The Leftovers season 3, episode 4 recap: ‘G’Day Melbourne’

Kevin sees two familiar faces in Australia in a devastating episode of “The Leftovers,” entitled ‘G’Day Melbourne.’

Nora Durst (Carrie Coon) and Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux) are two incredibly broken people who have tiptoed around each other all season, leading to a fiery argument (both literal and metaphorical) in a Melbourne hotel where their raw emotions are laid bare.

Though the show’s third and final season opened with the couple seemingly in a better place than before, three years after a drone took out the remaining Guilty Remnant members, and nearly seven years after the Sudden Departure, further fractures in their relationship had started to emerge.

Tension built as it became clear that Nora was not just mourning the loss of her two kids over the events of October 14 (or 15th in Australia), but also the recent loss of Lily, who was left at her doorstep at the end of season 1, but whom it’s revealed she gave back to her birth mother between the events of the second and third seasons.

Credit: HBO

There’s also something clawing at her about her brother Matt’s book about Kevin, which she mocks and sneers at not knowing that the events of last season’s “International Assassin” actually took place. It’s those type of significant moments that the couple seem incapable of sharing with each other even as they pretend to tolerate each other’s quirks, such as Kevin’s new habit of putting a plastic bag over his head. But towards the end of the episode, Kevin confesses that he can’t tell her everything because the last time he did he ended up alone, handcuffed to a bed post.

The two keep each other at arm’s length so much that it doesn’t even cross Nora’s mind that she give her partner half of the $20,000 in cash she has strapped on her body, opting instead to bypass the security line through Global Entry, leaving Kevin behind and in the dark about the true nature of her trip until they get on the plane.

Credit: HBO

When she explains that she’ll tell the supposed hucksters behind the radiation machine who she’s on a mission to investigate that she’s accompanied by her boyfriend because they’re in a “toxic co-dependent relationship” and he’s there to see her off, the look on Kevin’s face suggests that he knows the description has some truth to it, and the second half the statement turns out to be true, though it won’t be wherever the departed went to, but presumably starting a new life down under.

Fittingly, Kevin’s misadventures in Australia begin thanks to a TV in a hotel room, one of several call backs to his time as the titular “International Assassin” where he got rid of Patti Levin last season (Kevin later alleges that he’s searching for a book called Assassins at the library where “Evie” works). During a morning show broadcast, he sees who he thinks to be Evie Murphy, who was allegedly killed by a drone, but whose remains were never found. She’s seen staring creepily into the camera through to Kevin while wearing a hijab and holding up a sign referencing the Quran passage Surah 81, which includes the following words:

"And when the girl [who was] buried alive is askedFor what sin she was killedAnd when the pages are made publicAnd when the sky is stripped awayAnd when Hellfire is set ablaze"

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The girl in question could apply to either Evie or the little girl version of Patti, who was thrown down a well by Kevin, while “the pages,” likely refers to the Book of Kevin and the “Hellfire” may be the explosion mentioned at the end of the episode.

Nora and Kevin are so wrapped up in their own worlds that she doesn’t see him hurriedly get in a taxi to race to where G-Day Melbourne is filmed in front of the hotel where she’s waiting for the bus to take her to meet the people behind the radiation device. She’s suddenly met by a woman who asks that she hold her baby while she goes to a job interview after she answers in the affirmative that she’s a mother, demonstrating that she still sees herself in that role though her children are long gone. That’s especially crucial as we see that her flimsy plans to catch the alleged con-artists mask her genuine curiosity regarding the machine, and her desire to be reunited with her family.

Later, after Kevin accosts “Evie” and snaps a picture of her, it’s his ex-wife Laurie who he first thinks to call. She tries to calm him down as best she can, eventually revealing that he’s in the midst of a psychotic break after she calmly tells him to look at the photo he took of “Evie” again only to reveal that she truly is a Muslim woman named Daniah Moabizzi, and that he was simply projecting Evie onto a stranger.

“Are you and Nora okay?” Laurie asks Kevin. The question is never answered, but she rightly points out that Kevin is trying to run away from his problems like the fake Evie, something that can be applied to Nora as well.

For her part, Nora arrives at what appears to be an abandoned warehouse where she’s to undergo several tests before proceeding with the use of the machine at an undisclosed location. She’s unnervingly calm while locked in a shipping crate used to simulate what it’ll be like to be shut in the device, but it’s the final question the scientist asks that trips her up.

It’s the same one that was mentioned by a man who Kevin Garvey Sr. encountered in the Outback in last week’s episode before he self-immolated involving whether you would be willing to allow a baby to be killed if it meant that its twin would go on to cure cancer. Though they each gave divergent answers, they are both rejected by the scientists, making it unclear whether they based the decision on their answer or the way in which they answered the question. We see Nora desperately run after the women after she’s informed that “this isn’t for you,” confirming that she was willing to go through with the procedure.

Credit: HBO

This calls into question whether the machine exists at all. As Nora informs Kevin earlier on, all the people she saw in the video have disappeared, so either they went through, they were killed in the process or the devastation over the false hope they were given led them to commit an act like the man who set himself on fire. There’s also the possibility that they decided to start a new life somewhere on the continent, like we’re led to believe Nora has after we got a glimpse of her years later in the season 3 premiere.

This week’s theme song, Ray LaMontagne’s “This Love is Over,” foreshadows the epic fight between Nora and Kevin that ends their relationship after the distraught pair each return to their hotel room following a heartbreaking day. A frustrated Nora accuses Kevin of wanting to be the subject of Matt’s book, which he promptly sets on fire. Then, long simmering topics come up, such as why Kevin allowed Nora to give up Lily. He suggests that she doesn’t actually want to be a mother because then she would no longer be seen as a victim and people wouldn’t feel sorry for her anymore. Things escalate to the point where Kevin suggests that maybe she’d be better off joining her departed family members. Nora silently agrees with him as he departs the hotel room.

The episode closes as Kevin, exiting the hotel, serendipitously comes upon his father, who went to look for him after he briefly saw him on TV outside the studio of G’Day Melbourne, on which Kevin Sr. was featured in a news report about two missing Kevins, the other whom was killed by his companion, Grace.

Kevin Sr. informs his son that all planes have been grounded due to an explosion. Kevin Jr. says that he’s alone, denying Nora in the same way as an aged version of herself denied knowing him. The final scene shows her sitting in her hotel room smoking as the sprinklers go off above her to put out the fire, as water streams down her face in a close-up shot used to represent the tears she’s incapable of crying over the loss of her children and her disintegrating relationship.

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