The final season of the cult show about the cultish behaviour of a bunch of people left behind when 2 per cent of the world's population mysteriously disappears starts in the town of Miracle, Texas, but quickly relocates to Victoria as the clock ticks down to the seventh anniversary of what many assume to have been The Rapture, and what many predict will be the Final Reckoning.

The production was based at Docklands Studios, Melbourne in the second half of 2016, and made great use of inner-city locations such as Federation Square and Hosier Lane, the Melbourne docks, and a range of rural sites including the You Yangs.

Damon Lindelof, the co-creator of Lost and, with novelist Tom Perrotta, co-creator and showrunner of The Leftovers, said the producers sent advance scouts to several Australian cities before settling on Melbourne.

"The advance team did Sydney, they did Melbourne, they did Adelaide," he told Ausfilm, the agency responsible for luring Hollywood productions down under. "I started hearing as soon as they got to Melbourne that it was really going to be the place that ... fit best with the show we had designed."

Tax incentives were clearly instrumental in bringing the shoot to Australia - as they are all over the world - but the die was already cast to some degree in season two, when Scott Glenn's Kevin Garvey, a former police chief who seems to have lost his mind since The Disappearance, headed to Australia.

"We did not choose Australia because there was an economic benefit," Lindelof told podcast The Business recently. "But there ended up being a significant tax break in Australia, which helped us keep the money on the screen."

As the final season hurtles towards what may or may not be an explanation - fans wouldn't bet on it, though Lindelof has said he's learnt from the backlash over the way Lost concluded that the matter of an ending is kind of crucial - the main characters are drawn to Australia.

There are scenes in the desert, in the green rolling hills of Victoria in springtime, on the bay. In one especially bizarre episode, much of the action takes place on the overnight ferry from Launceston to Melbourne.

"I'm sort of amazed by the versatility [of the city]," said Lindelof. "I just have to say, Australia, there's just no other place in the world like it.

"From an American perspective, first off, it just feels really, really far. And if you're in Melbourne it kind of looks like the US, but everything is a little bit weird and a little bit different. And if you just drive 10 minutes out of town you feel like you're in the 1970s, and if you drive 10 minutes further you're in the country."

His chronometer might be slightly off, but compared to Ava Gardner's infamous assessment of the city while making On The Beach here in 1956, it's a ringing endorsement.

Never mind that Gardner never actually said Melbourne was a good place to make a film about the end of the world - it's so much more fun to print the legend.

Thirty years ago, journalist Neil Jillett, who was in 1956 a cadet at the SMH and later became the film and dance critic for The Age, confessed that he invented the line and wrote it in a story from the set as a clear fabrication. But in production, it assumed the mantle of direct quote, and from there entered folklore.

Still, there must be an element of truth in it, because The Leftovers marks the third time Melbourne has been chosen as the backdrop for the End Days on film. In Alex Proyas' 2009 film Knowing, though, Nicolas Cage tried to avert the apocalypse in a Melbourne that was doubling as Boston.

This time around, the city, and the state, is proudly, defiantly itself.

Yes, we're finally on the map. Pity we landed there just in time for the end of the world as we know it.

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