Unabridged Thoughts: True Detective, Season Three

There’s no end, it seems, to my thinking about True Detective (Season One, Season Two). And let me tell you, I have a lot of thoughts about Season Three. Let’s get the bottom line out of the way: Season Three is better than Season One, and might be the best season of television in the entirety of the Streaming Era (which I mark as beginning in 2013).

As I’ve noted before, every season of the show thus far embraces the sensibilities of a different genre of fiction. The overarching theme of Season Three is true crime. You might object that true crime is a non-fiction genre, and thus not an appropriate label for a television drama, but I contend that the fictive, fictionalizing qualities of true crime are at the heart of what this season is doing.

Everything New Is Old Again

After a tepid response from critics, backlash from fans, and subsequent disappearance into the Streaming Era’s rapidly expanding memory hole, showrunner Nic Pizzolatto and the HBO studio execs appear to have conceded that perhaps a season a year wasn’t going to be possible without cutting a lot of corners. They weren’t alone in this feeling, and we have since seen fewer and fewer prestige dramas released on yearly cycles. In the last decade, seasons of scripted, serialized dramatic television have had shorter overall runtimes and longer gaps between seasons, for a variety of reasons. Famously, it’s not always worth the wait, but as the distinctions between television production and film production have continued to blur (whether it be in terms of the writing process, the cost, or the complexity of VFX and post-production), a kind of quality-over-quantity sensibility has overtaken the industry.

In the four years between seasons, Pizzolatto appears to have sought a middle ground: Although still doing most of the writing, he credits a few coauthors with assisting on specific episodes. Filming did not begin until February of 2018. The visual cohesion of the season is better maintained by limiting the directing team to just three: Jeremy Saulnier, David Sackheim , and Pizzolatto himself. Saulnier evidently left after only a couple months, and given the non-linear structure of the show, it’s unclear who directed which scenes, but given the non-linear storytelling of the season, I’d be willing to bet that the show was shot chronologically with scenes re-ordered during post-production. This would make 1980 a Saulnier/Pizzolatto joint, whereas 2015 would be a Sackheim/Pizzolatto joint, with the 1990 era acting as a bridge.

A viewer’s first impression is that Season Three (hereafter, TDs3) plays it safe to a fault in its desire to recapture the success of Season One. This isn’t entirely baseless, as many of Season One’s distinctive features are evident from the first moments of the show. The season premiere centers an odd-couple pairing of detectives with complementary skills. The story is set in the American South, and immediately evokes the economic, class, and racial inequalities of the region. The story is once again non-chronological, with an “interview” conceit that naturalistically compels characters to provide exposition and give opinions they would be less likely to say aloud in normal dialogue. There are even hints toward the show’s earlier forays into mythos fiction (most obviously, an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons module with slightly anachronistic graphic design entitled “The Forests of Leng”). The messaging of the premiere seems obvious: “True Detective has gone back to its roots, tell your friends.”

It’s important to recognize that Pizzolatto’s chief quality as a writer is that he wears his influences, if not on his sleeve, then at least only half concealed as a cheeky pocket square. The first two seasons were filled with references to media that Pizzolatto has enjoyed, and he seems to relish including coded references. Not only that, but he also riffs and elaborates on existing works and tropes. It’s not hard to see the influence of popular works of true crime nonfiction, such as In Cold Blood (1966), Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994), and The Innocent Man (2006). That said, a substantial part of what makes TDs3 remarkable is its fairly obvious riffing on Season One. Not a remake or a rehash, TDs3 is a fundamental reworking in which the engine is torn down to its components and rebuilt into something else. He knows this music; let’s change the beat.

A Web, And At Its Center…

Someone looking to map TDs3 onto the template set by Season One will initially see clear parallels in our trio of detectives: Wayne Hays, played by Mahershala Ali (the intense outsider!), Roland West, played by Stephen Dorff (the amiable good ol’ boy!), and Amelia Reardon, played by Carmen Ejogo (the female one!). After a few episodes, however, it’s increasingly clear that TDs3’s characters are square pegs relative to the round holes of characters in past seasons. Even more strikingly, each of these three investigators is written and performed with such subtlety and nuance that I would wager many viewers fundamentally misunderstood who their heroes even were.

