'The Leftovers' Series Finale Won't Have Any Dangling Threads Or Spinoff Possibilities

The Leftovers third season is a continuation of everything the second season got right. Co-creators Damon Lindelof and Tom Perotta once again take their drama into new, unexpected, and even stranger territory. Right from the very start of the final season, it feels like anything goes. There's a great, almost free-wheeling sensibility to this season, despite how dense and full each episode is. Here's a final season that doesn't waste any time.

It won't end with any "to be continued" silliness either, at least according to Lindelof. Below, read what he had to say about The Leftovers series finale.

The family at the heart of The Leftovers continues their search for answers this season. The questions aren't why we keep coming back to this series, but there are always a few questions we can try to wrap our heads around, not including where the 2% went.

Most of The Leftovers' questions are about its characters, Kevin Garvey Jr. (Justin Theroux), Nora (Carrie Coon), and in a beefed up and terrific part this season, Kevin Garvey Sr. (Scott Glenn). Lindelof wants them to have a proper ending without any "dangling threads" or "spinoff possibilities" as he told Variety:

This is it; we left no dangling threads, no to be continued, no spinoff possibilities. We made pretty sure that this was going to be the last season of the show. The audience deserves as satisfying an ending as we can give them. I don't think anyone wants to see a question mark at the end of this.

Unless it's one great question, maybe that's not how some people would want it to end, but a part of the fun of The Leftovers is how it can veer off and defy expectations at each turn, while still remaining truthful to its characters. The HBO show can go to places you didn't even know you wanted it to go. Season 3, in particular, is always a good 20 or 30 steps ahead of the viewer.

According to Carrie Coon, who gets to play the most desperate, heartbreaking, and funniest Nora yet this season, the show will end in a way that's "really truthful":

I think in a show like this, you can have a really explosive, shocking ending or you can have something that feels really truthful and I think that's what we have. I was so proud to be a part of it, and I'm a big part of it.

Truthfulness is what the show often does best. As surreal as The Leftovers can get, it's still a series in which a group of characters can sit around on a porch, joke around, and they feel like your neighbors, not the stars of a sometimes philosophical and trippy HBO series heavy on religion and death. They are also that, of course, but as The Leftovers continues to go a little further out of this world, all the characters remain firmly rooted in reality.

The Leftovers final season premieres on April 16.