The Series
- As a whole, the sheer terror of losing a loved one to a completely incomprehensible phenomenon would be enough to give anyone a lot of sleepless nights.
The Pilot
- The woman Garvey meets, who is first featured on the day the disappearances happen, is shown losing her infant son almost literally between one moment and the next, and her breakdown as she slowly realizes her son is gone is painful to watch.
- Garvey himself is strongly hinted to have lost someone during or immediately after having sex. It's not surprising he "went crazy" immediately after.
- The Garveys At Their Best confirms this.
Penguin One, Us Zero
- When we first saw Wayne in the pilot, he was at best a generic cult leader. Then came this episode, where he took a high-dive into the crazy end of the pool and never came back up. He kisses a dead guy, gets uncomfortably close to Tom, takes his shirt (because he arrived shirtless for some reason), and can't manage to hug Christine without giving Tom a creepy stare.
Gladys
- In the opening scene, Gladys is brutally stoned to death while begging for mercy.
Solace For Tired Feet
- Jill and her friends play a game of chicken to see how long they can each stay inside an abandoned refrigerator in the woods. Jill breaks the record, but gets locked in when the handle breaks off. Terrifying on its own, but it's revealed that the game started on October 14th, when a teenager was forced into the fridge and never came out.
The Garveys At Their Best
- Laurie having her baby disappear while in-utero. While she was watching on ultrasound.
- Indeed, the entire last few minutes as you realize what's about to happen. Perhaps most stunningly, when Nora's last words to her children areto yell at them and make them cry for not eating properly, going to grab a towel...and when she turns around, they and her husband, are gone.
- Dialed up to eleven for Laurie when in season 3's "Certified," in a flashback, departed baby Sam's mother (one of Laurie's patients when she was a psychiatrist) posits that all the departed could just as suddenly "come back," presumably reappearing in the very spot where they disappeared. Laurie may not have thought about it before that, but once she does it pushes her over the edge and she attempts suicide before opting instead for the symbolic death of subsuming herself in a cult.
The Prodigal Son Returns
- The Guilty Remnant's entire plan: to place realistic life-size dolls of the Departed into the homes of those who lost family members. Nora walks downstairs to find dolls of her husband and children right at the table where they vanished and the agony of her pain thrown right back in her face is echoed through the entire town.
- Of course, that's matched by what happens to the GR after that stunt...
Axis Mundi
- The opening sequence with the pregnant cavewoman. She leaves the cave, goes into labour and gives birth - just as the cave is sealed off in a rockfall, leaving her alone. A few days later she saves the baby from being bitten by a snake but gets bitten herself, and some time later dies in agony. Fortunately the baby is still alive when another woman finds the two, but it ain't a nice way to begin season two.
I Live Here Now
- The reaction of John and Erika to realize that Evie faked her Departure to join the Guilty Remnant and Evie's cold dismissal of her own mother on the bridge. You can see the stunned looks of them unable to understand why their daughter would do this and realizing it would have been so much better if she had vanished.
- The moment the townspeople of Jared, this place promoted as a "safe haven" for the troubles of the world suddenly realize the hundreds of people camped out on their doorstep are actually The Guilty Remnant who proceed to doff their clothes into white and march into the town to take it over, ruining what little illusion of safety and faith the town had.
