The Leftovers season 3, episode 3 recap: ‘Crazy Whitefella Thinking’

The Leftovers “Crazy Whitefella Thinking” shows us the events that led to the final moments of last week’s episode.

The last time we saw Kevin Garvey Sr. in a traditional setting before this season of The Leftovers, was when he was bidding his son farewell back in the first season as he was set to move to Australia after he left the mental institution.

The former Mapleton police chief acknowledged that he wasn’t cured, but instead of ignoring the voices in his head, he just started doing what they told him to do.

“I can sit around and cry about how the world f***ing ended, or I can start it up again,” he said at the time of his trip down under.

The character also briefly popped up in the season 2 episode “International Assassin,” the show’s most ambitious installment to date. Kevin Sr. communicated with Kevin Jr. through a TV to instruct him on what to do about the Patti Levin situation while dressed in Aboriginal garb, with two similarly dressed men behind him.

Credit: HBO

The trailer for Season 3 of The Leftovers indicated that the action was heading to Australia, and while we saw brief glimpses of the Outback in the first two episodes, this was the first one entirely set there as Kevin Sr. faced a series of misadventures in his quest to find a man named Christopher Sunday to fend off the pending apocalypse.

For those keeping score at home, this week’s episode opens with a cover of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” by Richard Cheese, a likely reference to the claims of Kevin Jr. being a messianic figure who’s come back from the dead multiple times and saved Jarden from the Guilty Remnant. Leftovers creator Damon Lindelof has confirmed that each remaining episode of the final season will feature a different theme song that thematically ties to the story.

In “Crazy Whitefella Thinking” we see that Kevin Sr. is heavily influenced by his son, particularly the younger version of Kevin Jr. that can be heard on a tape from when they traveled to Niagara Falls in 1981 following his mother’s death. In one particular instance, a scared Kevin Jr. insists that his pops sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” as a way to make the rain go away.

This inspires Kevin Sr. to sing and dance to prevent the massive flood he believes will come to mark the seventh anniversary of the Sudden Departure. But he also would like to believe that he’s the one that’s destined to save the world and not his son. Weeks before Kevin Jr. discovered that Matt had written a book about him, he sent Kevin Sr. a copy of it all the way to Australia.

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Kevin Sr. furiously rips through the pages of the Book of Kevin to find that it mostly revolves his son and not him. He later calls Matt to curse him out and throws the book in the trash.

You see, Kevin Sr. is currently on his own journey to save the world by following a songline of Australian tribes, learning each one piece by piece. The problem is that the final one is only known to a tribesman named Christopher Sunday (played by David Gulpilil), who he now must track down.

His task is made harder after he’s arrested when he’s spotted by two cops at night as he emulates an indigenous tribe that he discovered earlier in the day, down to the paint, lack of much clothes, and their song and dance ritual. They accuse him of stealing the tribe’s song and confiscate the recording but agree to give him back the tapes of him and a young Kevin Jr.

While picking up his package from Matt containing the book, he asks for the address of an Aboriginal “clever man” Christopher Sunday. He’s pointed to a woman named Sharon who works with local indigenous tribes. It’s in her office that he runs into more trouble when he discovers a wanted poster of himself hanging by her desk that identifies him as being wanted for questioning. He flirts with her and attempts to distract the woman as she looks for Christopher Sunday’s address, but quickly bolts with the information when she realizes who he is.

It’s at Chris’ house that we get more context into how he decided on his current mission, and the connection to Kevin Jr.’s time in the hotel last season. He reveals that he took a hallucinogenic drug called “God’s tongue” given to him by a hippie on the streets of Sydney who asked whether he wanted to speak to God after he arrived in Australia at the behest of the voices in his head. He recalled that he woke up two weeks later in Perth in a hotel room surrounded by two guys also dressed as Aboriginals with no recollection as to what happened.

The only thing he remembered was that he looked into the TV and saw a chicken, the only remaining creature left in a town whose entire populace departed. The chicken pecked him towards the Niagara Falls recording, and thus began his mission to sing the flood away. Christopher Sunday tells him he’ll give him the song if he fixes his leaky roof. It’s here when Kevin Sr.’s real troubles begin.

While standing on the roof of the house, Kevin Sr. panics as he sees Sharon’s car pull up. He suddenly slips and falls off on top of Sunday, accidentally killing the man in the process. Kevin Sr. is later thrown out of the ambulance carrying Chris before he’s declared deceased after he insults the EMT, left to fend for himself on an abandoned road with only his bag and crutches in tow.

He travels through the desolate landscape until he comes upon a man driving a Volkswagen beetle. The driver gets out of the car and begins to pour gasoline on himself and his vehicle in an attempt to self-immolate. Before he commits the act, he asks Kevin Sr. whether he would kill a baby if it would cure cancer. Both men agree that they wouldn’t. “That is exactly what I said,” the man says, after lamenting that they “wouldn’t take me.”

It’d be fair to deduce that he’s referring not to the Sudden Departure, but the machine that Nora has been tasked to investigate which allegedly allows people to reunite with their departed loved ones. It’s also reminiscent of Kevin Jr.’s dilemma of having to kill Patti as a little girl as a means for rebirth, something that he was advised on by his father. The man then sets himself and his car ablaze, causing a small explosion.

A frustrated Kevin Sr. shouts towards the sky after an unsuccessful attempt at searching for water. To his temporary delight, a heavy rain storm passes over him, but he fails to realize that it’s also caused the tape recorder to malfunction. The following day, he continues walking and gets bit by a venomous snake when he tries to eat it. He then wanders towards a large cross and lays down below it exhausted and infected, only to see a blurry silhouette on horseback in the distance as he fades into unconsciousness.

Credit: HBO

It’s here that we near the moment when we saw Kevin Sr. in the last episode. The woman in question was the ringleader behind last week’s accidental killing of a local police chief named Kevin, who they thought to be the man described in the scripture found in Kevin Sr.’s hands at the time he was discovered under the cross.

After Kevin Sr. wakes up in the woman’s home, he calls Matt to find that three weeks has past and asks him to help him find out what happened with Sunday. By now, Kevin Jr. has taken the only remaining copy of the book, and Matt becomes uncharacteristically angry after he learns that Kevin Sr. threw his copy away.

The old man looks through a family photo while searching for food and falls asleep until the night when he hears the women drowning the man outside, at which point he exits the home on crutches, asks them what they’re doing and promptly gets shot with a tranquilizer gun.

The next day, the homeowner who picked up Kevin Sr., named Grace, confesses to her crime and pledges to turn herself in. She then tells him the heartbreaking tale of her relationship to the Sudden Departure. She wrongly believed that her entire family had departed and they were now with God as she was in town at the grocery store that day and couldn’t return until a day later when she discovered nothing at home except her family’s bibles. It wasn’t until years later when she was told that the remains of her five kids were discovered on her property that she realized that only her husband had departed and her kids had died while going out in search of her.

Next: The Leftovers Recap Season 3 Episode 2: ‘Don’t Be Ridiculous’

She then explains that she believed that Kevin Sr. was an angel sent by God to communicate with her, and mistook the man in the writings with a police chief named Kevin from a nearby town. She breaks down in tears throughout and says she’s crazy, but Kevin Sr. comforts her and tells her that she’s not crazy, she just got the wrong Kevin. Whether he’s referring to his son or himself remains to be seen.

The Leftovers airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO.