t necessarily include the over 1,100 people who’ve been diagnosed with cancer after exposure to toxins at Ground Zero or the over 1,400 rescue workers who worked on site who have died since.

If Kevin Garvey had succeeded in killing himself, he would not have been counted among the casualties of the departure, but that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t one.

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All things considered, “The Leftovers” doesn’t talk about suicide nearly as much as one might expect for a show dealing with the survivors of an apocalyptic-like global event. Instead, the suicide is a shadow that lurks in the background, present but rarely acknowledged. It’s part of what makes the opening scenes of “A Matter of Geography” so touching, as we flash back to the moment when Nora and Kevin lay all their cards on the table and set about becoming a tentative family.

Kevin tells Nora about his involvement in Patti Levin’s death and how her brother Matt helped him bury her. He tells her that he’s been sleepwalking. And that he smokes. She tells him about the prostitutes, about hiring them to shoot her. It’s not suicide, but it’s something similar, the way Nora would seek life from near death. It’s an aching scene, full of desperate connection and hope, and it succinctly sets up how the pair get to the point where we saw them in the Season Two premiere.

But all is not well within the heart and mind of Kevin Garvey. Throughout the episode he becomes increasingly skittish, staring into space, and listening to loud, driving music, as though he’s trying to create an environment too loud to think straight. Justin Theroux’s performance throughout is delicate and nervy, walking a line between impotent rage and complete desolation, the perfect portrait of a man trying to do right but thwarted at each new turn.

Though Kevin tries to make a fresh start with Nora by adopting Lily and becoming a family, then picking up and relocating to Miracle, he is spiraling. He digs up Patti’s body in a taut scene scored by extended use of the Pixies’ “Where is My Mind” (A song, thanks to “Fight Club,” “Mr. Robot,” and now “The Leftovers” is forever married to pop culture depictions of mental illness.) and transports her in the back of his truck. He then intentionally draws the attention of a police officer and admits that he has a dead body in the back. When questioned about it, he’s asked by a sympathetic officer if he wants to blow up his life; he says no, because that’s what he’s supposed to say.

People in their right minds aren’t supposed to want to blow up their lives. They aren’t supposed to turn themselves in to the police for their crimes. They aren’t supposed to sleepwalk and end up in places they aren’t supposed to and they certainly aren’t supposed to be haunted by visitations from dead people who plagued them when they were alive. But Kevin isn’t in his right mind, not really.

Seeing visions of Patti has Kevin at a sort of an impasse, where, given his father’s institutionalization, he believes himself susceptible to hearing voices and mental illness, but he’s also sane enough to know that hearing voices suggests that there’s something seriously wrong with him. His father, who shows up this episode, free from the mental institution where he’d be hospitalized, tells Kevin that the key to his freedom comes in doing what the voices tell him to and that seems to be what Patti demands of Kevin as well.

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Kevin is a lost, frightened, broken man, who attempts to get himself arrested for murder, who adopts a child with a virtual stranger and relocates with their new family, then picks a fight in an attempt to blow up his new life. And at the end of the episode, he comes to, half-drowned with a cinder block around his ankle, his survival coming only at the hands of some yet-unexplained geophysical event.

Plenty of people survived the departure temporarily, but Season Two of “The Leftovers” is determined to determine the true collateral damage of the event and may ultimately determine that the death toll was much, much higher.

Follow me on Twitter at @midwestspitfire.

libby.hill@latimes.com

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