Warning: Full spoilers for The Leftovers: Season 3 premiere follow.
Last week I presented the first half of my conversation with Damon Lindelof about the third and final season of The Leftovers. In this second half, we dive into spoilery topics coming out of the Season 3 premiere, including certain missing characters and other characters getting rather dramatically blown up. Lindelof also discusses the season’s big flashback opening, the premiere’s final scene (and what appears to be a flash forward), and more of his approach to crafting this concluding year of the HBO drama.
In addition, we chatted about his thoughts on the Alien and Star Trek franchises (in the wake of working on both), deciding he's better suited for TV than film, and why he thinks it’s best he stays away from any Lost reboot, should one eventually occur.
IGN: Was it a definitive way of saying “We are done with the Guilty Remnant story” when you literally dropped a bomb on them in the season premiere, after you had them sneak back into the story in a stealth way in Season 2?
Damon Lindelof: You know, the Guilty Remnant is Hydra in many ways. I guess the question to be raised is that it would seem that Meg is sort of excited about what happens -- that that was sort of her intention -- as she tells her Siegfried and Roy story. If it’s your intention to get blown up, are you martyred? And does the cause actually become a much bigger thing, radiating outward? Like I’ve said, the storytelling in Season 3 is very tight in terms of the time scale it’s on, so who knows whether or not Meg’s sacrifice or civil action, however you want to look on it, had any sort of great effect. We do see three years later that the Guilty Remnant doesn’t seem to be a pervasive idea on the show anymore, but we’ve always felt like the Guilty Remnant philosophy was more disturbing - which is this idea of how can you attach to your family, knowing that the Departure happened? They endorse basically breaking free of your family and accepting that the world has ended, and that’s a psychological and emotional idea that was grafted onto a cult. That idea is very pervasive in Season 3. Whether or not we see the Guilty Remnant again in any form, you know, I don’t want to speak to.
It bears mentioning that [Tom] Perrotta and I get a lot of credit for the show, but our writers room is incredible, and everyone in it contributed significantly, all the way back to Season 1. Our writers room functions very much in the way that a jury room does, and even if I’m the foreperson, I don’t get to overrule. We try to reach some sort of group consensus if the idea isn’t strong enough or good enough. But one thing we do as an exercise is, "Okay, we’re now breaking the premiere, what would we want to see if we didn’t work in this room? If we had no control over The Leftovers, what’s one of the things we would like to see?" And it was like, "Wouldn’t it be great to just blow up the Guilty Remnant? I mean, f**k those guys!" Seriously. Especially after what they did at the end of Season 2. Like, enough! Wouldn’t it be great to just f**king do that? And we all started smiling and said, “We’re doing that!” It sounds self-congratulatory and arrogant to say we’re fans of the show, but we are. If we’re writing on it, we should be fans of it too. So we often try to play the role of the viewer in terms of what they want, and then either serve it up in heaping piles, or subvert it, because sometimes you shouldn’t give them what they want just because they’re begging for it.
And I’ll just say, was it a drone strike? I mean, the official story is that somebody was smoking a cigarette and it was a gas leak, so, you know… Everything’s subject to interpretation man! Hashtag fake news!
IGN: The Garveys and the Murphys begin things in a relatively happy place here, but of course the two big question marks are Erika and Lily. What can you say about those two characters and when you might address a little more about what happened to them?
Lindelof: I’ll say much sooner rather than later, because again, it’s not a show that I feel like I want to leave little breadcrumbs and make the audience suffer. I’d say by the end of the second episode, you’ll have the answer to both those questions. But we did want the first episode to end with some sense of, “Oh my god, what happened to the baby?! What happened to Lily, and where’s Erika Murphy?” So, you will find out very, very soon.
IGN: Laurie and John as a couple is a fun curveball reveal. How did you decide to pair those two up?
Lindelof: Sometimes it starts with a gut instinct where someone just pitches [the idea], and I don’t remember who it was in that case, that Laurie and John are married, and you feel probably the thing that the audience feels when it’s first revealed, which is “I don’t know how I feel about this…” and then you see if you can earn it. It’s the old “show your work” paradox for when you were in math class, which is put your calculator away, I need to see how you arrived at this equation. So we started talking about where Laurie Garvey was at the end of the finale of Season 2, and where John was, and could we build a construct by which those two would end up together? And we talked for a couple days about it, and we showed our work, and I feel like the season actually owes the audience that work. We can’t just say “Boom, they’re together, deal with it!” We decided this was going to happen, we’re going to explore that relationship and get some of those answers as to how they came to be together, and more importantly, how it came to be that they’re doing what they’re doing. But hopefully the audience will swallow it, because I do feel like the idea of Season 3 is about furthering the idea of merging those two families together. Obviously, the show started with the Garveys, but to not continue to tell the story of the Murphys in season three I feel like would have been a huge mistake.
