Kevin Garvey's character arc in The Leftovers explained

The Leftovers · Character Study · Kevin Garvey

There are two kinds of protagonists in prestige television: the ones who try to hold the world together and the ones who try to hold themselves together. Kevin Garvey, played across three seasons of The Leftovers by Justin Theroux, is the rare one who attempts both, fails at both for most of the runtime, dies repeatedly while attempting either, and finishes the show on a farmhouse porch in Australia with his arms around the woman he came halfway across the planet to find. We have to talk about Kevin. The show, based on Tom Perrotta's novel of the same name and developed for HBO by Perrotta and Damon Lindelof, makes him do something almost no other lead character has been asked to do: be wrong, repeatedly, about reality, and keep going.

The three M's: Mapleton, Miracle, Melbourne

The most useful map of Kevin's arc is the geographical one. The show moves him through three towns in three seasons, each beginning with the same letter. Each is a different shape of denial. Each strips a different thing away from him.

Mapleton: the chief of a town that can't be policed

The pilot opens not on Kevin but on the event that created him as the character we meet. A young mother in a laundromat puts her baby in a carrier, turns around to load a machine, and finds the carrier empty. A man at the petrol station has his ten-year-old son vanish out of the passenger seat. Three years later, Kevin Garvey is in charge of a town where every third house has a story like this and where any kind of policing is going to be, by definition, an unfunny joke. He performs the job anyway.

The Guilty Remnant, the white-clad chain-smoking cult who refuse to speak and who exist to remind everyone of what they would prefer to forget, has set up a chapter on his street. Its local leader, Patti Levin, played by Ann Dowd in the performance that made her career, has taken Kevin's wife Laurie with her. The show's first major action setpiece, the Memorial Day "Heroes Day" parade in the pilot, ends with the Guilty Remnant standing silently across the route and the townspeople beating one of them with a brick. Kevin breaks it up. He goes home alone.

The Mapleton season also contains the show's first great trick: in The Garveys at Their Best (1.09), the penultimate episode, the entire hour is a flashback to the day of the Departure, in which Kevin is a different man, a man with a marriage and a son and a daughter who all live in the same house. Watching him in that episode and then watching him in the pilot of the same season is the show's first lesson about its own protagonist. The Kevin Garvey we have been following is not the Kevin Garvey that existed before October 14, 2011. The first one is a ghost the second one walks around with.

By the season finale, The Prodigal Son Returns (1.10), the Guilty Remnant has executed a mass demonstration in which dummies of the Departed are placed in their old homes for their families to find. Mapleton burns. Kevin's daughter Jill is locked inside the GR compound. Laurie, watching, finally cries. The show's first season has ended by showing what happens when a town tries to ignore its grief, and the grief insists.

Miracle: Patti, the underworld, and the man who can't die

Season 2 is the show's masterwork, and it is the season where Kevin becomes something other than a traumatised cop. The Garveys arrive in Jarden, Texas, a town renamed "Miracle" by the federal government because not a single one of its inhabitants departed on October 14. They buy a house from John Murphy, a former arsonist played by Kevin Carroll. The house's previous occupants vanish on the night the Garveys move in. The town's economy depends on its impossible record, and that record breaks the day Kevin arrives.

The thing the season is building, slowly, is the realisation that Kevin himself is the impossible thing. He sleepwalks. He wakes up next to dead bodies he does not remember meeting. He has visions of Patti Levin, who is supposed to be dead, and they grow more frequent and more elaborate until, in A Most Powerful Adversary (2.07), he drinks poison from a stranger on the premise that doing so will end the haunting.

It does not end the haunting. It ends Kevin. He dies. The next episode, International Assassin (2.08), is the most acclaimed hour of television Lindelof has ever made.

"It would be easier if you just sang the song." Hotel attendant, "International Assassin", Season 2, Episode 8

Kevin wakes up naked in a bathtub in a hotel suite. There is a suit hanging on the door labelled "international assassin". There is a folder containing a target. There is a karaoke bar in the basement. There is a senator (Patti, in a different body) who must be drowned to release her from his consciousness. The episode is a literal underworld, played as a spy thriller, scored to "Take On Me", and the show treats it without apology as actually happening to Kevin in some sense. He completes the assignment. He comes back. Patti is gone.

The second season finishes with Kevin singing Simon and Garfunkel's "Homeward Bound" at a piano bar in a second underworld visit, having been shot in the chest by John Murphy. He returns to a house full of every person he has ever loved. The credits roll. It is the closest the show ever lets him get to a happy ending, and the show, with characteristic cruelty, then makes a third season.

Melbourne: the Book of Kevin and the twin brother

Season 3 begins, in its first frame, with Matt Jamison writing a book. The book is called The Book of Kevin. It argues, in well-organised paragraphs, that Kevin Garvey is the messiah. The whole season is what happens when a man who has spent two seasons quietly suspecting he might be cosmically significant is finally told so out loud, in print, by his best friend.

