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After the violent and tension-filled first episode of HBO's The Leftovers set the tone for the season, I certainly didn't expect to get sunshine and rainbows from "Penguin One, Us Zero" and it didn't disappoint in that regard. Show-runner Damon Lindelof's style has always been to feed the viewers bits and pieces of information that don't immediately add up to anything substantial so that the final reveals pack more of a punch when they do arrive and all the pieces make some semblance of sense. This certainly seems to be the case here. We do get some new background information from several main characters and begin to understand slightly more about two groups whose motivations are hard to grasp: the Guilty Remnant and Wayne's Compound. A [dim] light is also beginning to shine on Kevin Garvey's (Justin Theroux) past and present struggles as well as his very sanity.

In the sprawling suburban Guilt Remnant complex, this episode focuses on Meg's (Liv Tyler) initiation into the organization. Kevin Garvey's wife Laurie (Amy Brenneman) has the responsibility of showing Meg the ins and outs and trying to coax her into becoming a member herself. She does this by trying to get Meg to realize that things are out of control for her and that she needs to give up control in order to regain some emotional stability. First, she takes Meg out to the woods with an axe and has her try to chop down a tree. This results in tears and frustration which builds up later to the point of Meg almost wanting to leave and go back to her regular life. Later, Laurie sees that Meg needs to connect to things on a more emotional level and when Meg realizes that although Laurie may still have friends and family on the outside she has surrendered to the Guilty Remnant's way of life, it begins to dawn on her that this may be the only way to bury her intense feelings about the event and how it has affected her life afterward. Later in the episode it's revealed that Meg has left in the middle of the night and Laurie has a look of disappointment on her face. She shouldn't - Meg is out chopping down that tree.. it appears she may be ready to surrender herself and become a part of the Guilty Remnant.

Wayne's compound is raided by the FBI based on statutory rape charges from years ago - it looks like Wayne's weakness is young girls. Surely we'll learn more about this going forward but for now the story may be centered around Tom Garvey (Kevin's son) and Christine (the girl to whom Tom showed affection but looks to be in love with Wayne). After Wayne escapes from the compound raid, he gives Christine over to Tom with instructions to keep her safe and then leaves. It looks like Tom has finally had enough of the path he has been on as he almost called his Dad on the phone and as soon as he and Christine were alone in the car he lets out a blood-curdling scream of desperation and rage just like he had in the compound's pool back in the first episode. Yikes. We'll either see him saved or he will become a force of destruction and misery in this series. Either way the build-up should be a good one as it unfolds.

Kevin Garvey's story gets more interesting by the minute, as it becomes more and more hard to tell for him (and to the viewer) what is real and what is not. Reality itself seems to be playing tricks on him and that is best shown in the scene where the Mayor is having a conversation with him at the police station and the bagels that he had just put into the toaster completely disappear. Fortunately for Kevin, this episode seems to be more about showing that the things he thought could be hallucinations (mostly because of doubt introduced by other characters) are real. Dean, the "mystery man" that we have seen previously, first parks his truck at Kevin's house and then actually shows up at his door. We might think that his is all just more flights of fancy from Kevin's overactive imagination, but Dean actual hands his daughter Jill a 6-pack of beer to take inside and she asks who the man at the door was afterward. Well, looks like he is definitely real.. unless it runs in the family (a real possibility). Kevin later opens up the toaster at the police station and discovers the bagels have fallen behind some sort of mechanism inside. We do meet Kevin's father in a mental institution earlier in the episode and he seems to be a very intelligent and well-spoken man.. at least until symptoms of schizophrenia seem to wander into the conversation. It's obviously going to be a focal point here.. is there something different about the Garveys? Or could it be just a history of mental illness in the family. Does any of this have to do with the reason why Wayne seems to have everyone figured out except for Tom? Surely there is more to the story here.

There is a little more levity here than in the first episode, which I certainly appreciate. We see some teenagers goofing off, bagels disappearing and then reappearing, and blow-up penguins. I think in order for this show to work on a week-to-week basis it needs to continue down this path and separate the seriously murky emotional overtones and physical violence with more penguins and jelly beans. Hats off, Damon - I'm still a little confused about where the Guilty Remnant is going but I will no doubt be tuning in for at least the next few weeks to find out. Also, the next episode appears to center around Christopher Eccleston's character, Matt, who is a preacher that has been handing out flyers suggesting that the people that disappeared were not in any way 'special'. I'm inclined to agree with you, Matt, especially when Gary Busey was among those taken. Although that might depend on your definition of 'special'.

