Headscratchers / The Leftovers

• When Nora's badge is missing at the conference she is not really trying hard to get it back. There is a PA system you hear in the episode - why don't the event organizers make an announcement about a missing badge? Even if the person with the wrong badge doesn't hand it over, everyone else at the conference would be on the lookout. Why not inform hotel security someone has her badge? If the hotel is that security conscious, they must have a security video of the mirror-breaking incident - does the person who broke the mirror look like Nora?
  • The convention organizers are pretty unorganized and unprofessional. The lady Nora talks to seems to have no system in place to deal with the issue nor the inclination to worry about it. As far as hotel security, they're not going to start enforcing the convention's sign-up process. They're only concerned with people trashing the hotel, not sneaking into panels they didn't properly register for.
  • As a person who's run conferences and conventions: a conference badge is not a legal ID or a restricted document by any means, and realistically there's not much stopping someone from taking the wrong one (intentionally or by mistake). There is no reason at all to make a fuss about the badge being missing or to try to get it back. Hotel security is the one who dropped the ball by assuming the person with the "Nora Durst" badge was thus automatically and infallibly "Nora Durst."
• The Guilty Remnant recruit people by stalking them until they break down and join. Before breaking down, their targets scream at them and attack them in attempts to drive them away, to no avail. Can't their targets gets restraining orders against them at the very least? Even Chief Garvey seems powerless to prevent them from persecuting Nora.
  • It would have to be a blanket order against any member of the cult, because you know they'd just rotate members and abuse every loophole they could find to keep up their activities. That's the problem with these people, they're too determined to be a nuisance to stop them short of arresting and/or killing them all. Plus they seem to be very well funded.
    • It definitely would be against the cult as a whole. I'm no lawyer but I would have to assume that American law accounts for harassment by organizations.
  • The in-show explanation seems to be that the members always stay a certain distance away from their targets, either just off their property or across the street, but far enough to where they aren't doing anything technically illegal. Whether or not this would hold water in regards to real life law, I'm not sure, but as far as I can tell that's the explanation the show's going with.
• How did Kevin and Nora not know about each other beforehand? Kevin obviously is very close to Matt's family, knew him well enough to give the toast at his father's party, knew his wife. He must have known Matt has a sister. Yeah, it's possible he never knew the sister's name, but you would think Kevin would have known his friend Matt's sister was the Nora who lost her whole family.
  • Kevin might have known that Matt had a sister, but didn't know anything about her. She might not have really come up much in conversation. I've attended parties for friends who don't know much about my sibling, even though I have a pretty tight family.
  • Also; Matt and Nora's sibling relationship has never been a stable one. Matt resented having a younger sibling as a child due to him wanting all his parents attention and this competitiveness is something that carries over in various ways to his adulthood. His tendencies towards self-righteousness also seems to have been stumbling block in their relationship for a longtime. They see each other semi-frequently but they don't have the same circle of friends and don't go to the same events together due in part to this rift.
• Why didn't Matt and Kevin not clean up the cabin after Patti's death? It seems that all they did was dispose of the body, then clean themselves up and leave.
  • The cabin doesn't exactly seem to be well-traveled. In all likelihood it's abandoned and they may have felt a top-down scrub wouldn't be worth the effort. Anyone who shows up there is just going to find a dried puddle of blood if they show up soon.
  • Kevin has a death wish and subconsciously wants to be caught so he doesn't put as much effort in scrubbing the crime scene of evidence as he should. Matt is just going along with what Kevin says because he has no experience in crime scenes and Kevin does. Matt in that moment is way over his head and isn't going to make suggestions of how to cover up Patti's death properly.
• Why did so many people of Mapleton leave their homes open to invasion after the first time the GR broke in? The Garveys got a security system. Did the rest of the town trust that the hated local cult wouldn't try another stunt?
  • Maybe not all of them can afford it. And even for the ones that can, the GR would be likely to scope out vulnerabilities and plan accordingly.
• What was the Guilty Remnant's ideology? On the one hand, they disrupted memorials for the departed, holding signs that say "Don't Waste Your Breath." This suggests they consider mourning for the departed to be a waste of time. But at the same time, they refused to allow people to move on by pulling stunts like dressing mannequins in the departed people's clothes and putting them in their families' homes. So which is it? Did they want people to forget or didn't they? Their actions seemed contradictory.
  • They believe that trying to move past the trauma and grief of the departure is wrong. They believe that living in constant reminder of the departure is the only thing that matters. When the guilty remnant tell people to not waste their breath they are telling them that trying to move on with their lives and return to some degree of normalcy is impossible and they shouldn't try. When they dress up the mannequins and put them in people's houses they are doing this to remind people of the lose of their loved ones and are suggesting their absence will never go away. Both acts are intended to reignite feelings of grief and despair which the cult believes everyone should feel all the time. Essentially; the guilty remnant cultists are analogous to the sort of people in real life who will judge people for wanting to date again after a spouse or partner has died tragically because they think that person should grieve that loss forever and wanting a life after tragedy is something shameful or disrespectful.