Recap: The Leftovers 2.9 "Ten Thirteen"
The best part about a season of television coming to an end is things start to come full circle. I’ve been wondering all season what Meg was up to and now we finally have some answers.
We know Meg is planning something big for the October 14th anniversary, much like the end of last season when she and Laurie set out the body replicas of the departed in the leftovers' homes. We also find out she has Evie and her two friends locked up in a barn on the Guilty Remnant base in Texas. What’s curious – and alarming, frankly – is Tommy broke open the trailer and could’ve set them free but they weren’t interested. They were dressed in all white and scribbling on paper. This is both good and bad: Good because we know there wasn’t an isolated departure, which we were already pretty sure of; also good because Kevin won’t get charged with murdering or kidnapping the girls due to his palm print on the car. Bad because Evie is now wrapped up in whatever chaos Meg is about to inflict on Jarden to make them feel the way the rest of the world does.
It’s interesting that Meg feels it’s her responsibility to make people remember, considering she didn’t actually lose anyone to the departure. She doesn’t know what it’s like to have a loved one vanish, like the rest of the world does; she knows what happened to her mother who died on October 13th.
Before Meg joined the GR back in season 1, she had visited Jarden for a reading from Isaac, hoping to learn what her mother wanted to tell her before Meg excused herself for a little pick-me-up, only to return to her mother dead on the floor of the restaurant. Isaac told Meg the answer couldn’t fix the hole inside of her, but she insisted on knowing anyway. We also learned Meg was abandoned twice by men in her life: her father died when she was young, and her stepfather walked out on the family. It makes sense that she’d feel lonely and in search of connection, like the GR. But, what did Isaac tell Meg to send her over the edge?
Just before leaving Jarden, Meg meets Evie. As Evie walks away from her, she says to Meg, “Sorry you didn’t find what you were looking for, no one ever does.” Obviously, Evie isn’t buying into the spectacle her town was turning into and seemed to feel the idea of moving on was ridiculous, so she’d be easy pickings for the GR.
During their brief conversation, Meg tells Evie a joke, which she later repeats to her father right before she disappears. Now, the timeline is off a little here. If Meg was visiting Jarden while she was with her fiance, that means she told Evie the joke about a year before she and her friends vanished, which doesn’t line up with when she told her father the joke. Of course, she could’ve told him the joke at any time, so if she didn’t repeat it until right before disappearing, were she and Meg in contact? Of course they were. Here’s how we know:
Remember back in the beginning of the season when John was hearing a cricket noise in the house and it was driving him crazy? In this episode, we hear Meg’s phone ring while she’s in the car with Tommy and her ringtone is the sound of crickets chirping. Assuming Evie and Meg were in contact this whole time, it’s reasonable to imagine that Evie had the same ringtone as Meg, so she would know when she was calling her. When Evie disappeared, her phone was locked in the car and we haven’t heard the crickets in the house since.
Based on the violence and sheer coldness Meg has these days, I feel pretty sure Jarden’s population of 9,261 is about to change.