If you’re reading this we hope you’re watching along with us. This Spoiler Dive contains spoilers (obviously) for ‘The Leftovers’ S03E08.

The Leftovers started airing April 16th on HBO.

This is it, the last ever episode of The Leftovers. Stay tuned for our Season Review. In the meantime if you’re still processing from the series finale, this is how I reacted to this surprisingly intimate and restrained conclusion.

Episode 8: The Book of Nora

We’re back with Nora and Matt as Nora has finally talked her way into being vaporized. She says her goodbyes to Matt who is dying of cancer and questioning what he believes in. Nora sits naked inside a sphere-like chamber that beings to fill with fluid. Just before her head goes under it looks like she begins to yell “Stop!” before we cut away.

We’re in Australia with the older Nora we saw at the end of the Season premiere who is apparently hiding away from the world. Kevin winds up on her doorstep not remembering anything of their relationship and invites her to a dance.

So many theories ran through my mind trying to uncover what was going on here. How come Kevin couldn’t remember? Did those hallucinations cause him to go mad? Was Nora in an alternate timeline where they never got together? But it was none of these. Just the same old timeline a good few years in the future putting wrinkles on their faces and greys in their hair.

Kevin was lying because he didn’t no where to begin since all this time had passed and wanted to erase that last bitter conversation they had together. Great way for the writers to pull the wool over our eyes however. Poor Kevin had been visiting Australia every year with Nora’s photo hoping that she might still be alive despite everyone telling him otherwise.

So, just the future. They still have pay phones in the future, even if it is the Outback. Speaking of pay phones, despite what happened two episodes ago, Laure is alive. She went scuba diving in Australia but didn’t hijack her equipment as suggested, even has a new baby, and now talks to Nora once a week.

After Kevin admits the truth, Nora tells Kevin what happened to her. We don’t cut away to see her experience, just her face as she tells the story. She speaks of going through with the machine to a timeline where everyone that vanished in the rapture actually stayed behind, while everyone else vanished (including Nora), leaving only 2% of the world behind. She finds her family but they’ve already moved on without her, and she was, in her words, a ghost. Nora tracks down the Swedish inventor and asks him to remake the machine so she can travel back again. But in the process so much time had passed she couldn’t face returning to Texas.

What a fitting end to this series. Did Nora actually travel through to the other side? As much as we’re dying for answers it doesn’t matter. Kevin believes her and takes Nora for who she is. As literally told in the show’s Season 2 theme song Let the Mystery Be, which comes back for the final time. Show creator Damon Lindelof has learned from the reaction to Lost, that giving away everything doesn’t always make the audience happy!

But if we go down that path of Nora lying, isn’t that such a tragic story? Too ashamed to confront Kevin she just hides in Australia running her sham love dove business with the local nun. She doesn’t even go to Matt’s funeral for crying out loud.

And in the end did any of that doomsday Kevin-as-Jesus stuff matter? At the end of the last episode “The Most Powerful Man in the World (and His Identical Twin Brother)”, Kevin learns that he shouldn’t have let Nora go. Perhaps it was always a story of how people come together in great times of distress, and how that might not actually fix things, that we can still feel alone when in love with another person, and how love can be so powerful, so devastating, it can drive us to do things any sane person would consider ridiculous. Food for thought.

Let the mystery be, folks.