Leftovers ‘Book of Nora’ gripping, gorgeous finale

8 episodes of ‘Funderdome’ leaked

The ‘Book of Nora’ ended a stunning eightepisode final season of ‘The Leftovers’ with a gripping, gorgeous finale.

One moment from the series finale of “Lost” packed so much power that it nearly threw me across the room. Sawyer and Juliet encountered each other in front of a vending machine, and suddenly they remembered each other, and the great love and potent chemistry they shared exploded between them.

The best and most famous episode of “Lost” is “The Constant,” which is about different man and woman separated by time and space and dimensions, but who promise to find each other, one day. They won’t give up, no matter what.

What if you took those kinds of moments and made an episode of television that was 72 minutes long, one that was the capstone to an exceptional saga? What if that episode provided a moving, heart-wrenching, sincere and romantic coda to a story about of redemption, loss, separation, sin, connection and the kind of love that cannot be denied or eradicated — i.e., the themes that Damon Lindelof has always been fascinated by? You would get “The Book of Nora,” which is easily one of the greatest TV finales of all time.

Many people worked on “The Leftovers,” of course. The show’s writers outdid themselves again this season. The drama’s directors, especially executive producer Mimi Leder, who helmed the series finale, imbued its wild poetry with endless amounts of compassion, craft and insight. Hundreds of crew members made every set and location and costume look exactly right, and the music and soundtrack were always beyond perfect. Of course, every member of the cast knocked it out of the park, every chance they got. The credited writers of the series finale are executive producers Tom Spezialy, Tom Perrotta (who wrote the book the whole thing is based on), and Lindelof, and all of them deserve to attend many Australian parties (or weddings).

But this finale was just so Lindelofian — the pure, magical version of that. Shorn of the need to service a mythology, “The Leftovers” entered the land of myth, and yet it stayed grounded in the messiness of specific human beings and transmitted an impish sense of humor. It evoked, in every way that matters, a bittersweet and lovely mixture of pain and wonder. It’s hard to wrap up any TV program, and it’s incomparably harder to do so with one of that series’ best episodes. The list of shows that have done that is short, and “The Leftovers” surely deserves to be on it.

Much of the finale, for some reason, visually recalled for me “The Little Prince”: Maybe it was Nora’s leather jacket and all those stars and the earnestness at the core of both stories, which are otherworldly but contain lessons about surviving this broken world. (“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”)

Once again, because “The Leftovers” never asked me to cry, it made me cry. A lot. Very few shows can go to these emotional wells and not give in to the temptation to manipulate viewers in a crass, craven way that smacks of shortcuts and fear and compromise.

None of that happened here. This season was an eight-day — well, eight-episode — wonder. And to cap it off, there wasn’t a false note in “The Book of Nora.” The drama could be sludgy and too often wallowed in self-pity when it started, but it evolved so weirdly and wonderfully, and there was so much lightness in the series finale. Like its core couple, who had been through so much, it danced.

Every frame exuded truth — in pursuit of a story that may have been false. But honestly, when those pigeons landed, did you care? No, you did not. If you have a pulse, the final Kevin-Nora scene — and the return of the pigeons — slayed you. But is it true? Did Nora really enter an alternate dimension, track down her family, come back, and settle down in the middle of nowhere in Australia?

Well, the last part is verifiable: That’s where Kevin found her, living alone and under a fake name. He told her a false story, one designed to erase or at least reduce the enormous amount of turmoil they’d both experienced since they talked in that hallway in Mapleton, New York.

It was a good story, and Kevin almost got Nora to believe it. He knew that, despite her history of giving no quarters to liars, some part of her wanted to believe him. Wouldn’t it be easier? But both the audience and Nora had questions, undoubtedly.

Maybe Kevin had gotten brain damage on that last trip to the other side. It’s quite possible the experiences of the last decade or two damaged his memory. His episodes of mental illness could have taken a turn; perhaps a survival-driven memory wipe had taken place.

We know from watching this series, and from living this life, that just about anything is possible, and for people in extreme circumstances, the extreme is always plausible. This has always been a story about competing stories, and Kevin’s checked out. Potentially.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter that he was lying. Nora’s story easily bested his compelling tale of heroic persistence (a story in which, as predicted, Kevin became proactive instead of merely reactive). She not only spun a better yarn than he did, she won the three-season competition for the very best story.

The Dark Overlord is back: The hacker who previously leaked almost the entire 5th season of Netflix’s “Orange Is the New Black” targeted ABC with a new leak Sunday night, apparently releasing eight episodes of the network’s still-unaired show “Steve Harvey’s Funderdome” on The Pirate Bay.

“Time to play another round,” the hacker wrote in a note accompanying the release. “We’re following through on our threats as we always do.” The Dark Overlord first threatened to target Disney-owned ABC this past Friday.

“If you prefer your meat bloody, we’re serving it bloody as can be,” the note continued. “We’re bringing another piece from from the world of unaired mainstream media content.”

“Steve Harvey’s Funderdome” is scheduled to premiere on ABC on June 11. The show, which is the result of a cooperation between Harvey and Mark Burnett, has two entrepreneurs pitching their ideas to a studio audience. Said audience gets to vote on the winner, who then receives seed funding for their business.

Variety wasn’t immediately able to verify the authenticity of the leak. However, details on The Pirate Bay show that the upload consisted of a total of eight video files, with names suggesting that the files are the first eight episodes of the show. (RTRS)