"A Most Powerful Adversary" is the seventh episode of the second season of the American supernatural drama television series The Leftovers, based on the novel of the same name by Tom Perrotta.
In the episode, Kevin's hallucinations of Patti disrupt his life, causing Nora to flee her house with Lily and Mary.
According to Nielsen Media Research, the episode was seen by an estimated 0.610 million household viewers and gained a 0.3 ratings share among adults aged 18–49.
Kevin (Justin Theroux) wakes up handcuffed to his bed, discovering that Nora (Carrie Coon) and Lily are not in the house.
Despite Kevin's plea not to read it, Jill does it, with the letter stating that she took Lily and Mary and left, telling him not to call her.
Suddenly, Michael (Jovan Adepo) joins Kevin in his truck, revealing that they met before and is aware of Patti's appearances.
Michael claims that Kevin visited Virgil (Steven Williams) on the night he arrived in Miracle, something he cannot remember.
[1] Justin Theroux was not informed in advance of his character's death, as he reads the scripts in the order they arrive, without a clue of what will happen next.
The site's consensus states: "'A Most Powerful Adversary' delivers a shocking twist ending to a superb episode of The Leftovers.
A presence that, more of less, starts to put Patti in the same type of category as Satan, though she herself scoffed at the idea of directing Kevin down any particular path.
Realizing that his asleep-self didn't want to end it all, like Patti insisted, helped drive him toward that last-ditch solution.
Club gave the episode a "B+" grade and wrote, "The ending of 'A Most Powerful Adversary' is very much a television cliffhanger, and the kind that almost never feels earned because it relies so heavily on information the audience doesn't already have.
"[8] Alan Sepinwall of HitFix wrote, "Recent television has created such intense cliffhanger fatigue that I would have rolled my eyes at a lot of shows that ended an episode with the main character dying of poison and being dragged off to parts unknown.
"[3] Jeff Labrecque of Entertainment Weekly wrote, "The show now rests in the hands of Michael, who seems to have a lot to unpack in the final three episodes.
"[9] Kelly Braffet of Vulture gave the episode a 4 star rating out of 5 and wrote, "The Leftovers explores how we live with the unknowable, and it's doing so with great characters and fantastic writing and across-the-board stellar performances.