Why yes, you can peek up Justin Theroux’s nose in the surprisingly informative final trailer for The Leftovers‘ third (and also final) season. You also peek at a bunch of other things: namely, people clambering to make existential sense of the fact that the world may be ending in 13 days (on the seventh anniversary of the first disappearance of 2% of the world’s population — the inexplicable event around which the series is based).
The two-minute trailer comes after the release of a series of teasers, the last of which featured an Australian flight attendant’s voiceover, which began in standard, formal pre-flight talk, then digressed into the small side topic of…the world experiencing “worldwide flooding” and thereby ending. “Please be sure to keep your seatbelt fastened, as everything you know and love will soon be gone,” etc. This season largely takes place in Australia, where it appears some of the series’ protagonists have gone to experience the end of days…or the end of the series…or whatever this season of the highly unpredictable series actually has in store.
The end times could, also, just be overhyped superstition: at the beginning of the trailer, the resilient priest, Matt Jamison, played by Christopher Eccleston, tells a congregation: “What will happen on October 14, just a couple of weeks from now? Probably nothing. But if something does happen on October 14, you’ve come to the right place.” This makes the whole thing sound like a Y2K situation, whose sole outcome will be people regretting having bought so many canned peas. But then Kevin Garvey’s (Justin Theroux) father — who’s either mentally ill or just very attuned to the weird goings-on in the world — proclaims that “the rains will come, and with them a great flood,” after which Abba wonders, “Where are those happy days/they seem so hard to find.”
And then the rest of the trailer is an exhilarating Abba-soundtracked ride through pre-apocalypse. Recently-turned-cult-leader Meg Abbott (Liv Tyler) and cult-convert Evangeline Murphy (Jasmin Savoy Brown) are still in cahoots; Laurie Garvey (Amy Brenneman) is on a boat; frenemies Erika Murphy (Regina King) and Nora Durst (Carrie Coon) bounce on a trampoline together; Kevin Garvey runs frantically through assorted settings and gets some kind of presumably supernaturally pivotal baptism — his second in just one trailer, following a previous baptism by Michael Murphy (Jovan Adepo); the priest bludgeons someone with a baseball bat; and Nora — who lost her whole family in the first round of departures — gets a very strange phone call asking if she’d like to see the again.
Watch:
There’s also a poster:
As the very serious image of Justin Theroux as a ripped angel indicates, the series will return to HBO on April 16.