So far, The Leftovers has struggled to capitalize on the human scale of its Rapture narrative. The series has built up a few story arcs, spent a bit of time exploring the backstory of The Guilty Remnant, and nodded toward the big Holy Wayne plot. But I remain skeptical of the show in the same way Fred Clark is not a fan of the Left Behind novels, which he mercilessly critiqued in a legendary collection of blog posts beginning with the 2003 declaration “Left Behind is Evil“.

These two apocalyptic artifacts have something in common: The Rapture narrative becomes the hook for something else, a set of heavy-handed reconstructions of what humanity is “really like.” In the case of the Left Behind series, Clark does a good job at deconstructing its implicit gender codes, theological clutter, and political consequences. We see how the series tames and domesticates the wildness of the Christian apocalypse narrative by attaching it to the authors’ ideological hobby horses.

I argued in a prior post that The Leftovers does something similar, in this case “uncovering” a series of suburban middle-aged crises with a bit of quasi-religious intrigue scattered in to make this otherwise standard TV drama feel a little more punchy. (Put in a more complicated way: The Leftovers re-imagines all the things people like about TV in the era of quality as little apocalypses that collectively amount to a contemporary mythos. A thought deserving of a longer essay…)

—

This all sounds a bit harsh, given its generally positive critical reception. But “Two Boats and a Helicopter” and “Guest” are the only two episodes so far that really embrace the post-Rapture setting as the space for storytelling that gets the strangeness of apocalypse. A quick review:

  • Episode 3 (“Two Boats and a Helicopter“) is a great object lesson about a Reverend’s distorted sense of righteousness and  the agony of religious affection in the absence of God. Imagining the pastoral task after the Rapture is a deeply strange idea, and this episode does a good job of couching the fear and anger of Reverend Jamison in a spate of theological insanity.
  • Episode 4 (“B.J. and the A.C.“) is the Baby Jesus story retold, Tom and Annie a distant Mary and Joseph for the episode. The Sheriff,   like the town’s sole Wise Man looks for the real little baby Jesus rather than just buying one from the store. The baby is scorned and     defiled by the town’s youth – even set momentarily like Moses in a basket to be set adrift (which technically is great Lukan exegesis…).  Yet, even the presence of Jesus can’t mask the smell of filler all over this episode.
  • Episode 5 (“Gladys“) is more filler, made even less intriguing by its graphic martyrdom attention-grabber.

And now back to Episode 6 (“Guest“), which like Episode 2 is a great standalone chunk of TV. Nora has been a cipher to the audience and this episode does a bit of digging into her backstory. She has lost two children and her husband in the “Departure,” and now works for the federal agency handling the financial claims of other families left behind. In “Guest“, she wanders a conference on issues related to the Departure after slipping into a new identity through an error in the system. Freed momentarily of her Departure baggage, she gets to party. This is a nice respite until the next morning, when she has to jump back into this dire federal employee she has become. She ends the episode in the arms of Ecclesiastes-quoting Holy Wayne, who takes on Nora’s pain for a small fee.

Both Reverend Jamison and Nora let us feel an odd weight of grief. In “Guest” this grief is well articulated by Nora’s vocal insistence that there is nothing positive about these events. There is no positive spin to them. Any pop-psychological language of “acceptance” or “healing” is bogus. She speaks of a pain of loss and confusion compounded by the nagging theological suspicion that either God has something to do with this or the “Departure” is confirmation that existence doesn’t mean anything.

A peculiar feature of the Christian apocalypse is that it uncovers the presence of God in human history, but it also reveals the implications of God’s absence. Apocalypse is troubling stuff. Sometimes this show gets it.

—

Recently at The New Republic, Adam Kirsch described The Leftovers as a show that “Finally… Truly Takes Religion Seriously.” He says:

But in shunning her family, isn’t Laurie simply doing what Jesus told his followers to do in the Gospels? “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” How do we react when this demand is put into practice, when someone in our own time and place makes the leap into the unknown that faith calls for? “The Leftovers” is trying to dramatize an answer to that question—an unlikely mission for a TV show, but a deeply compelling one. 

There are a few things off about this.

First, the premise of the article neglects the fact that even very recent shows like Mad Men, Rectify, and Rev. trade deeply in religious images and ideas in their evocations of contemporary society. The notion that The Leftovers takes religion “seriously” is not clear at all. So far, its religious elements have been cast by the show as sub-human responses to the Departure.

But second, this idea that Laurie’s abandonment of her family is an echo of Jesus’ notorious call to discipleship is mistaken. In that passage, Jesus is forcing his followers to weigh their choices. They are being invited to participate in a new community, one that replaces our broken concepts of family, loyalty, and hospitality with something much better, fuller, and connected to the world to come. But being part of this new family at times requires painful sacrifice, as it can require us to extricate ourselves from the mire of past relationships in the hopes that others will follow us into the Kingdom.

The disciple is not leaping into “the unknown that faith calls for.” The are simply deciding to act as if this new world described by Jesus in the gospels is actually present in their midst. This is entirely different than what Laurie has done, which we will shortly discover should the TV show remain even slightly faithful to the book.