Consider Roland. His drip and his swagger all radiate “cowboy,” and the path of least resistance would be to lean on some of the stereotypes that made Martin Hart instantly familiar. What we get instead is a detective who is not merely friendly, but who wields gentleness and empathy as investigative tools. In settings awash with bigotry, Roland is scrupulously egalitarian and uncomfortable with prejudice. My reading of the show’s subtext is that Roland is either gay or bisexual, but also deeply closeted, perhaps so much so as to never have romantic or sexual relations with another man in his lifetime. If this is Pizzolatto’s authorial intent, it’s conveyed with masterful subtlety during an era in which most shows inartfully explain everything to the audience all the time. If this isn’t the intent and I’m merely reading something into Dorff’s performance, his character arc is nevertheless one of quiet, unspoken heartbreak. The most sensitive of our trio, with social gifts and a gentle heart, he nevertheless spends most of his later years alone but for the company of rescued dogs. It’s a common flavor of personal tragedy so low-key that it’s rarely portrayed in media, and we often fail to recognize it in the lives of those around us that we think we know well.

Consider Amelia. She gets the agency that Maggie was not afforded in Season One: A full intellectual and detectively peer to her male counterparts, without whom the case would never have been cracked. Viewing the season’s mystery through a literary lens, rather than a law enforcement one, she embodies both sides of true crime’s moral coin. She is at once a do-gooder and a medler; driven by the truth but also an able liar who is a little too in love with her authorial voice; self-serving in her service to others. While the show’s setting routinely throws up predictable racist and sexist roadblocks to her progress, she stands up defiantly against some (including some of Wayne’s more regressive biases) while turning others to her advantage when she can. Rather than being the show’s embodiment of virtue, her literary perspective allows her to understand what the case means to others earlier than her fellow detectives. She understands that when a person vanishes, they leave behind a void that everyone in a community will try vainly to fill with stories. And fiction tempts us with more comfort than fact.

The clearest change that prevents TDs3 from mapping onto Season One, however, is an absence: Roland and Amelia have no meaningful relationship with one another. They do not collaborate, or come into direct conflict; they are at most acquaintances, and hardly ever speak. So TDs3 cannot be a triangle, or any other closed polygon. Instead, we come to know Roland and Amelia primarily through their relationships with Wayne.

Wayne is the axis around which the show revolves. Ali’s performance is transformative: He plays Wayne with an astonishing physicality. In the 1980s, he moves with meticulous grace, someone who learned that detection meant death while hunting the Most Dangerous Game as a LRRP in Vietnam. The show gives us ample reason to think that Wayne has a considerable body count and a potential for extreme violence, but in 1980 he has the Zen-like cool of a predator who has way more bite than bark. In the 1990s, this composure and self-assurance has boiled away, and we see the impatient energy of a man let off the leash after a decade on the shelf, but also more insecure than ever before. In 2015, we see palpable frailty and advancing dementia, someone on the brink of losing everything that makes a person a person. And yet, in all of these we recognize the same proud loner, the same stubborn bulldog, the same wasted potential. It’s natural to assume, at first, that Wayne is “Rust Cohle, but 15 years earlier and black,” but this analogy falls apart almost immediately. Unlike Rust, Wayne is a man of few words, who shares his inner world sparingly with only a trusted few. His politics are conservative, his disposition somewhat anti-intellectual, his loyalty to the system still unbroken in 1980, despite what it has already cost him. He’s a Scully to the bone, relative to Rust’s Mulder. Understanding what the case means to Wayne is worth 60% of our final grade in TDs3, so we will consider him more as we proceed.

Other supporting characters, in turn, devote most of their screen time to interacting with only one other character. Wayne’s son Henry (played by Ray Fisher) towers over him protectively in 2015 and exchanges lines with almost nobody else on screen. The grief-stricken parents Tom and Lucy Purcell (portrayed viscerally by Scoot McNairy and Mamie Gummer respectively) hardly speak to each other at all, their already fragile marriage shattered beyond repair by the inciting incident. Instead, Tom forms a powerful bond with Roland (contributing in no small part to Roland’s tragic arc), while Lucy opens up (if only briefly) to Amelia. Because the show’s trio of leads are so well-realized, seeing how each supporting character interacts with just one of those three gives us enough to infer unspoken emotional depths. Given how many moving parts figure into the mystery, its false leads, and its ultimate resolution, it’s striking how many scenes consist only of two named characters speaking directly to one another.

