The Leftovers series finale recap: ‘The Book of Nora’ season 3, episode 8
By Hector Cruz
The Leftovers features a time jump in its series finale to reveal the fate of its main characters.
The Leftovers has included several fantastical episodes throughout its three seasons, including Kevin’s multiple journeys to the underworld, and this season’s boat trip alongside a lion-worshiping sex cult where Matt battled “God.” But despite its main concept, the series began and continued to be a look into the emotional journey of several broken people dealing with the aftermath of 2% of the world’s population suddenly disappearing.
The mystery behind the rapture-like event was the initial hook, but it was the interpersonal relationships between the ensemble cast of characters that brought viewers back each week, as Leftovers creator Damon Lindelof maintained that the reasoning behind the Sudden Departure would never be revealed.
Therefore, it’s fitting that the show ended with a grounded finale focusing on the love story between protagonists Kevin and Nora several years in the future, while still leaving some open-ended questions that are best left up to interpretation.
Credit: HBO
The final episode returned to season 2’s “Let the Mystery Be” for its opening theme, signaling that there will be some things left unresolved by the time the closing credits roll. Unsurprisingly, “The Book of Nora” focuses on the long-time DSD employee as she submits herself to using the device that will reunite her with her departed husband and children. But we know from the season 3 premiere that an aged version of Nora known as Sarah exists in the world years later delivering birds to a nun in Australia, so obviously, things went astray at some point down the line.
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The episode opens on Nora facing the camera as the doctors’ tape her testimonial absolving others of responsibility for her use of the radiation device. She re-records the message because one of the doctors found it to be not believable. The second time she becomes emotional while mentioning the names of her two kids.
Dr. Eden then explains how the procedure will work: Nora will be given a saline solution and disrobe before entering the chamber, which will fill with the fluid containing metals as she places her knees to her chest. The doctors and Matt will be able to communicate with her until the liquid reaches her face, at which point she will have to hold her breath for 30 seconds before being transported to the other side using radiation.
Matt is firmly on board with her decision even as he views a fossil of an earlier participant, making the experience seem real for the first time. After Nora answers “Matt-Libs” as a fill in for a fake obituary, the preacher confesses to his sister that he’s most scared about his own fate involving his relationship with Mary, their child, and his life-threatening illness. He promises to tell others whatever it is that she wants about what happened to her, and they then exchange goodbyes.
We then see Nora’s long walk in the nude to enter the device. Everything goes as planned until the fluid reaches her face, at which point we see her mouthing what looks like the word “stop.” Flash forward to ten years later, and we’re brought back to the closing scene of “The Book of Kevin.”
Credit: HBO
Nora collects small slips of paper from birds’ feet, before delivering a crate of birds on her bike to a nun at a convent. The Australian nun asks “Sarah” if she knows anyone named “Kevin.” It turns out that a man by that name came around with a picture of her asking if she knew her.
Nora quickly jets home to pack clothes and money but is met by a knock on the door before she’s able to make her escape. To her shock, it’s a gray-haired Kevin, who introduces himself as if they only spoke one time before at a dance back in Mapleton. He claims that he was on vacation in the area, and saw her ride by on her bike. He laments that he never got to dance with her years before, and invites her to a dance in town later that night. But Nora, visibly emotional, asks him to leave and quickly shuts the door behind her.
We then discover that Laurie didn’t die at the end of “Certified” as most viewers thought. Nora uses a payphone to call her now-therapist, who’s enjoying life back home in Jarden as a grandmother. Nora angrily accuses Laurie of telling Kevin her whereabouts, but she denies doing so. She gives a nonplussed reaction to finding out that Kevin is pretending that they never dated, but gives Nora permission to attend the dance, which causes Nora to hang up the phone in frustration.
Credit: HBO
Instead, she frantically looks every window and door in her home and decides to take a bath, unintentionally locking herself in her bathroom. However, she does end up going to the dance later that evening, which turns out to be a wedding where the guests are all wearing Mardi Gras beads around their neck. She quickly spots Kevin, who keeps up the act.
They soon catch up on the events of the past 10 years. Kevin informs her that he had a pacemaker put in after he suffered a heart attack, and offers to show her his scar. We also learn that Matt recently died after spending the rest of his life with Mary, Jill is married with a daughter, Tommy’s landed on his feet after a failed marriage, and Kevin Sr. is still alive and kicking at age 91. Kevin mentions that he never got married again because he was “holding a candle for her.”
