Just as you thought you’d stuffed yourself with all the Thanksgiving leftovers you could handle, Damon Lindelof served up one more shocking helping. Bad jokes aside (or should I say “pointless” jokes), Sunday night’s penultimate episode of The Leftovers second season explained one of the biggest mysteries with a twist.

In “Ten Thirteen” (spoiler alert) we finally found out what happened to Evie and her two friends. As I predicted a few weeks ago, the girls planned their own disappearance, but the final reveal was entirely unexpected – they joined the Guilty Remnant! It goes to show that Lindelof, who co-wrote the episode with Monica Beletsky, is well aware that obsessive fans will pick up on tiny breadcrumbs of clues, but still knows how to delightfully surprise with a twist. That twist was pulled off so well by connecting Evie to the very last person expected, someone who has quickly become the most essential and dangerous element to this season’s impending climax.

Meg, Liv Tyler’s Guilty Remnant member-turned-leader of the Mapleton division, only appeared briefly in Episode 3 this season when she sexually assaulted Tom (Chris Zylka). That episode introduced us to the new Meg, a merciless leader who begins making exceptions to the rules of the GR (breaking her vow of silence, for one) to bring chaos. In Sunday’s episode, the real chaos is only beginning to brew. Like last season’s penultimate episode, this week we flashed back to the day before the Departure on October 13, 2011. Meg has lunch with her mother, but in Meg’s repeated trips to the bathroom to snort cocaine, it’s clear she was struggling her upcoming marriage long before the Departure. (Remember, she left her husband to join the GR.) Even worse than losing someone on Oct. 14 for unknown reasons, Meg’s mother dies right in front of her at the restaurant on the 13th.

Refusing to give explanations or answer questions, “Ten Thirteen” leaves us in the dark as much of the series does, but it does start connecting dots. We flash forward to 2013 when Meg and her husband take a road trip to Jarden, Texas. (In case you’re lost, this is roughly two years after the Departure, before Meg joined the GR and long before the Garveys moved to Jarden.) Here, Meg visits Isaac the psychic to find out what her mother wanted to tell her before she died.

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We never learn what it was, but those words end up shaping who Megan becomes. As she sits crying on a bench in Jarden, Meg meets the next person who’s going to change her worldview and will eventually help her to reawaken others’. Evie approaches Meg trying to comfort her. But this isn’t the buoyant Evie we met when the season began. this is the Evie who’s discontent and frustrated with her town’s faith. It’s in this small meeting that the seeds to the major event Jarden unknowing faces were planted. Here we learn the origin of the broken pencil Knock Knock joke Evie told her dad, revealing the “pointlessness” that defines both women’s’ perspectives of the world. We also find out the reason behind the cricket sound in the Murphy’s home. As one redditor highlighted, Meg’s phone ring tone is a cricket noise, perhaps revealing that Evie had a similar phone she used to contact Meg before she faked the disappearance.

We now know Meg and Evie are planning something big, something that will “change everything” as one GR member scribbled on a notepad. Evie and her friends have long-felt a cynicism towards their town, and as Lindelof told Variety of the episode, “the girls were really angry about the exceptionalism” Jarden touts in being a sacred, safe place. They’re desperate to wake up their friends and family, just as Meg’s mission is to serve as a living reminder of what happened. But Meg has been operating on a much more drastic and violent level than Evie. They only disappeared, but she traumatized a school bus full of children with a fake grenade and ordered her followers to stone a man to death. What could this big event be?

Evie and her friends will kill themselves

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This seems drastic enough to suit Meg’s M.O. but possibly too drastic to expect from the girls. Originally I thought just faking their disappearance would be enough to shake things up in Jarden, as it has so far. But if the girls return safe and sound, Jarden would continue to believe they are spared and their faith in safety would continue unharmed. That was just the first step to their plan, and the real horror is obviously on the way. Killing themselves would certainly make a lasting mark on the town, proving that no one, not even three girls born in Jarden, are spared. The concept of death and loss outside of the Departure itself is also something I can see as Meg’s philosophy. She lost her mother to an actual death the day before the Departure and as Isaac said, the entire world forgot her tragedy the very next day. Perhaps Meg’s pain doesn’t come from the same place the rest of the GR’s does. While they are reminders to the belief that the world has ended and that nothing matters, Meg might be fighting to remind us of the pain that existing before that end, the same suffering that led her to cope with drugs, the same pain that was ignored on October 14th. Her mission to wake people up might be to remind them of the true sorrows of loss, the tangible human forms of suffering that the Departure took with it. If the Murphys’ watch their daughter take her life, it will not only force them to experience the loss they were previously spared from, but a loss much deeper and real. But how will they do it?

The girls will hang themselves

The most popular reddit theory so far is that the girls will kill themselves in the most exhibitionist way: a public hanging. There could be some clues in Episode 8 that my have foreshadow this. When Kevin was crossing the Jarden bridge to get little Patti to the well, the man who stopped him had tied multiple nooses off the bridge. Meg also mentioned the bridge when talking to Matt in this week’s episode, alluding to how it separates the town from the people waiting to get in. If the girls did want to send a message to those inside and outside the town, the bridge would be an ideal spot. Looking at history, public executions were events that drew large crowds and sent a strong message to onlookers. Such a suicide would force the people of Jarden to finally reckon with loss, while make those fighting to get inside question the town’s sacredness. But then again…

Who knows!

Lindelof loves teasing fans and leading them astray with insignificant clues. He surprised us with this episode’s twist and will likely take the show somewhere next week that no one could have guessed. Perhaps Kevin will redeem himself with the Murphy’s and save the day. Maybe the guy in the tower will become relevant. Perhaps Mary will wake up and give birth to a baby boy. Or maybe this season will end in more obscurity, giving us answers in questions like the philosophical Jeopardy Lindelof’s show continues to be.

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