The Leftovers Releases Timely Trailer for Season 3

Normalcy and anarchy clash in the haunting new trailer for The Leftovers season 3. Frankly, April 16 can’t get here soon enough.

Every piece of pop culture these days, from Colony to The Lego Batman Movie, seems designed to mirror our present moment. Inspirational speeches about courage and unity that might once have come across as corny make you want to applaud. Even the most cartoonish supervillain can strike a nerve.

For The Leftovers, real-world parallels were inevitable. It is, after all, a show about people trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. Even in 2014, when the show premiered, it felt painfully relevant, with the Sudden Departure providing a ready allegory for virtually any mass tragedy or disaster. Then, it was a reflection, commenting on past events. Now, it’s a warning, prophesying future doom.

A new trailer for season 3 debuted Friday, and it continues to amp up the foreshadowing. You can check it out below:

We’ve known for a long time that the final season would bring Justin Theroux’s Kevin Garvey to Australia. We now know he won’t be going alone: Nora Durst (Carrie Coon), his girlfriend and a fellow Departure survivor struggling to move on, will accompany him. The new trailer shows the pair boarding an airplane to Melbourne as a flight attendant blithely recites instructions.

Lest you get too comfortable, though, other images are spliced throughout: people dressed like Puritans standing in front of a wooden church; a car drenched in rain; a man on fire. And if you listen to the voiceover, it takes on an unsettling tone, referencing “worldwide flooding” and urging passengers to please “keep your seat belt fastened, as everything you know and love will soon be gone.”

Only The Leftovers could turn the “fasten seat belts” chime into a chilling omen.

So, what does this tell us? Not much, aside from the hint that the impending event is a flood, no doubt an allusion to the Bible (though it should be noted that flood myths are common across cultures). Like the show itself, the trailer focuses less on plot than mood. By juxtaposing images of mayhem with the mundane, almost sterile scene of an airport, it disorients us, hinting at the horror that lurks beneath the surface of everyday life.

The Lost echoes also grow louder. That series’ final season began on an airplane, though it was leaving Australia, and by then, Jack had gotten rid of his beard. We’re going to assume that The Leftovers won’t end with the characters in a purgatorial alternate universe; it already went the afterlife route in season 2. But anything can happen, and that’s part of the fun.

The Leftovers returns April 16 on HBO.

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