IGN: We’d heard so much about this season would be in Australia, but the premiere is very much still about Miracle, unlike Season 2, which jumped us into the Miracle story away from Season 1’s setting. Did you feel it was important to spend some time in Miracle because it was so ingrained in the show at this point, rather than, say, Kevin finds out he needs to go to Australia for whatever reason almost immediately?
Lindelof: Well truth be told, in Season 2, although the first episode takes place entirely in Miracle, then the second episode does back up to Mapleton, so the idea was there was some fundamental continuity. But I also felt like I didn’t want to be gimmicky and say “Every season of The Leftovers starts in a new place, and then we have to back fill how they got there!” It was important to spend at least two episodes showing the audience what the condition of all the characters’ lives are, that would potentially propel them to Australia, so it just didn’t feel like, “Hey, it’s the finale of Modern Family, let’s go to Hawaii!” All the characters really needed to have a reason, and that reason is they’re either running towards something, or they’re running away from something. But you kind of need to know what that something is up front, versus backfilling it later. I love non-linear storytelling for all the obvious reasons, but also, that was one of the categories that I feel like the audience has come to expect now, so why not tell the show in a slightly more linear fashion? That said, obviously the final scene of the first episode does not seem to be linear. So we’re jumping around in a slightly unconventional way this time.
IGN: Regarding that final scene, people will instantly think of a term you are familiar with, which is flash forward. What would you say about how people might interpret that?
Lindelof: I’m not gonna talk about that one. I just kind of feel like that scene has to speak for itself. As more information gets filled in for the audience over subsequent episodes, they will have more context for what that scene is and what happens in it. I never want to do the same thing twice, but at the same time, I am driven by non-linear storytelling for all sorts of things. I feel like some TV shows -- and it’s great when they do this -- but a show like The Affair or Big Little Lies essentially says “There’s a murder that we’re building to, and we’re flash forwarding to people in an interrogation room talking about the murder, but we’re not going to reveal who the victim was.” That sort of a thing. I’m interested in much more of an existential mystery, or a character-based mystery, as opposed to a whodunit mystery, and I think you’ll see as the season goes on how we’re doing all that.
IGN: The opening of the premiere give us another one of these sort of ancient flashbacks. It feels like there a version of The Leftovers where you might have done that much more frequently. Was that something where you sort of chose your moments?
Lindelof: I think that we thought about the opening of Season 2 and the opening of Season 3 similarly in that this is the overture for the season, so we want to introduce a thematic, emotional, mythic idea, and we’re going to use this language - we’re going to do it in a non-verbal way, we’re going to use music and action. And so the audience is going to be left thinking “Why did they do that?” But they also do have some sort of historical construct underlying them, and all I’ll say about the opening of Season 3 is we read this book called When Prophecy Fails by this sociologist Festinger that I think was written in the 1960s or something. It’s about a bunch of researchers that learn about this cult this woman is running, that she believes in aliens, that the world is going to end. She’s in communication with these aliens who are going to come and pick her and her friends up before it does end. And the purpose of the book is the researchers know the aliens aren’t going to come, and the world isn’t going to end, and they want to be there for what happens when it doesn’t. We’ve been inundated with a lot of “the world is ending” stories, but I haven’t seen a lot of stories about the disappointment people suffer when prophecy fails. So we decided to use that as our overture for a season that was basically about a prophecy that the world may be ending. And hopefully that scene will have more context as the season goes on. Because it’s happening in a slightly disconnected space, in the same way that the cave woman did, there will be multiple interpretations as to how literal you’re supposed to take that scene, or whether or not it’s just sort of a thematic intro. That’s kind of all we have to say about that. You’ll know much more when the season ends.
Continue on as Lindelof discusses whether he'd want to tackle a comic book movie, his work on Prometheus and Star Trek, why he's better suited for TV than films, the possibility of a Lost reboot and more.
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