‘The Leftovers’ episode 9 review: A Laurie surprise within Kevin Garvey’s past

For a good 45 minutes or so into Sunday night’s “The Leftovers,” we were starting to wonder just what sort of show we were watching. Characters were actually happy for a change!

Then, we started to bear witness to Kevin Garvey slowly killing his relationship over time by giving into his old habits (smoking), not talking to his wife about everything, and then also putting down a deer. Eventually, this led to us meeting the woman Kevin cheated on Laurie with, who was connected to that same animal. Maybe that is why he is so haunted by this creature in particular.

So what was entertaining about watching him completely self-destruct? There is almost no good answer to this. We really wanted to like this episode more than did, largely because we can tell that the quality was here, and the show at least tried to give us more insight into who the Garvey family was before everything went south and the departure happened. We blame some of this on the “True Blood” finale being a letdown, and us being somewhat downtrodden because of that.

The one thing that did surprise us within the hour? Finding out that at one point, Laurie was pregnant and had yet to tell her husband about it.

We’ll classify this episode more as “valuable information,” and we wish that we would have had most of it sooner. We now understand more of Laurie’s guilt, why Kevin hates himself so much, and the isolation and regret Nora Durst has at the same time. Everything makes sense. But why wait until almost the end of the season to tell us these things, when it could have been valuable information sooner? This is more of a critique for this whole season, and not just an individual episode. Grade: B-.

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