"Don't wake up. Don't anybody wake up. Go to sleep.. go back to fucking sleep!"

After the frantic pace of recent episodes "Gladys" and "Guest", you would think that The Leftovers would come up for some air. Quite the opposite. With only three episodes left in the first season, "Solace for Tired Feet" brings no solace at all to viewers and in fact continues to take us further under the current as the events in Mapleton start to intertwine and come to a head. This latest episode starts off with Jill and a group of her friends trying to see who can last the longest locked inside an old refrigerator in the woods. Some pretty terrific games that these kids are into, huh? Well, Jill breaks the record but the handle breaks off when her friends try to let her out and chaos ensues. Enter the character that perhaps we least expect to see at this moment, Kevin Garvey Sr., who has apparently broken out of the secure psychiatric facility that he was voluntarily remanded to soon after the Sudden Departure. 

In contrast to the previous two episodes, "Solace for Tired Feet" has an expanded focus but it does still tend to orbit around Kevin Garvey. Whether we're talking about his budding relationship with Nora Durst (one of the bright spots in the series so far), the strange chemistry with Jill's friend Aimee (Emily Meade), the jumbled and somewhat-tied-to-reality sequences with Dean (Michael Gaston) or the unsettling conversations with his father, Kevin is unwittingly the nucleus of all of this chaos. And that's not even mentioning his ties to the Guilty Remnant or the mess that his son Tom is wrapped up in.

Speaking of Tom Garvey, we learn (somewhat shockingly) that he is just one of many spokes in Holy Wayne's plans. Not only does he discover that there are other people like himself who are doing what Wayne has told them to, but apparently there are also other girls just like Christine (young, asian and pregnant?). I think that we as viewers of the show are supposed to be in the dark about Wayne and his motivations and abilities (supernatural or otherwise), but he has certainly been portrayed this far as an unsavory character which is very much at odds with the talent that he somehow possesses. Christine may have been having another vision when she was babbling phrases like 'there are spiders underwater", and I'm sure that we'll find some parallel to this later in the series, but the most important thing that we can garner from this episode is that Wayne has more than one baby and they are being referred to as 'The Bridge'. For whatever reason, Wayne seems to be in hiding and trying to make the money last until these babies have been born. This may be coming pretty soon, as at the end of the episode Christine is revealed to have given birth to her daughter.

Throughout the season so far, we have seen so many references to Kevin's possibly psychotic state (disappearing bagels, missing shirts, Dean, etc.) but at every turn he proves himself to be sane after all. In this episode, we see the real, tangible result of what Kevin perceives as a dream in the bite on his hand and the dog he has tied up outside. Aimee seems to have had a whole conversation with Kevin while he was blacked out, or having an episode - and in fact I'm not sure that Aimee is exactly what she appears to be. We haven't learned much about her and her back story but she seems to know some things about Kevin that he doesn't know about himself. Odd. Anyway, the whole episode culminates in a conversation that Kevin and his father have at a familiar diner.. for some reason an old issue of National Geographic seems to be some kind of token for Kevin to accept a new reality that may be happening to him and already happened to his father. Are things exactly as they seem, or could everything be completely different? Although Kevin does not want to, he ultimately does seem to accept that he has some new kind of purpose or connection waiting for him to explore when he grabs the magazine (not at the diner, but one that had been ordered by his daughter at their house on behalf of Kevin Garvey, Sr.).

Good luck to the citizens of Mapleton as things play out over the next couple of weeks. Things are about to get even crazier than they already are.. and that was already pretty nuts!

In typical The Leftovers fashion, any answers that we may think we're getting closer to actually just lead to more questions. Now I've been a fan of Damon Lindelof's work since his Lost days so this is mostly expected, but it does seem as though we're getting a constant stream of open-ended story arcs. The Guilty Remnant, Holy Wayne, Kevin Garvey Sr.'s (and now Dean's) mysterious voices, a specific issue of National Geographic, etc all twist and turn in an endless spin cycle of exposition. "We'll get to all of these things in time," The Leftovers seems to say, "but loose ends don't need to be tied up in the middle of a season."

