Kevin keeps getting drenched in it, too.
There's the weeping priest who rides in the elevator with Kevin, and the cop wearing a bag on his head, who passes him in the underbelly of the hotel. Kevin has to face Patti on the other side. There's the music. There's the woman in scrubs.
Kevin wakes up just as confused as we are, submerged in a bathtub. (It's a reference to Jesus and the Book of Revelations, for my fellow secular humanists out there.) Given his choices, the plain black suit is clearly the way to go.
The entire hour played out like an episode of The Prisoner that delightful cult series about a secret agent dropped into "The Village", a surrealist vacationland where his superiors try to shake him down for information. Our Kevin has landed himself in a global spy thriller! The questions are routine: what's your name and why are you here (Kevin's cover: Kevin Harvey is there to meet Patti for a $50,000 donation) read normal. There's a clandestine meeting in the parking garage with Virgil, hotel-concierge-slash-handler, a gun hidden in a toilet, a convoy of white SUVs, and a pack of nasty security goons.
You know how sometimes when you're telling somebody about a dream, you'll say something like, "It was my house, but it wasn't my house?"
The loved-up couple put their affection for each other in display at a charity gala in NYC last week, snuggling on the red carpet for photographers. "There's enough great story lines to go around", he said at the time. Take the gun. Shoot Patti. He does without doing much, letting his eyes show his hesitancy and fear show through and otherwise allowing us to project our own confusion onto him.
Yeah, as if that's gonna work. Theroux, proving yet again that he's one of our great listening actors, takes much of this in silently, embracing her and showing real pity for Patti for the first time right before he drowns her, breaks down, and crawls out of the dirt back in reality. I can't tell you whether it's real or whether something Kevin made up it in its head. Or, if he did know why, he didn't believe it (hence the "Holy shit" comment to end this week's episode). Does he believe love and attachment are pointless?
"Would it help if I said I deserved it", a helpful Patti suggests. But like so much else in the episode that seems like an idea that comes exclusively from Kevin's subconscious.
In what seemed like equal parts Sopranos homage and Lost fan trolling, Kevin spends the entirety, barring the last two minutes, of the episode in the afterlife, taking on a different identity, encountering risky henchmen and dead, familiar faces from season one as he tries to assassinate presidential candidate Patti Levin. Nothing of any sort seems to happen. In episode 6, she tells the whole story about the bird.
He's lamenting about how he can't find anyone to take a dump on him and Kevin realizes that this is Neil and the girl he saved wasn't his daughter but was in fact Patti. Patti is still alive, she’s no longer the Senator, and she's no longer the little girl. We had many conversations about understanding what would be the wrong way to do it, assuming the audience knew this, assuming they would understand this when they wouldn't.
Friends, I don't even know what you want me to do here. Pre-Departure, she's a sobbing, nervous wreck; post-Departure, she's icy and strong with belief.
Well, maybe there's more to talk about than that. Kevin's final mission is to return the child to Jarden and push her down the Orphan's Well.
There's so much more to think about: Kevin senior's deux ex television moment and his admission that he was tripping on "God's tongue", the mysterious South African man who gave Kevin the choice to jump rather than "cross over" the bridge to Jarden, the water, Mary. "If you do this, it will change you", he says.
Kevin was not an assassin, as Kevin Sr. pointed out, but why did he have to kill Patti when she looked like a little girl? However, as Kevin tells the guy on the bridge, none of this is real. They're all already dead.
Nevertheless, "International Assassin" doesn't open with two dead bodies. What difference does it make? Kevin killing Patti again and again, yet he's still there. At the bottom of the well, the adult version of Patti waits for Kevin. In that competition, she learned the power of silence and won four days in a row with more money than she bargained for, but she couldn't leave him. The earth begins to quake, he climbs out of the hole and into... She could have, but she didn't. But in that moment, Kevin doesn't suddenly disappear from the room and he isn't back in his old life in Texas with a Patti-free existence.
When we first see Patti, before we recognize it as her, she is a child floating facedown in a pool, similar to how Kevin lands when he falls down the well. It's nighttime and Kevin is confronted with Michael, who says, "Holy shit".
So, did it work? Kevin's quest in Limbo relies on him finding and killing Patti Levin. He killed Patti three times. Don't kill her in hotel. He also realizes that the girl is not just a young girl - it is Patti Levin. He had to refuse the chance to kill himself, and in the end, he had to be willing to die to finish the job. But episode 8 is a pretty unique thing.
"Oh. And there's still two episodes to go".
Except that would be a cheat, and generally speaking, The Leftovers doesn't cheat.
I mean, I get why no photos were released beforehand for this episode since they'd all contain Kevin and last week we ended with a big "Is he really dead?" type cliffhanger? She fights him off a bit, as he cries, but it's over. Who knows what happened to her or in what state she'll be coming back.
Dear Matt: the good news is that it's a boy! Dream sequences get a bad rap as tedious and indulgent, but I found myself totally engrossed in the ridiculousness that unfolded.
Justin Theroux sent viewers into meltdown over THIS naked shot of his butt
Hilarious Zoolander 2 Trailer Features Justin Bieber, Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, Penelope Cruz
Penelope Cruz plays the agent and asks the duo to infiltrate the high fashion world. Not according to the first full-length trailer for Zoolander 2 .
