History Characters / TheLeftovers

* DoesNotLikeShoes: PlayedForDrama, surprisingly. They left their shoes behind.

-->''Played By:''' Creator/LindseyDuncan

* PoisonousFriend: Seems to exist only to egg on all of Kevin's worst impulses.

* CoolOldGuy: Kevin Sr is a witty old fellow who loves his son. He is a muscular old man and a former police chief. He's still considered very dangerous at his age and even beats up a younger police officer.

** Swings back somewhat the other way by the time of Season 3. He's shown as being seriously dangerous and encouraging Kevin's ideas/delusions about his magical powers, which leads to danger for them both. Especially noticeable in "The Most Powerful Man in the World (and His Identical Twin Brother)", when he convinces Kevin to keep trying to drown himself, and even the ''dead'' Christopher Sunday thinks he's delusional.

* RageAgainstTheHeavens: A couple of times in Australia.

* DiesDifferentlyInTheAdaptation: In the book, Meg commits suicide after Laurie is unable to kill her during a Guilty Remnant campaign. In the series, Meg is killed via drone strike in Jarden.

* BadCopIncompetentCop: Is quite willing to abuse his power both in and out of uniform, and falls for the GR BatmanGambit that allows them to steal pictures of the Departed town wide as a set up to their future gambit of [[spoiler:creating ultra lifelike dolls of the Departed]]. That said, he's still ''far'' more competent than his main deputies, who are almost a stereotype of a backwoods, dim bulb cops, (one in a well meaning, likeable way, the other as just a straight up jerk) and does try to protect even people he doesn't like, such as the Guilty Remnant.

* LaserGuidedAmnesia: Has them regarding his blackouts, although sometimes afterwards he can recall brief flashes from them. It just adds onto his fears that he's losing his mind.

* MessiahCreep: He starts out as the Chief of Police in Mapleton, NY, but by season 3 he is considered by Matt as the new born Christ.

* UnreliableNarrator: Because of the gaps in his memory from his blackouts. There are all sorts of things around him and that he's doing which he's not consciously aware of, and it skews his perceptions.

After Wayne's compound is attacked by the government, Tom escapes and is given the task of body guarding Christine, one of Wayne many groupies/followers who Wayne slept with, and is now pregnant with Wayne's child. Months in isolation with little word from Wayne only increases Tom's doubts and questions about the man. This comes to a head [[spoiler:when he discovers another man looking after another one of Wayne's pregnant followers, who had been given the exact same spiel, nearly word for word, that Tom had. After Christine gives birth and then leaves him and the baby, Tom travels back to Mapleton and leaves the child on his father's door step. While there he encounters Laurie]].

* TheCobblersChildrenHaveNoShoes: Downplayed, but still a much straighter example than his sister Jill. He appears traumatised by his relationship to her biological father in Season 1 and then in Season 2, despite his mental vulnerability, Laurie unwisely convinces him to go undercover in the Guilty Remnant. This is a direct result of her job, too, as she's attempting to free as many Guilty Remnant members as possible. This leads to several extremely violent and terrifying experiences for Tom.

* DidntThinkThisThrough / ThanatosGambit: It's unclear which, but [[spoiler: she and the Guilty Remnant Extremists under her command are all killed mere days after her plan to invade Jarden, when the government launched a drone strike that destroyed the visitor's center they were occupying. It's not clear whether Meg was aware this was going to happen before hand and the entire plan was to martyr herself and her followers, or if she didn't expect such a sudden and final response.]]

* DisproportionateRetribution: It's implied she targeted Jarden not specifically for the symbolic purpose of striking at the one place everyone believed was "safe", but because she personally tried to find closure there regarding her mother's death by asking a local psychic what her last words were and being unsatisfied with his answer. What's more, it's strongly implied he was the real thing and his answer was true, it just wasn't profound enough to fill the hole inside of her. This prompted a petty grudge against the town for not living up to her expectations and fixing her problems that escalated to a full on terror a ttack.

After beginning a relationship with Kevin Garvey in the first season, season 2 sees selling her house for a large sum of money to people researching the Departure, and convincing Kevin and family to move to the town of Jarden in Texas, the only town in the world of its size or larger to not suffer a single departure, after Matt raves about the town. She uses most of the money she made from selling her house to buy a house in Jarden when her and Kevin's initial plan for a six month lease doesn't work out, because, as Jill points out, Nora desperately needs someplace that she can feel safe. Between events in Jarden, Kevin's growing instability, and Matt's problems, however, she is soon feeling very overwhelmed.

* NoPlaceForMeThere: How Nora feels about her post-Departure life for long swathes of the series due to her grief. However, she realises that while this is true for her in her world, [[spoiler:it's also still true for her in the world where her children survive, because ''they'' are the lucky ones there, just as she is unlucky in her world. This leads her to return home, although she still stays in Australia and tries to avoid Kevin.]]

* DidTheyOrDidnTThey: the show stays a littel ambiguous whether she may have slept with Kevin during one of his blackouts. Her response to Jill sound like a big "F... you!", but it still could be a SarcasticConfession ...

* StacysMom: She's implied to have a crush on Kevin, and Jill even asks is she slept with him during one of her more abrasive moments.

* CaptainSmoothAndSergeantRough: She essentially plays a version of this with Kevin, where she lets him be the rough, in your face enforcer, and then she smooths things over.

* BackForTheDead: Absent in season 2 since Kevin moved to Miracle, only to show up in season 3 and [[spoiler:get shot by Tom when he tries to kill Kevin for betraying him, since Kevin told him that he was crazy]].

* RedOniBlueOni: To John. She's much calmer and level headed than him, but it's also taken to extremes in that his anger issues push her away from him. She's also revealed in Season 3 to have coped much better with Evie's death, that even Nora marvels at her poise.

* WomenAreWiser: An interpretation of her behaviour.

* ApologeticAttacker: To the other Kevin as she drowns him. In her defence, she thinks he'll come back. He doesn't.

* DisproportionateRetribution: It's implied she targetted Jarden not specifically for the symbolic purpose of striking at the one place everyone believed was "safe", but because she personally tried to find closure there regarding her mother's death by asking a local psychic what her last words were and being unsatisfied with his answer. What's more, it's strongly implied he was the real thing and his answer was true, it just wasn't profound enough to fill the hole inside of her. This prompted a petty grudge against the town for not living up to her expectations and fixing her problems that escalated to a full on terror attack.

* IllBoy: "The Garveys At Their Best" shows that he has suffered from an unspecified malady since he was a child, (implied but not outright stated to be cancer) and has to be checked at least every few years to make sure that it's still under control. It eventually comes back in Season 3 and he knows it'll be fatal.

* TheAlcoholic: Functional, but he still drinks more than he ought to.

* TheLostLenore: How her parents and brother respond about her when she's missing. It gets brutally subverted when she returns with no compassion for them.

* BadassBeard: In season 3, he's gone from stubble to a full beard, which along with joining the Miracle police force shows he's really getting himself back on track.

* InTheBlood: His father hears voices, and Garvey's experiences have him questioning whether or not he's losing it, too. However, ultimately partially subverted, because while both Kevins share mystical powers, Kevin Jnr's appear to be much stronger. Lampshaded by Kevin Snr in Season 3.

->'''Played By:''' Annie Q.

->'''Played By:''' Emily Meade

->'''Played By:''' Amanda Warren

->'''Played By:''' Max Carver & Charlie Carver

->'''Played By:''' Kevin Carroll

-->'''Played By:''' Jovan Adepo

-->'''Played By:''' Jasmin Savoy Brown

-->''Played By:''' Lindsey Duncan