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[Editor’s Note: The following article contains spoilers for “The Leftovers” series finale — Season 3, Episode 8, “The Book of Nora.”]

Of the many emotional moments packed into the 72-minute “Leftovers” finale, hearing Laurie’s voice on the other end of Nora’s emergency phone call was perhaps the most shocking. After spending the past two weeks (or two months, if you’re a TV critic given access early on) coming to terms with Laurie’s decision to “go scuba diving,” it took a minute (or a day) to wrap your head around the fact that she didn’t kill herself.

Read More: ‘The Leftovers’: Damon Lindelof on The Finale’s Two Endings and Why You Can Believe in Both

While obviously an ecstatic, life-affirming, “holy fucking shit Laurie is holding her grandchild right now” moment, it demanded a shift in understanding from what we’d come to accept at the end of Episode 6. All the interviews with the creators and Ms. Brenneman led us to believe she was, in fact,...

HBO's "The Leftovers" just concluded an incredible second season. (Here's my review of the finale.) As a bookend to the long and candid conversation we had two months ago, I spoke with the series' co-creator Damon Lindelof about many of the big decisions going into the finale, about all the hard work and tough choices required for a season this good, and his thoughts about the show's precarious future, coming up just as soon as a temple closes on Christmas... Let's start with a meta question: why are we doing this interview? A year ago, you didn't want to do any post-mortems. You wanted to let the show speak for itself. You did a bunch at the start of this season, you talked to Mo Ryan last week, and are doing a few like this for the finale. Why did you decide to be a little bit more out there this year?...

Lone Survivor

Composed by Explosions in the Sky and Steve Jablonsky

Metropolis Movie Music

One of the more surprising developments this winter has been the financial success of Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor, a half true-to-life action thriller about 2005′s failed Operation Red Wings. Against the Oscar fare that typically hits multiplexes this time of year, it’s grossed an estimated $108 million as of February 7. It’s also fueled debate over the authenticity of the film’s events as adapted from Patrick Robinson’s gussied-up memoir. In addition to multiplying the number of Taliban forces Petty Officer Marcus Luttrell and his team fought, Lone Survivor makes little effort to complicate U.S. involvement in the Middle East beyond black-and-white terms. While some of the blame falls squarely on Berg’s (and Robinson’s) shoulders, Lone Survivor’s score deserves some heat, too.

Enlisting the services of Texas post-rockers Explosions in the Sky...

Following on from the release of the sneak peak last week, Marvel and 20th Century Fox have released the first full length trailer for upcoming superhero movie event X-Men: Days Of Future Past, bringing twice the Magnetos, twice the Xaviers and twice the emotional impact.

It’s a great trailer, packed with emotion and what looks like any number of major moments of spectacle, if the brief flashes of what we were able to see are anything to go by – and the use of John Murphy’s exceptionally appropriate Adagio In D (which has of course also turned up in trailers for X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Star Trek Into Darkness and most recently for Gravity.)

After seven years, we finally get to see Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen’s modern day X-Men return to the big screen, their world colliding with the “new breed” of the X-Men from 2011′s First Class,...