After an episode devoted to his common law wife and an episode devoted to his estranged (and just plain strange) father, Kevin Garvey finally gets the spotlight in this Sunday's episode of The Leftovers… and boy, was it a doozy. Evie Murphy returned to The Leftovers in the most unpredictable way possible — but of course, this being a show by Damon Lindelof, not everything turned out to be exactly what it seemed at first glance.
The final season actually got off to a relatively calm start (relatively for The Leftovers anyway), introducing viewers to the new status quo in Miracle three years after the events of Season 2, before steadily ratcheting up the weirdness in the following two episodes. So Kevin suddenly spotting Evie standing stoically in the background of a live G'Day Melbourne! morning news broadcast on his malfunctioning hotel room TV was just par for the course for this increasingly bizarre series.
You may well remember that Evie is presumed dead, blown up with the rest of the Guilty Remnant by ATFEC in the opening moments of the premiere. Viewers were primed for the possibility of the Murphy daughter still being alive by her father Kevin's stubborn insistence that she's simply faking her disappearance a second time; but it's still jarring to see her standing there, seemingly alive and well.
Yes, alive. Although Kevin immediately (and understandably) assumes that he's being visited by another Patti-like specter from his past, it quickly becomes clear that other people can see Evie, too. Except now she's speaking with an accent, going by the name Daniah Moabizzi, and pretending she doesn't know who Kevin is.
After Kevin calls his ex-wife Laurie to fill her in on this strange turn of events, he tracks "Daniah" down to her job at the local library… where she finally admits that yes, she is Evie, and she begs him not to tell her family that she's alive — because "there is no family," she says, spouting one of the GR's old mantras.
Perhaps you, like me, were wondering how Evie managed to fake her dental records being in the charred remains of the Miracle Visitors Center when this shocking twist gave rise to a second shocking twist: Daniah isn't Evie at all. Kevin is simply hallucinating, projecting his memory of Evie onto this strange young Australian woman. After their conversation, Laurie called Daniah and asked her to play along with Kevin's delusion. (Remember in the premiere, when Laurie told Kevin that you never tell someone in the middle of a psychotic break that they're in the middle of a psychotic break? I guess I should've known that plot point was gonna come back up again.)
So Evie is still dead, and Kevin is still seeing things — or he's seeing things for the first time, depending on whether you believe last season's ghost-Patti was a manifestation of mental illness or a true metaphysical visitation from the afterlife. Will poor Kevin Garvey ever catch a break? Is he really going mad, or is he on his way to receiving some divine message to help prevent the impending apocalypse on the seven-year anniversary of the Sudden Departure?
The season is already halfway over and there are only four episodes left to learn the answers to those questions… and all the other many mysteries of The Leftovers. I'm freaking out!
