I mean, seeing how most of the episode, from the beginning with Nora being told not to lie, to the nun saying something along the lines of "it may not be real but it makes for a better story," and Kevin's whole fake act, was concerned with the difference between truth and lies, and how we choose certain lies to believe and build our lives around, I don't think we're meant to take Nora's story at face value.
The first episode of this season was The Book of Kevin, in which a belief is presented that's centered around Kevin which explains and soothes people with a positive version of the afterlife, where Kevin "frees the dead from their pain."
I saw this episode as a sort of distaff counterpoint, right down to the title. Nora presents another belief that we can either buy into or not buy into which explains and soothes people with a positive version of what happened to the Departed, where they're living their lives happily as "the lucky ones."
Something which this show has done since the pilot is a sort of aggressive cross-cutting between someone telling a story, and the actual events. E.g. "cleaning out a gutter," and the shot of Kevin Senior running around naked.
If the writers wanted us to fully believe Nora's story, it would have been insanely easy for them to cut to Nora waking up in the parking lot, and show her wondering around Australia and Mapleton. It was a conscious choice not to prove, or necessarily disprove Nora's recounting.
Something something Let the Mystery Be.
But yeah, there were some shades of the LOST finale, and I was worried for a moment or two that the small Australian town was the Afterlife, and Lindelof was going to the exact same well. Still, it was nice to see Laurie, although I may have preferred for her to have just suddenly showed up as the Vice President in Kevin's Presidential excursion, just to see the drama that would ensue.
I think the only fault of this season, in my estimation, is due to HBO giving them 8 episodes instead of 10. I would have loved to see a Murphy-centric episode, and perhaps instead of being instantly droned out of existence, an Evie/Meg manhunt episode which has the same end result. I feel like all of those characters got short shrift this season. Such is the reality of being a low-rated drama with a massive ensemble cast. Some people are gonna be under served.
I'm interested to hear what our resident Leftovers grumpy gus buzzkill non-International-Assassin-liker thought of this episode.