Kevin spends the season trying to outrun the book and trying to find his father. Kevin Garvey Sr., played by Scott Glenn, has been in Australia for two seasons, listening to voices, transcribing what he hears, and assembling an Aboriginal songbook he believes will, on the seventh anniversary of the Departure, stop the second flood. The father plot and the son plot converge in the bleak comedy of Crazy Whitefella Thinking (3.03), an entire episode dedicated to Kevin Sr. wandering the outback chasing prophecy. The juxtaposition with Kevin Jr., who has spent his life trying to refuse exactly this kind of inheritance, is the season's running joke.

Nora and Kevin's relationship collapses in G'Day Melbourne (3.04), in which Nora's secret trip to meet the physicists who built the machine to "send people to where the Departed went" comes apart in a hotel room. The fight in that episode is the most painful piece of acting the show has, and the show has a lot of painful acting. Kevin's last act of the relationship, before the season finale's reconciliation, is to claim he never loved her. He is lying. He is also, by his own logic, doing her a favour.

The third death, in The Most Powerful Man in the World (and His Identical Twin Brother) (3.07), returns Kevin to the underworld hotel one more time, this time in two roles: he is the President of the United States, who is about to detonate the planet, and the President's identical twin brother, an international assassin sent to stop him. The episode is the show's blunt argument that Kevin is two people, has always been two people, and is only useful when the version of him that wants to escape lets the version of him that wants to stay be the one in charge. He chooses to come home. He shaves.

Kevin Garvey, deaths and resurrections of

The show declines, beautifully, to specify whether Kevin's deaths are real, hallucinatory, or theological. The same ambiguity that wraps Nora's machine in the finale applies, retroactively, to every one of these. Either Kevin Garvey is a man who has been to the underworld three times, or he is a man whose unconscious is so loud it stages plays for him. The show offers no third answer and treats the question as the wrong one.

The people who keep him anchored

Kevin's three relationships are the show's load-bearing structure. The one with Laurie (Amy Brenneman), his wife, who joined the Guilty Remnant and then left it to become a therapist who quietly puts her affairs in order before walking into the ocean in Season 3. The one with his father, Kevin Sr., whose absence in the first two seasons is louder than most father plots managed at full volume. And the one with Nora.

The Nora relationship is the one the show treats as the actual centre. Their first scene together is at a school dance in Penguin One, Us Zero (1.02), in which Nora, after a session of her bereavement work, looks at Kevin and quietly asks him if he wants to come back to a hotel. The show makes them spend three seasons earning the answer to that question. The reason the finale, The Book of Nora (3.08), lands as hard as it does is that the last fifteen minutes of the show return to that hotel-room shape: a woman, a man, a story. The first time, the story was an offer. The second time, it is a confession.

"You're here."
"I'm here." Nora and Kevin, "The Book of Nora", Season 3, Episode 8

Theroux's performance, properly

Justin Theroux had been a working actor for almost twenty years when The Leftovers arrived, and the role redefined what he was thought capable of. He was, before this, mostly remembered for sleek roles in Mulholland Drive, The Last Jedi, and the underseen Duncan Jones film Mute, which is worth your time. As Kevin Garvey he does something that is enormously hard to do on television, which is to play a man who is, at any given moment, lying both to himself and to the camera. He shouts. He whimpers. He sings karaoke in a tuxedo without flinching. He breaks down quietly in a hotel bathroom in G'Day Melbourne in one of the show's two or three best pieces of acting.

The show ends, on the porch in Australia, with him deciding to believe her. It is the only ending the character could have. Kevin Garvey has spent six and a half hours of underworld television, and three full seasons of waking life, accumulating evidence that reality is bigger and stranger than he is. By the time Nora tells him the story in the kitchen, the only sane response left to him is to take her word for it.

The shape of the arc, in one sentence

Kevin Garvey starts the show as the chief of police in a town that cannot be policed, dies three times in three seasons, sings two karaoke songs, fathers a movement he refuses to lead, talks to a dead woman, sees his father's prophecy realised in a flood that nearly arrives, breaks the only relationship that has ever mattered to him, fixes it again on a porch on the other side of the world, and ends the series doing the dishes. The journey, in the show's own framing, is from being a man too busy to feel anything to being a man who decides, in the kitchen, to listen.

Further reading and watching

If you want to rewatch the show start to finish, the complete three seasons remain Lindelof's strongest work, and International Assassin alone earns the rewatch. The companion essays on this site go deeper into the rest: the question of whether Nora really went through the machine, a longer reading of the show's themes of grief and loss, and a character study of Damon Lindelof as a writer. For the work that came before, the Lost essays cover the related ground: the Lost finale explained in full, the Smoke Monster's actual origin, and what the numbers meant and who the candidates were.

Filed under · The Leftovers · Character Study · Justin Theroux