A further quality that encourages us to see even minor characters as having complexity and depth is that the show largely eschews the dichotomies of earlier seasons. Gone are the low-SAN investigators and zero-SAN monsters of Season One. Gone are the political-cartoon-caricature insiders and the hard-boiled outsiders of Season Two. In TDs3, to one extent or another, everyone sees themselves as a victim and everyone makes their own moves for their own reasons. Characters don’t often appear “evil,” so much as they appear selfish, callous, or egocentric. The season’s bad actors usually have an opportunity to justify themselves so we can come to our own conclusions about what they believe. This results in a season that feels like it’s full of people, and even those who can be boiled down to familiar tropes feel like they have a bit more than one dimension.

Sediment Buried, Then Washed Away

Setting aside any specific characterization, time should be spent reflecting on the structure of TDs3. The premiere lulls into a false sense that we should expect Season One all over again, but TDs3’s story structure is decidedly more radical: It tells the story in each of its time periods in parallel, such that all three stories conclude in the final episode of the season. I can’t overstate how tricky this is to pull off, because the show has to delicately balance what the audience knows against what the characters know.

Case in point: It’s clear in 1990 that Roland and Wayne have a falling out during the 1980 investigation that sours their friendship. It also becomes clear that some further falling out occurs between 1990 and 2015. The non-linear structure of the story ensures that we spend a lot of time seeing consequences of these turning points before the show reveals their specific details. This approach to storytelling take the classic “rising action, then falling action” formula and folds it in half in order to push two separate Act III climaxes (those of 1980 and 1990) into the season’s final episode, told concurrently with the show’s grand finale. In a way, this realizes the notion of “seeing a life from outside of time” from Season One more completely than that season’s more conventional structure would allow. The audience is on the hook not just to learn “what will happen next,” but also “how exactly did things already go do wrong?”

More than just a writing exercise for the sake of looking clever, however, Pizzolatto appears to have an agenda in doing this. At various points, the younger Wayne (and only Wayne) experiences fourth-wall breaking moments that feels like 2015 somehow intruding on the past. His stoic composure breaks, and seems disoriented, afraid. These are performed wordlessly, are never discussed, and do not feel like the hallucinations Rust experiences in Season One. Though infrequent, these are regular enough that they demand analysis.

My interpretation is this: The season’s central mystery is not The Case as such (which I’ve carefully written around, but am getting to), but rather is a crisis of identity happening inside the mind of Wayne Hays. The 1980 and 1990 narratives should largely (although probably not wholly) be seen as a mixture of memories and imagined stories being experienced by Wayne’s 2015 self at precisely the stage of his life when dementia is taking it all away from him. In that sense, the show is not being told non-chronologically; Wayne’s memories are being experienced non-chronologically, by Wayne, in 2015. The questions of “Who am I?” and “How did I get here?” are not merely existential abstractions for the 70-year-old: These are questions he needs answers to as a practical concern as his dementia worsens. TDs3 is, then, a story about a story, a tale told by a man, to himself, during the last coherent weeks of his life, as he tries to pull a splinter from his mind that he has carried for half a lifetime. And, in the end, the man is gone, and only the story remains.

Tell Me A Story. Make It A Story Of Great Distances, And Starlight.

Which brings us, at long last, to the case itself. As in previous seasons, the inciting incident is a death cloaked in sinister circumstances. Will and Julie Purcell, children of Tom and Lucy, ride off on their bicycles and disappear. Although Wayne and Roland are on the case, we as viewers know from two prior seasons of experience that this isn’t going to end well. Even in the first episode, however, the show subverts our expectations. In 1980, it is only Wayne’s uncanny talent for tracking that reveals the location of Will’s body, so it’s plain to see that the crime is murder. This is directly juxtaposed with Wayne learning, in 1990 (as the episode’s final reveal before credits), that Julie Purcell is in fact still alive. So we also know, in some sense, that there’s a different, non-murder crime in the mix. And this “we didn’t really solve it” moment isn’t the mid-season twist it was in Season One, but is the show’s second, more calamitous inciting incident.

