So if “The Leftovers” is going to have a twist, if we have any chance at surprising people at all, we really have to hide it but we have to make it fair. There are things in the premiere like the girls driving in silence. You see them goofing around and listening to music and kind of busting the balls of the guy who’s gathering water. And then they get in their car and they’re driving silently and stone-faced. And there are little moments, like when they’re singing the Miracle song with some sense of cynicism, and the oddness of the knock-knock joke, and obviously the gift that Evie gives to her father. We’re going to revisit that in the finale.
We had to set it up in the premiere and then just let it go and just hope that nobody figured it out, because if one person went on Twitter and said. “Those girls driving in the car without speaking reminded me of something,” the whole second season of the show [goes down]. By the time we revealed it at the end of episode nine, there would have been a big collective “Duh,” versus hopefully a collective gasp. My hope is that when the door of that Airstream opens up at the end of episode nine, the audience goes, “The writers knew. Of course they knew. It was all there.”