Kevin Garvey is now becoming explicitly aware of his 'blackouts' and this awareness may drive him further into either aggressive, self-defeating behavior or perhaps (and I'm hoping) into accepting the unknown - specifically what his father, Kevin Garvey Sr. has been pushing him towards. Or maybe those are both actually the same path and there is no way out for the Chief. In "Cairo", Kevin falls asleep in his bed only to wake up at an old cabin - apparently some place that Kevin used to frequent when he was younger - with Dean. He discovers Patti tied up inside and we learn shortly afterwards that (according to Dean) Kevin had gone out, gotten drunk, kidnapped Patti and brought her here. 

The always conflicted Kevin Garvey tries to do what he feels is the right thing and let Patti go, but everything (and everyone) works against him. Patti maintains that she will report everything that happened if she is set free (which would certainly ruin his professional career and strain all of his relationships), and Dean physically restrains Kevin and tells him to go back to sleep so that the real Kevin (the one that supposedly spearheaded all of this craziness in the first place) might reappear. There is a lot of information to digest within these scenes at the cabin. First, the painting of the deer in the cabin closely resembles one that is actually in the National Geographic issue so prominently featured in the last episode. Second, Dean seems aware of the fact that Kevin doesn't fully grasp the situations that he continually finds himself in (to what extent, I'm not quite sure), and we also see Dean talking to "voices" at one point, much like Kevin Garvey Sr. One new question that presents itself here then is are those voices the same or are Kevin's father and Dean working on opposite "sides"? The way the show presents this information lends credibility to a few theories that I've heard about Dean being guided by "evil" and Kevin Garvey Sr. by "good". Or is it the other way around? Third, Kevin finds himself in the woods full of damning evidence that he has been here many times before - his shirts are bloody and dirty, hanging from the trees surrounding a well-used campfire. We also see quite a few dirty, used work boots - does this mean that Kevin may be leading a group of people, perhaps the same group that stoned Gladys earlier this season? That guy needs some sleep, for sure.

Something that I touched on in a previous review was that Patti and Gladys shared an "I'm ready" moment at the beginning of the "Gladys" episode earlier this year before she was stoned to death. In "Cairo", Patti eventually tells Kevin that Gladys had agreed to being martyred (presumably in that scene) for the cause and that she knew that her time was up as well. It makes you wonder if Gladys is somehow connected to what seems to be happening to Kevin as well as Dean and Kevin Garvey Sr. Certainly she knows more than she lets on. Going back to the stoning, something that bothers me is that Patti is talking when she is near death - begging her assailants to stop - perhaps this is just a natural reaction to being inches away from a cruel and violent demise, but one would think she would remain stoic if she had readily agreed. More than likely, then, she didn't agree so readily or there was more at stake. After entering the cabin to find Patti gasping for air under a plastic bag (Dean's doing), Kevin makes a decision to sacrifice his career and possibly a lot more by cutting Patti's bonds to set her free. Patti will have none of this, as it seems she has already set much of this in motion (including a larger Guilty Remnant plot to dress up Loved Ones versions of the departed in their stolen clothing for some kind of shocking demonstration), and kills herself with a shard of glass from Dean and Kevin's earlier physical confrontation. 

Here are Patti's parting words from a William Yeats poem called He Bids His Beloved Be At Peace:

I HEAR the Shadowy Horses, their long manes a-shake,

Their hoofs heavy with tumult, their eyes glimmering white;

The North unfolds above them clinging, creeping night,

The East her hidden joy before the morning break,

The West weeps in pale dew and sighs passing away,

The South is pouring down roses of crimson fire:

O vanity of Sleep, Hope, Dream, endless Desire,

The Horses of Disaster plunge in the heavy clay:

Beloved, let your eyes half close, and your heart beat

Over my heart, and your hair fall over my breast,

Drowning love's lonely hour in deep twilight of rest,

And hiding their tossing manes and their tumultuous feet.

