‘The Leftovers’ recap: ‘Can I tell you about belief?’

What is freedom, really?

At one point in this week’s episode of “The Leftovers,” Virgil, who appears to be John Murphy’s father, not Erika’s, which I erroneously surmised last week, vaguely references the atrocities he visited on John, saying: “I hurt him. I hurt him a long time ago. And then he hurt me back. And he freed me.”

The hurt that Virgil references is actually child molestation. The hurt that John visits on him is gunfire. And the freedom he receives in turn, coming back from near death reborn.

It’s a pretty picture, the idea of sloughing off your demons while existing in the plane between life and death, but it’s one that holds considerably less weight when coming from a child molester who, upon convincing Kevin that he can free him from his demons, instead leaves him to die, before turning a gun on himself and taking a bullet to the brain.

Kevin Garvey wants nothing more than to be free. He wants to be free of Patti who is either haint or hallucination and he wants to be free from himself, his family, his life and this world. But at the same time, Kevin is lost within the freedom he already has.

Much of “A Most Powerful Adversary” is given over to Kevin wandering around Miracle trying, fruitlessly, to find a way to get Nora back after last week’s admission that he was having visions of Patti. He drives, after waking to find her gone, anxious to find someone to free him from the broken shackles she left him with, being unable to locate the keys to unlock his anti-sleepwalking handcuffs.

And when Nora finally tells Kevin that if he found a way to free himself from Patti, she would return home and they’d be a family again, Kevin decides to take Virgil up on his offer to free him from his Patti problem permanently.

There’s something striking about seeing Kevin wander aimlessly, fractured handcuff still encircling his wrist, a bit like seeing Prometheus unbound (This is not a Damon Lindelof joke.) and with nowhere better to go.

I’ve talked before about how the reason that Nora and Kevin work so well as a couple is that they find the middle ground between being being a weight that holds the other back and being solid firmament that keeps the other tethered. With Nora gone, Kevin is adrift and reckless with promises of freedom tempting him into decisions that he shouldn’t be making.

But this is “The Leftovers,” and in the wake of the departure, all people seem to know how to do is make desperate decisions that get them no closer to their chosen destinations. Even Laurie’s unlikely reentry into Kevin’s orbit isn’t enough to guide him through the darkness he grapples with.

Laurie is in Miracle because she’s still seeking Tommy, though the manner in which the two got separated remains unclear. She does, however, take time to lay down some harsh truths for Kevin, though in the nicest way possible. “Can I tell you about belief, Kevin?” Laurie asks, in the midst of a monologue explaining that his encounters with Patti were manifestations of his mind, representative of his fragile psyche clinging to anything to make sense of the post-departure world.

Laurie speaks of her and Tommy convincing people that he was a healer and how the power of their own belief eased their pain and as spot-on as everything she says is, there is a flaw in Laurie’s logic: Belief requires trust and trust can be hard to come by.

For Kevin to believe that Patti is truly a manifestation of his fractured mind, he has to believe Laurie, who left their family behind and joined a cult. He has to admit that he has inherited the mental illness he believes his father exhibits and he has to face the fact that it might cost him Nora forever.

Kevin chooses to believe that Patti is an entity to be fought and vanquished because that’s the only thing he can believe to keep living in this world. Kevin has to believe that he can be free from Patti without being institutionalized and medicated because that’s the only way that he knows to regain some semblance of normalcy.

In the end, Kevin does what he does because he believes it’s the best way to be free, to be found, to be saved. Only time will tell if his faith is rewarded or if he’ll pay for his mistake with his life.

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