Damon Lindelof on How THE LEFTOVERS Season 3 Will Be “Something Else Entirely”
I finally got caught up with Damon Lindelof’s HBO series The Leftovers and was blown away by what he has created. This is unlike any show I’ve ever seen before, and it is quite an emotional roller coaster. The Leftovers is a very heavy series, but one that I recommend watching if you haven’t already.
HBO recently announced that The Leftovers will have a third season, and I can’t even imagine what it will bring. In a recent interview with /Film, Lindelof talks about the third season. When asked about the season two finale, he explained that he never thought of it as a potential ending and how he sees these seasons:
“I’ll be honest with you, that idea — this could be the end — was never articulated. I think we want to design every season of The Leftovers as a novel, as opposed to a piece in a trilogy. After the first season ended, I really felt like that was it. I thought, Okay, we’ve now adapted Tom’s novel, and we ended it the exact same way Tom’s novel did. I kind of get the sense that Nora is there, holding the baby in her arms, and Laurie is probably going to leave the Guilty Remnant, even if that’s not definitive, and, at the very least, she’s reunited with Tom, and Kevin has saved Jill’s life. Kevin and Jill are all there, smiling, staring at Nora and the baby, and I could extrapolate what happens next, and I was cool with that being the ending. All these characters were in turmoil when I first met them, but now they’ve found each other.”
The third season of The Leftovers will be its last, and there’s a lot of pressure for Lindelof to give fans something amazing. The writer talks about the high expectations, and why he wanted a third season:
“When the finale aired I started getting even positive reviews saying, ‘I don’t want there to be anymore.’ I thought, Oh, shit, but I kind of do want there to be one more season. I have to look under the hood of what they’re saying and translate it and accept it at its most base ideology: you’re going to undo this season by doing a season that’s not as good. It’s sort of, like, why push your luck? That’s not the way I look at it. Am I still compelled to tell stories in this world about these people? Yes, and that’s why it was important when HBO called and said they wanted to pick up the show for a third season, I said, ‘We should also announce this is going to be the last season.’ HBO was like, ‘Let’s keep it open. We don’t have to do that.’ I said, ‘I think it’s important that we do. The critical community — and that’s the voice of the audience I keep hearing, because I’m not on Twitter or in people’s living rooms — has done a good job voicing what the audience is thinking. If the critical audience is thinking season two is enough, then if we’re going to do more, we’re not going to do much more.’”
Lindelof is just starting the development process of Season 3, so there aren’t many details he can share one what the story will entail, but he does talk about how he’s approaching it:
“The big thing we gotta figure out for season three is: Where are we going to end it? What’s the last episode of this series going to be? We’ll design the entire season basically building up to that moment. I think there was a very purposeful circularity between seasons one and two, with the ‘wherever you go, there you are’ theme of it all. We decided to end the second season very similar to the first season. The Garveys felt like they could pickup and go to this place the Departure didn’t happen, but lo and behold, the same exact thing happened. The only safe place is the place you’re surrounded by the people you love. We can’t do that again, and not just because the audience is expecting it, but because we were telling a story about geography in season two, while season three is going to be something else entirely.”
I’m curious to see how the story of these characters comes to a conclusion. I’m also interested to know how he will once again revamp the series into something else. After seeing what he’s done with the first two seasons, I’m excited for what he does with the third.