I like The Leftovers single-character episode like last week’s “Guest,” but hours like “Solace for Tired Feet” suck me in more, I think. Probably because I am deeply interested in the surreal, metaphysical mysteries at the show’s core. “Solace” did a good job of deepening those mysteries, with help from an outstanding Scott Glenn.
Glenn plays Kevin Garvey Sr., who has just escaped the loony bin (right in time to save his stupid granddaughter Jill, who was trying to beat the record for staying in a refrigerator the longest; teens in Mapleton must be easily bored). Kevin Sr., along with Wayne, is the best representation of The Leftovers‘ supernatural side, as he hands Kevin a forty-year-old copy of National Geographic like it’s his classified marching orders.
Here’s the best part of the dynamic between Kevin Sr. and Jr.: even though Kevin Jr. is constantly giving the old man shit, slapping handcuffs on him and hauling him back to the asylum, he still ultimately takes the old man’s advice. When his father sees all of Kevin’s pills, he tells his son that they’ll screw up his brain, and a few scenes later we see Kevin flushing every last pill down the toilet. When Kevin is presented with a different copy of the same NatGeo issue, he initially throws it away, but the episode ends with him reaching into the trash to retrieve it. Kevin Garvey is a real skeptic, and as he gets drawn further into this mystery, so do we.
(Also, side note: is it just me, or is there some strange sexual tension between Kevin and Aimee? I might be reading too far into things, but I can totally see her trying to pull some American Beauty shit.)
The other part of “Solace” involved Tom finally getting sick of Wayne’s cryptic orders. As he tells Christine, it’s been over two months since they were contacted by Wayne, and when he does call, it’s to order Tom to leave $3,000 in a dead drop site. Tom follows the man who picks up the money, bursts into his motel room, and finds the bizarro English version of himself, as the man is a fellow disciple of Wayne’s, transporting a similarly pregnant girl.
It’s an interesting tactic to take with Wayne: we’ve seen that his magic hugs are exactly that, magic, and really do serve to take one’s pain away. Yet The Leftovers chooses to paint him as kind of a pervy manipulator, the kind of man who would hole up on a ranch in Nevada with a bevy of comely Asian women at his beck and call. So yeah, the magic works, but the sorcerer is kind of a prick.
Chris Zylka does a nice job of showing Tom’s mounting frustration, culminating when he throws the Wayne-phone against a wall, shattering it (similar to something his father did earlier in the episode). When he returns to Christine, he finds that she’s given birth to a girl in his absence. On the one hand, babies are the kiss of death for TV shows; on the other, it could go some way towards explaining what exactly is Wayne’s deal. But it’s there that I face a conundrum: do I want answers when I love the mysteries so much?
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