Let the Mystery Be: The Leftovers and the Limits of Explainer Culture  

No one knows anything on The Leftovers. It's a state of affairs established in the series pilot, during which several characters accuse each other of "not know[ing] shit" — specifically, about the Sudden Departure that has disappeared two percent of the world's population. By the second season, the show's creators signaled their self-conscious commitment to the message by selecting, as the song to accompany the new credits sequence, Iris DeMent's "Let the Mystery Be." Even the show's paratexts invoke the specter of inscrutability. As the tagline for the finale reads, "Nothing is answered. Everything is answered. And then it ends." 

Unknowability, in short, is more than just a theme among others on The Leftovers — it's the show's guiding ethos, as other critics have noted.1 Less acknowledged, however, is how strenuously The Leftovers' fictional subjects seem to resist this directive. Largely unable to "let the mystery be," most of the series' protagonists spend its three seasons doggedly seeking answers to the question of what happened on October 14th: scanning for clues, decoding symbols, and disseminating theories that might qualify as what one character in the show's third season calls "Crazy Whitefella Thinking."

Which is to say, the cast of The Leftovers bears a certain resemblance to contemporary television viewers. Trained on the narratively complex "enigma-driven" serials that, as Jason Mittell argues, would come to characterize the TV landscape in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, audiences have responded in kind — adopting maximally suspicious hermeneutic approaches, optimized for a new, post-network, post-Lost era of textual sleuthing. As Mittell puts it, one result of narrative complexity has been to "convert many viewers into amateur narratologists, noting patterns and violations of convention, chronicling chronologies, and highlighting both inconsistencies and continuities across episodes and even series," an emergent "model of engagement" he terms "forensic fandom."2 

Ten years after its debut, then, The Leftovers may be the television show that speaks most powerfully to the way many people watch television today — and perhaps, to one of the dominant postures for engaging with pop culture, period. In its extended dramatization of the desire to Make It All Make Sense, the show constitutes an allegory for the way many contemporary viewers approach "content": that is, with an avidity bordering on paranoia, hunting for "Easter eggs" and scrolling Reddit posts.

I was reminded of the parallels between audiences' "forensic" activities and the characters' own when re-watching the episode in which series lead Nora Durst, an investigator with the Department of Sudden Departures (DSD), administers a survey to the Departed's next of kin, intended to surface a hidden rationale behind their selection. Confronted with a statistical anomaly, Nora presses the issue: "Isn't that what we're supposed to be looking for? A pattern?" Later, when core cast member Laurie writes a book about her time with the cult-like Guilty Remnant, her potential publisher wants answers — specifically, about the GR's requirement that all members smoke. Laurie hedges; she can't explain it, "because it was never really explained to me." "Yeah, but they have a story, don't they? A story, a myth, a rule book..." (season 2, episode 3).

The market may demand answers. But art doesn't have to supply them, and life — as The Leftovers suggests — often won't comply. The radical contribution of The Leftovers is to both model and make a case for a different interpretive posture, one inclined more to mystery than mastery. In this sense, The Leftovers exemplifies a kind of Negative Capability TV, an alternative to the "puzzle-box" model that has become so dominant, it can feel like the default. The Leftovers, by contrast, basically requires a Keats-like capacity for "being in uncertainties, Mysteries, and doubts." Atlanta, Lodge 49, Twin Peaks: The Return, and most recently, The Curse are among other shows that demand a similarly Keatsian capability, or what Emily Ogden calls, in her recent book on the subject, "a capacity to hold the position of not knowing yet." 3

It's worth clarifying, as Ogden does, what such unknowing would and would not entail. It is not, for instance, a free pass for truthers. "I am not talking about the refusal to know what can be known, or about the simple accident of not having found something out yet," Ogden writes, "nor even . . . about the fact that we will each absorb only a finite amount of knowledge in the course of our finite lives." Instead, she explains, she is talking about an aptitude for "not knowing yet," or maybe ever.4 

One crisis that The Leftovers helps to illuminate, in other words, is the epistemological one humans face when confronted — in stories, in life — with something that can't be determined with certainty. Like a lot of modernist texts, but a comparatively small subset of televisual ones, The Leftovers tests our tolerance for ambiguity: it asks us, at times explicitly, to approach narrative as something potentially insoluble.  

A corollary of the fetish for explanation-on-demand is the tendency to overestimate what even needs explaining. Glass Onion (2022), Rian Johnson's self-referential sequel to his puzzle-box-office smash, Knives Out (2019), pokes fun at this habit of overstating complexity — of giving certain cultural texts, perhaps, too much credit. "Oh, it's so dumb, it's brilliant!" one character declares, prompting Detective Benoit Blanc to respond, "No, it's just dumb." 