The bride and groom, whom Kevin met at the bar of his hotel, then interrupt to announce that the nun is going to release the birds that Nora delivered with messages of love that each guest wrote that they will deliver to people across the world. They also bring out a goat so everyone can place their beads around his neck that are meant to represent past sins. A groomsman will then drive the “scapegoat” out into the bush to relieve them of their prior misdeeds.
Credit: HBO
Kevin then manages to get that slow dance with Nora. The two tearfully embrace each other, demonstrating that Kevin knows Nora wasn’t just someone he met one time before. Nora pushes him, to tell the truth, but he refuses so she sets off back home on her bike.
Once there, she realizes that the birds have not yet returned as they usually do. She quickly pedals to see the nun at the convent where she sees a man climbing down a ladder out of a window. She pounds on the door wanting answers about what happened to the birds, but also ends up confronting her about other lies, including the fact that birds can’t travel more than a 5 mile radius and whether a man just snuck out of her window, while the nun retorts that she lied about not knowing Kevin.
A lot of the finale centers around the lies we tell ourselves and each other. From the nun pretending that the birds will be spreading messages of love and casually swearing to God that she didn’t just have sex with the man on the motorcycle, to Kevin wanting to wash all of their dysfunctional past away by trying to maintain the lie about the nature of their relationship. But the biggest lie may or may not be the explanation Nora gives to Kevin about what happened after she entered the device.
Credit: HBO
On her way back home, Nora trips over some beads, which lead to the goat tied up to a wire fence. She tumbles down while trying to save him, but manages to untie him, places the beads around her neck, and takes the goat home.
Kevin then pulls up to her house and comes clean about his entire act and how he found her. It turns out that he never believed that she had died, so he’s traveled to Australia every year during his two-week vacation to find her, showing her picture to as many people as he could. Finally, he recognized that the nun was lying when she claimed she didn’t know her.
Nora invites Kevin in for a cup of tea and he fills her into more of the details of his life. Everything he said was true except about their past, adding that they’re all still living in Jarden in the same houses, except not many people refer to the town as Miracle anymore.
Nora then confesses that she speaks to Laurie from time to time, but requests that he not be mad at her due to their therapist confidentiality agreement. She then assures him that she did not back down from using the machine, and goes into detail as to what happened when she went to the other side.
The streets and most of the homes were empty with 98 percent of the population gone. “Over here, we lost some of them. But over there? They lost all of us,” she explains.
She managed to make her way back to Mapleton from Australia, which proved difficult since there were no airplanes. Once there, she waited behind a tree in front of her former home until she saw her family come out the front door. She barely recognized her kids, now older, while her husband was accompanied by a woman. They all looked happy. It was then that she realized that she didn’t belong there and that she was out-of-place.
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“They were one of the lucky ones,” she said of her family who lost only one member (herself) on that side.
Instead of staying, she hunted down the inventor of the machine so he could transport her back home. That too took a long time, so by the time she got back too much time had passed, and she feared he wouldn’t believe her.
However, Kevin responded that he had no reason not to believe her. The episode ends as the couple holds hands and we see that the birds have returned outside after delivering their message of love.
One can take Nora’s story at face value, but it’s obvious that Lindelof intentionally left out images of what she described to leave some ambiguity. Earlier in the episode, Nora maintained that she doesn’t lie, but we know from seeing her actions in the past few seasons that that’s not true, though it may be that she turned over a new leaf and she’s now on a quest for truth as evidenced by her early interactions with Kevin and the nun.
But this also could be a coping mechanism for her if she decided against going through with using the device. There’s a distinct possibility that she backed out at the last-minute since we saw her shouting something when the liquid reached her chin before the camera cut away. As for Kevin, he may, in fact, believe that Nora went on her own journey just as he did when he died several times before.
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But he also knows all too well that sometimes you must lie to protect the ones you love. This may be the latest example of him accepting her as she is, flaws and all, like with the bulletproof vest or when she waved away his need to put a plastic bag over his head.
For those who do believe Nora’s tale is true, the show is able to provide far more answers about the Sudden Departure than we ever thought would be given. But the validity of her claims is likely to be debated by fans for some time to come, while others will simply “let the mystery be.”