This shift from solving murder to finding a missing person animates the rest of the season. Julie is a princess who Wayne feels he needs to save (rather literally, actually, given the conditions of her captivity), and Wayne is an obsessive Sigfried, a man possessed by the idea of finding her and setting her back into the place she belongs. In each of the time periods, a different version of this urgency animates Wayne: In 1980, it’s an honest cop’s quest to protect an innocent; in 1990, it’s more selfish and emotional, a way to exact a kind of revenge on the people who hobbled his career, and to get to return to the kind of police work he was genuinely good at; in 2015, it’s a mixture of grief at the passing of his wife and fear of leaving business unfinished, a spectre haunting a mind that is unraveling before our eyes. Whichever Wayne we are watching, it’s clear that the intensity with which he is pursuing this quest is unhealthy, exacting a toll on his psyche while also eroding his most important social ties.

Beyond Wayne, the theme of how story subsumes the show’s many victims (some of whom are perpetrators in their own right) is broadly explored. What little we learn of Will and Julie as people is seen through frosted glass - the impact of their disappearance on the community is much more widely felt. Like many victims in true crime, their identities as people and their true motivations are pushed to the side. Instead, scapegoats are immediately sought (people of color, the uncomfortably destitute, heavy metal fans, etc.) and accusations are made. Seen from the vantage point of 1990 and 2015, it’s clear that the 1980 investigation is a total shambles, as compelling leads get steamrolled by sensational fearmongering. A major irony in all this is that Wayne and Roland are at the height of their powers during this period, working well together and uncovering what will be crucial clues, but at every turn they are derailed and distracted. By the time we come to TDs3’s Big Shootout (every season has one), any hope of finding Julie in 1980 is already lost, although Our Heros haven’t realized it yet.

At the same time, Wayne and Amelia meet and have immediate chemistry. On paper, they’re quite different people (Amelia is bookish, literary, and dabbled in anti-war leftism, in contrast to Wayne’s stoic and practical conservatism and military service), but the spark between them feels real, and the fanning of that flame by their romantic dialogue feels earned. (I have a hunch this opposites-attract formula is inspired in part by the romance between Jessie Custer and Tulip O’Hare in the Vertigo comic Preacher, but that’s based only on clues from prior seasons that Pizzolatto has read a lot of comics). The catch is that their encounter and early relationship is predicated on his missing girl, an unseemly undercurrent of tragedy. In 1990, we see the case festering in their marriage like a foreign object the body can’t quite metabolize. Wayne resents the decade he spent riding a desk, and Amelia is caught up in the True Crime Power Trip, the trap by which a real tragedy becomes fodder for non-fiction authorship and a vehicle for acclaim, whether or not the case is ever solved. So the romance between Wayne and Amelia begins in a compromised place, and the deal they make in 1980 is, in many ways, imperfect for them both. When the events of 1990 come to a head, they must renegociate who they are to one another to keep the case from tearing their family apart.

Meanwhile, as the 1990 investigation picks up steam, the full shape of the crimes reveal themselves. By the end of the 1990 phase, we know most of the details surrounding what happened to the Purcell children, and most of the motivations. Rather than a broad, cultic conspiracy, we discover a much smaller, much more intimate crime, made possible by unsavory wealth and the hubris that comes with it. Herein lies another fakeout: a conspiracy smaller than anyone would have expected. One way or another, the events of 1990 leave almost all of the “bad guys” dead (along with a few additional innocent victims), Julie escaped (whereabouts unknown), and those who remain stuck in a standoff.

The 2015 “investigation,” such as it is, only uncovers the last couple details, far too late to have any impact. Of particular note, the attractive, ambitious true crime investigator Elisa Montgomery (played by Sarah Gadon) who is interviewing Wayne (as well as having an affair with Henry) manages to only uncover one minor clue, and is ultimately left in the dark. TDs3 seems wholly uninterested in advocating that she needs to know the truth, or that “the world needs to know;” quite the contrary, the season’s message to true crime as a genre seems to be, “while justice delayed is justice denied, there’s no great merit in being a narrative graverobber, either.” Elisa, I think, is meant to read as the “sort of person” Amelia was at risk of becoming in 1990: Nominally a truth-seeker, but probably somewhat amoral in her own right and possibly a snake (after all, she might be sleeping with Henry to try to get the inside track into Wayne’s side of the story). When Wayne persuades Henry to break things off, it’s framed as a moment of a father helping his son to be a better man, possibly as an echo of the compromise Wayne himself had to make to come out of 1990 whole.