These reception habits feel like the byproduct of online explainer culture, which has now been normalized — and monetized — to such a degree that entities from Marvel and Taylor Swift to Tesla have gotten in on the "secreted messages" game. The hunt for Easter eggs may have started as a fannish practice, but it has now become a hegemonic one, with disconcerting results. As Nick Haramis has noted, writing about the longer history of steganography, there's a fine line "between fandom and fanaticism."5 If literary studies has long acknowledged this tension — positing postcritique as the answer to paranoid reading, "surface" approaches as correctives to "symptomatic" ones — media studies hasn't waged this particular method war. The resulting irresolution can be jarring. "I recently discovered there are a lot of youngs who are mad that yellow jackets [sic] isn't explaining explicitly the supernatural elements," one professor recently shared on social media. "I was surprised. Things that defy reason are so fucking pleasurable in mystery shows." For some viewers, apparently not.  

Thinking Outside the Puzzle Box  

There may be no one who understands better the degree to which "forensic" approaches have shaped the reception of serialized television drama in the 21^st century than Leftovers' co-creator and showrunner, Damon Lindelof. To date, Lindelof remains best-known for his work on ABC's Lost (2004-2010), the arch-puzzle-box show which immediately preceded The Leftovers. When Lost aired its now-infamous finale, frustrating viewers who had invested years deducing the island's secrets, Lindelof became, as Phil Maciak notes, "his generation's poster boy for audience disappointment."6

With Watchmen (HBO, 2019), Lindelof issued a forceful correction. The limited series wraps up with astonishing, clockwork precision, all of the weird and wayward plot lines resolved, its loosest ends tied up in a concluding set piece that almost qualifies, in its abundant satisfactions, as something like fan service. 

There's nothing wrong, of course, with this kind of perfectly joined construction, or its bravura execution in Watchmen, whose final sequence is so dazzling as to qualify as what Mittell calls a "narrative special effect."7 But there is something off-putting about the extent to which "enigma-driven storytelling" has become the rule. To appreciate the mystery plot's preeminent stature in prestige television one could look to Mike White's White Lotus (HBO, 2021-), both seasons of which front-loaded enigmas, in the form of dead bodies, onto what are otherwise social satires, while offering abundant clues for cine- and telephiles to discover. (See, for instance, Jennifer Coolidge's flowered dress.) Industry veteran that he is, White — whose earlier series, Enlightened (HBO, 2011-2013), feels comparatively unshaped by these kinds of demands — seems ready to give people the puzzle box that they want. 

The Leftovers, far from meeting expectations, delights in confounding them. Starting with the earliest episodes, signs and symbols are invoked with knowing frequency, teasing, if not trolling, audiences with possible augurs: dogs, birds, snakes, a single loud cricket. If polar bears preoccupied Lost viewers, the animals of The Leftovers are pretty clearly red herrings, harbingers of nothing so much as the characters' own frustrated desire to understand. 

Get too caught up in puzzle-solving, the show suggests, and you may miss the point — and lose the plot. In S/Z, Barthes identifies the hermeneutic as one of five possible "codes" at work in a fictional text. But in popular discourse, it can sometimes feel like the only code. Following the season finale of Yellowjackets (Showtime, 2022-), USA Today ran a recap initially headlined, "Who died? Who got eaten?"8 What else, after all, would you possibly want to know?

The Danger of a Single Explanation

Rewatching The Leftovers, I was struck by how cannily it seems to escape the long arm of explainer culture. Its latter seasons regularly lead with seemingly self-contained set-pieces—a prehistoric melodrama that doubles as the season two prologue, a nuclear submarine disaster featuring very full-frontal nudity—that even the most motivated viewer might be hard-pressed to "explain." (Which doesn't mean they don't try.) As an interpretive approach, this kind of determinism feels facile. "Here's the thing about 'easter eggs' in media objects," scholar Olivia Stowell put it on Twitter, "respectfully, easter egg hunts are, in fact, for children." It's no contradiction to say that the impulse also feels macho, analogous to the desire to dictate, in media franchise discussions, what is canon.

The Leftovers is both funny and clear-eyed about the perils of excessively aggro interpretation — which, in the world of the series, is generally the province of white men. The series abounds with characters whose off-the-wall theories do actual damage. In season two, Nora's brother, the Reverend Matt Jamison, begins pushing "The Book of Kevin," a gospel starring protagonist and small-town police chief, Kevin Garvey, as unwitting Messiah, alienating his entire family in the process. In the following season, it is Kevin's father who emerges as the false prophet, peddling a secular vision of humanity's salvation — one, we learn, based on a half-baked grasp of Aboriginal tradition, a two-week acid trip, and the prognostications of a talking chicken named Tony.  His evangelism ends when Kevin Sr. accidentally murders the indigenous elder he's been hounding for "wisdom." Then, there's the weird guy who spends most of the first season shooting dogs, then returns, in season three, with the same arsenal and a new conspiracy theory: that humanity has been contaminated by canine DNA. When Kevin declines to share his hypothesis, the man tries, almost successfully, to kill him. 