Yikes, Patti. Thanks for the parting poetry - this seems to be referring to the four horsemen of the apocalypse while also expressing a new awakening (via the sunrise). I suppose Patti is alluding to what is about to happen in Mapleton (and perhaps across all of the chapters of the Guilty Remnant). Whatever the Guilty Remnant actually does with the fabricated bodies of the departed, it will surely be the most impactful thing that they have accomplished and truly have a lasting effect. We are already seeing more and more distraught people joining up with the Guilty Remnant (including Jill, although I think her intentions may be different). They may need to buy some more real estate.

As for Kevin, how can he do the noble thing now? Even with the best of intentions, he is obviously leading some kind of double life and exposing all of that (or even part of it) to everyone would only result in punishment for him. From the very beginning we see that Kevin is a good force in this town, and one of the only people who seem to have their head on straight (besides what happens when he falls asleep and/or blacks out, obviously), so is it better for him to plunge straight into chaos or give himself up to be locked away like his old man? The events of the next episode leading up to the season finale will no doubt be filled with fire and brimstone, and personally I dig it. Although obviously about the struggle between good and evil, The Leftovers exists in a time and place where morality itself is skewed, so who knows and who is to say which is which?

So after last week surprised us with a crazy ending (both Patti stabbing herself with a shard of glass in an attempt to implicate Kevin and Jill turning up at the Guilty Remnant), I would expect nothing less of The Leftovers than to avoid the cliffhanger and throw us back into the past. It's really more of a move from Damon Lindelof's Lost, but certainly welcome here as it serves to build tension before the season finale which airs in two weeks. Anyway, on to the good stuff..

Laurie has been a bit of a mystery to us since she was introduced as Kevin Garvey's wife and one of the Guilty Remnant. Bits and pieces of information have been floating around though which you might have picked up. It is revealed in "The Garveys at Their Best" that Laurie was a psychologist before the Sudden Departure (I'm just assuming that's capitalized in this world) and, in fact, one of her patients was Patti who went on to become the head of the Mapleton chapter of the Guilty Remnant. Hearkening back (or forward, rather) to "Gladys", we gain a greater understanding of what was in the brown paper bag that Patti left on the doorstep of her [presumably] ex-husband's house. Shit. In addition, we see all of the build-up that caused Laurie to join the Guilty Remnant and leave her life in the first place. Not only was her and Kevin's relationship tumultuous to say the least, but she was pregnant with a baby that no one else knew about and who disappeared in the Sudden Departure along with the others. Not that the Sudden Departure wasn't bad enough already, but the thought of women at various stages of pregnancy suddenly losing their unborn children is a startling one. 

Elsewhere in Mapleton, we see a surprisingly lighthearted Jill (with braces, no less) who is as far as she could possibly be from the older, more jaded version of the same girl that we know now. We also learn that Tommy apparently gets loaded and heads over to his biological father's house quite often. Kevin spends the episode chasing an "unstable" deer throughout the city and trying to capture it alive, though it ends up dead at the very end of the show (and that series of events also leads Kevin to infidelity). The way that Kevin Garvey's past was portrayed in The Leftovers previously had led me to believe that he (and his family) were happy.. but it appears as though Kevin has never quite been happy, never found his true calling or reason for being. Foreshadowing all of the crazy events with Dean and Kevin Garvey Sr., at one point Kevin is on a run and sees a car with four women in it drive up to him. "Are you ready?" they ask him. When Kevin looks confused they seem to laugh and drive off only to have a sewer grate nearby blow off the street and into the air with a visible eruption of flames. This seems like the moment that the top comes off the bottle, so to speak, for Kevin. Whether the women in that car have anything to do with the more recent developments in the show or are even real at all remains to be seen.

Does the deer in this episode symbolize Kevin's sanity or how he thinks of himself? Is Laurie's baby really gone, and if so were Patti's words in the therapy session, "there's something wrong inside you" somehow related or just referring to the unsettling feelings that many characters seemed to have? When and why does Kevin Garvey Sr. go all nutty bar? Why would Laurie follow someone like Patti whom she knows is not completely well or mentally stable? Lots of questions posed here like usual.. thanks The Leftovers, I'll be not so patiently waiting until the season finale in two weeks!