I Watched You As You Disappeared

This is a meandering review, partly because I think many of the season’s pleasures stem from seeing it unfold, but also partly because many of the particulars of the case don’t really matter. I don’t merely say this as a dismissal of the story: I think it’s the moral we, as an audience, are meant to take from all this. Chasing this case causes net harm in 1980 and 1990, and treating it as more important than people is framed as a moral hazard. While injustice must be fought, “the battle between good and evil” is a sucker’s bet, not a royal road to heroism but an ordeal that will take everything from you in the end.

The 1980 investigation, with all its false leads, is a dumpster fire that leaves our heros disoriented and dismenpowered, while ruining other lives along the way. “Give up!” the show seems to say to them, and rewards them in proportion to how fully they do so. Roland comes out the best of the three. While Wayne and Amelia remain entangled with the case in a way that haunts the early years of their marriage, they nevertheless find a new purpose to each of their lives in one another.

The 1990 investigation is, if anything, even more calamitous. Tom, mostly stable after years of perilously intense grief, is thrust back into his worst nightmare and dies for his trouble; Lucy comes to a similar (albeit far more deserved) end off-screen. All three of our protagonists end their careers and must build something new in the wreckage. Formerly the best off, Roland’s sense of light and purpose is nearly extinguished by the ordeal and (we must infer) he becomes a recluse as a result. And, crucially, none of this does Julie any good. After all, we learn that she’s been on the run for years. What good does having an ending to our story do for her, other than to possibly endanger her further? She has no family left to go back to. Wayne can’t put her “back in her place,” any such place ceased to exist almost as soon as she disappeared. So Wayne and Amelia make a pact to quit together, to give up on the case and to rebuild outside of its shadow.

By 2015, there are hardly any pieces left on the board, and the resolution of the story matters exclusively to those still haunted by the case. Wayne, we are told, has only become fixated on it again because he has finally read Amelia’s 1990 true crime oeuvre on the case, “Life and Death and the Harvest Moon,” in the wake of her passing. When the case haunts him, it often does so in her form, as if he feels the need to do this for her in some sense (or is this just a selfish story he tells himself?). With the last of what he has left to give, and Roland and Henry’s help, he drags himself to the very precipice of the truth. And when he parks his car outside of Julie Purcell’s home, he can no longer remember why he came, or where he is, or what it means. This sprawling mess of a case, whose initial crime was never even really a murder (at most, it was an accidental death caused by someone who was non compos mentis), has shrunk to the pinpoint of a welfare check, and having exorcised that last vestige of the quest from his soul, Wayne is finished.

In final scene of the season, we see a young Wayne moving stealthily through what we may presume are the jungles of Vietnam. Glancing back, he disappears into the foliage, and we fade to black. I interpret this as an allegorical portrayal of Wayne finally letting go, and vanishing into the blackness of his dementia for the last time. He will never be seen again. This is a story about failure, about giving up, and one in which only giving up offers any hope of a happy ending.

Conclusions

The reason TDs3 works as well as it does is because it has learned the most important lesson from the problems with Season Two: The characters are always more interesting than the case. The very unconventional story structure gives us three different flavors of Wayne in crisis, two of which position Amelia as his escape, and one of which is marked by the grief of her passing. Where a conventional mystery would use its final expository scenes to explain the conspiracy to the audience or see the villain angrily admit to the crimes, TDs3 instead gives us imperfect people in love, talking one another through the mysteries of the heart. The True, TDs3 tells us, is not The Good, and people are more important than stories. But people must nevertheless swim in an ocean of stories, fiction and non, and the stories they grab onto can lift them to the surface or drag them to the depths. It cautions us to value the living over the dead. Don’t take up residence in the open graves of sad stories when there’s no one left who would benefit from knowing the ending.

It’s also broadly a relief to see a show as grim as True Detective nevertheless depict characters who genuinely like one another. If Season One was the story of three incompatible people who dislike one another but get dragged back together again and again by a case, TDs3 is the story of three people who would be the closest of friends were it not for this case that keeps tearing them apart.

It’s hard to imagine how Pizzolatto will top TDs3 with the upcoming Season Four. Hopefully, in the last four years, he’s taken his time to once again prepare something for us that is very different from his previous offerings. After seeing what four years of thought and care did for TDs3, I’m looking forward to it.