A powerful counterpoint to this trend arrives in the finale, in the form of the extended monologue that concludes the series. In the final scene, Nora, Kevin's long-lost partner, tells a story that reverses our understanding of the cataclysmic event at the heart of The Leftovers — or not. The truth value of Nora's tale remains just uncertain enough to leave viewers in the closing moments, as in the final scene of Twin Peaks: The Return, unsure of the narrative ground on which they've been standing. The first time I watched the episode, I was convinced Nora was lying; the second time, I felt sure her story was true. Even more interesting, however, is Kevin's response to her account: "Why wouldn't I believe you? You're here" (season 3, episode 8). More concerned with his lover's presence than with getting answers, Kevin really couldn't care less. 

Unlike Kevin, however, many of the series regulars tend to hold their narrative certainties too tightly. "I am not part of Kevin Jr.'s story!" his father yells. "He is part of mine!" Nora, meanwhile, having clung to the belief that the baby abandoned at her doorstep was destined to be her daughter, is devastated to learn that Kevin's son, Tommy, intended otherwise: "I left her for my Dad." Then there's Grace Playford, a tragic figure who — convinced that Sudden Departure was in fact the Rapture — failed to search for her five missing children; instead, they died of exposure, not far from her home. If Joan Didion immortalized the idea that "we tell ourselves stories in order to live,"9 The Leftovers implies a darker possibility: that the stories we tell ourselves might be not just a mechanism for survival, but the means of our undoing. 

Toward not Knowing 

It is telling that The Leftovers' trajectory is toward a gentle agnosticism. Even its most dogmatic characters eventually reconcile themselves to the fact that their grief and fury signify nothing. Or something! Who knows. As one critic wrote, by the third season, "even the most religious characters are transparent about their own uncertainty." For John, who we meet in the Texas-set season two, the crisis comes on gradually. A staunch denier of the supernatural, he comes to discover that his seemingly loving daughter, Evie, has decamped for the Guilty Remnant, while his son, Michael, has helped to orchestrate Kevin's return from the dead (again). He finally collapses in the face of the mounting illogic. "I don't understand what's happening," he sobs in that season's finale. "Me neither," Kevin admits, as the instrumental version of The Pixies' "Where is My Mind?", a signature music cue, reprises (season 2, episode 10). Meanwhile, it's not until the show's end approaches that Matt finally accepts, to borrow the title of the definitive, blind-faith-destroying fifth episode of season 3, that "It's a Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World." 

Throughout, it is Kevin who serves as the series' most consistent proponent of unknowing as an ethical position, the only viable posture to assume in the kind of fallen world viewers, like the show's protagonists, may increasingly feel they inhabit. Part Odyssean seeker — "homeward bound" as he sings in one other-worldly Karaoke session — part wide-eyed Candide, Kevin is frequently befuddled and continually exposed. (Literally: audiences see all of Justin Theroux's tattoos). Not unlike the hapless Dougie Jones, the empty-headed double of the original Twin Peaks' Special Agent Dale Cooper, post-Departure Kevin isn't sure about much. Apparently un-killable, dropped into absurd, supernatural scenarios, Kevin is forced to roll with some very weird punches. "I'm an international assassin," he announces, as he tries to catch up to events unfolding in one parallel timeline, even as, in another, he discovers he is both "the President" and the would-be executioner of his own identical twin (season 3, episode 7).

The lesson of such radical open-mindedness may be for the critic as much as the casual viewer. At stake in the show's elevation of the experiential over the explanatory is not so much a single methodology — post-critique versus paranoia, textual erotics versus forensics — as an orientation that allows for experiencing and explicating. The show, to borrow Susan Sontag's phrase, is not against interpretation; it's just not for such a narrow version of it. Faced with television that will not be summarized, it might not be the worst thing to experience more, and explain less: to practice a bit more being in doubts.   

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Elizabeth Alsop is an assistant professor of Communication and Media at the CUNY School of Professional Studies and coordinator of the Film and Media Cultures program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her scholarship has appeared in Film Quarterly, The Journal of Film and Video, Feminist Media Studies, Narrative, Modernism/modernity Print+, [in]Transition, and various edited volumes, and her cultural criticism has been published in The LA Review of Books, The Atlantic, and Public Books. Her book on the films of Elaine May is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press in 2025.

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