In the days after losing a beloved family member suddenly and without warning, I had a hard time looking at strangers. Even strangers I didn’t really see, the ones passing by me in cars on the freeway seemed, somehow, extra strange. A huge chasm had opened up beneath me, but no one could see it. I just walk around with this feeling? I saw someone standing at the corner, waiting for a light to change and thought, How many other people are walking around with huge invisible holes in their chest?
In Mapleton, everyone can see Nora Durst’s wound.
Like episode three, this week The Leftovers shrunk to a show of one, devoted to the story of Nora. We’ve seen her in Mapleton already, giving a speech about the loss of her husband and two young children in the Sudden Departure and exchanging quips with the Chief in a manner not quite optimistic enough to call flirting. She also works for the Department of Sudden Departures, the government agency that has been set up to interview and offer a payment to those who lost family members on October 14th. We glimpse her office life, and wince as her boss asks why all her Legacies answer yes to Question 121. Maybe you tell them your story before the camera rolls, his boss suggests, but Nora shakes her head. “That would never happen,” she says, but you have to wonder if she even needs to. The town gives her free coffee and a wide berth and she seems to inhabit all of it, keeping the shadow of a normal routine, replacing untouched gallons of milk and boxes of Lucky Charms in her cupboards for her Departed kids and filing for divorce having recently learned her Departed husband had been unfaithful.
“While you’re here, do you want to revert to your maiden name?” the Judge asks.
“No, I want to remain Nora Durst.”
But remaining Nora Durst becomes trickier in New York City, where Nora will sit on a panel at the Second Annual DROP (Departure Related Occupations and Practices) Conference. There are protesters outside the hotel, but inside it seems like any other professional conference, with attendees standing in line for plastic badges on lanyards and tote bags. Nora’s badge is missing, and she is given a generic Guest replacement. Suddenly unmoored from her identity and with no indication (by way of small orange stickers) that she is a Legacy herself, Nora stalks into a mixer and then into a panel, looking for whoever may be impersonating her. She has a brief altercation with a woman who had suggested, the year before, that there may be a connection between sugary cereals (Lucky Charms, anyone?) and the Sudden Departure, but then Nora lets Nora slip away. As Guest she steps into a rowdy elevator of fellow attendees. Guest follows them to their suite and knocks back stiffly poured Screwdrivers and a pill that the FDA “will approve next year.” Guest dances on a couch and makes out with $40,000 Loved One replica (the going rate if you want it to be accurate down the appendectomy scar).
Yet, Nora is still there. The version with the badge makes trouble in the hotel bar, and our Nora is kicked from her room. Her anger returns to her in a flash. At a copy and print shop she recreates the badge she should have been wearing, slapping on three orange stickers next to her name. This is who she really is, her loss clearly displayed across her chest. Hotel security materializes next to her as she strides toward her panel, and asking why, exactly, she returned to the hotel with a gun. It was the gun she had, earlier in the episode, asked a prostitute to shoot her with, while wearing a Kevlar vest. (The going rate for that is $3,000.) The guard, however, is moved by her loss.
“Jesus, you lost your whole family? What are the chances of that?”
“1 in 128,000.”
And so Nora’s identity is returned to her (as a woman ranting about plasma rays is removed from behind Nora’s nametag) but so is the weight of everything that Nora Durst is. Her free coffee is a now free martini and you can see all her Nora Durst habits and grief return as she berates another conference member in the bar and then lets herself be led to a rundown building by a tall, balding man that has been drifting in the background of the conference. He leads her down a dark hallway and into a room where she can pay to step through a curtain ($1000, if you’re keeping up the tab at home on just how much of an economic driver the Sudden Departure might be).
Holy Wayne, charismatic despite the dingy surroundings and dirty white sleeveless shirt, steps forward. Carrie Coon, the actress who has carried an entire episode playing with the line between despair and the familiarity of despair, is great in this scene, trembling and skeptical, but ultimately answering Holy Wayne’s question the way, it seems, everyone would. He can take her pain away, and so she steps into his arms.
We end as Nora takes up her job, again, as her interview approaches Question 121. Yes, she answered it, all three times she was asked. Yes is how anyone has ever answered it for her.
“In your opinion, is the Departed in a better place?”
The woman pauses, lets out a tear. “No,” she replies.
For the first time, maybe Nora’s loss is invisible. She could be, for better or worse, as much of a stranger as anyone else.
Margaret LaFleur lives, writes and watches TV in Minneapolis, MN. More of her writing and miscellaneous internet interests can be found on Twitter or at margaretlafleur.com.
