[Mike F]

Originally Posted by TheAlpineOracle

Last night's episode completely lost me. I know this show is out there, but that episode just left more questions than answers. Not sure how they are going to end this so quickly. I fear we are going to get no resolution, as you suggest above, the disappearance will just be left unexplained with everyone just moving on.

I'm not sure if this is what you meant by "lost me", but I always end up understanding way more about an episode after reading Alan Sepinall's recaps. Here's his recap for last night.

Spoiler!

None of it makes much sense, but it’s not supposed to, and Kevin is constantly noting the absurdity of it all. Whether he’s actually traveled beyond the veil of death or has retreated inside his own fragile mind while his body tries to heal the latest injury he’s inflicted upon it, the world he finds himself in is one shaped by his own thoughts and personality, down to the way all the other people he once knew in life now swear exactly like he does.

....

these trips have never really been about saving the world. They’ve been about saving Kevin Garvey. And this was in many ways his most desperate — and thus most powerful — assassination mission yet, because the problem is wholly internal this time: Kevin no longer knows what he wants to do, or be, and he has just destroyed things with the woman he has realized he both dearly loves and is terrified by. Having Patti’s voice in his head was either a paranormal problem over which he had no control, or (if Laurie was right about it being a psychotic break) something that still felt like a paranormal episode to him. And the karaoke trip was just the result of a misunderstanding with John over Kevin’s role in Evie’s disappearance, even if the song seemed to convince him — temporarily, it turned out — that he wanted to be alive and with his family and friends. Here, though, his suicidal depression is so profound and inescapable that he goes into the water, repeatedly, half out of the hope that he may not come up. (It’s another thing he and his ex-wife have in common.) Michael can see that this is what’s motivating him, even if he’s too shy and polite to say it aloud, and Prime Minister Christopher Sunday also seems to know that he didn’t come to this place for the song, the shoes, or any other reason.

And who is there to save Kevin from his own misery and confusion? Why, it’s the bane of his existence, Patti Levin, there to return the very difficult favor he did by drowning her in a well in “International Assassin.” Once again, Patti — even this afterlife caricature of her — seems initially monstrous, as she tries to manipulate President Kevin into launching a nuclear missile strike that will bring about the end of their world. And once again, Patti’s motivations prove to be more complex and less evil than that. Yes, she is destroying this world, but she’s doing it for Kevin, who needs to stop having it as his escape hatch for every time things are difficult for him back in his own. He confessed to Laurie in “Certified” that he felt more alive as an assassin — or, here, as Commander-in-Chief — than he has in a long time as a small-town police chief. His romantic relationships have never quite worked out, he’s never been entirely committed to parenthood (Nora giving up custody of Lily was a relief to him) as anything but a way to ignore his other problems, and the post-Departure world makes no sense to him. Wouldn’t it just be easier to disappear into Kevin Harvey’s tailored suits once and for all? It could be, but Patti — with some assists from God(*) — won’t let him do it. She not only nukes this world so Kevin can’t come back, but forces him to read aloud from a romance novel he’s written (at least one of the afterlife Kevins has written it, anyway) that forces him to confront his own cowardice and self-destructive behavior with Nora, and to realize that continually running away from his life has only made everything worse for him and the people he only truly realizes he cares about when they’re out of reach. They haven’t Departed — nor has he, since Assassin Land, if it exists outside Kevin’s head, is about more traditional concepts of life and death — but he can somehow only truly see them when they’ve faded out like one of those pictures in the opening credits