Carmen Ejogo and Mahershala Ali in True Detective‘s Season 3 finale, “Now Am Found.”
Courtesy of HBO.
Naturally, Sunday night’s Season 3 finale of True Detective clocked in at about 79 minutes. That’s the length of a slight but respectable feature film. Rumor had it that HBO and creator/show-runner Nic Pizzolatto clashed about the running time; originally, the episode was slotted for 57 minutes, which is about the length of a standard Game of Thrones installment. To be sure, these 79 minutes included a bit of credits as well as a previously-on montage and a closing inside-the-episode look—but even with all that taken into account, the True Detective finale stretched to nearly twice as long as the average network drama episode, which usually hovers right at 42 minutes.
Yes, of course, True Detective isn’t a network drama: it’s prestige TV on premium cable, as everything about it practically screams. The characters talk about serious things slowly, and the music is perpetually tuned to Haunted Southern Gothic Folk. Its cast was led by two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali. But now that we’re on the other side of Season 3, the time I spent watching True Detective doesn’t feel justified. The season had its moments, but it felt more like a vehicle for delivering a type of experience—the True Detective experience—than a discrete story divided into eight installments. What’s good about this show is almost entirely eclipsed by what doesn’t work.
Let’s start with the spoilers. Wayne Hays (Ali) ends the season finding Julie Purcell (Bea Santos), who was sold by her mother (Mamie Gummer) to a grieving heiress, grew up drugged on lithium, escaped and lived on her own for a little, then washed up at a convent. Her old school buddy Mike Ardoin (played by Corbin Pitts and Nathan Wetherington at different ages), who as an elementary-schooler told Amelia (Carmen Ejogo) that he always meant to marry Julie, worked at the convent as a landscaper. In the finale, Amelia appears as a ghost to tell Wayne a story: What if the lovestruck boy recognized Julie, a decade later? What if he reminded her of who she was, after the lithium had addled her memories? What if the tombstone the nuns placed in their cemetery for Julie was a ruse, designed to prevent anyone else from disturbing her happiness?
In the final moments of the episode, the elderly, dementia-addled Wayne finds Julie and her daughter, and he seems to want to say something to them. But as he’s sitting outside their house, he loses his memory—or does he?—and suddenly can’t recall who these people are, or why he drove all the way out to Northwest Arkansas to see them. A few scenes later, when he goes to play with his grandkids, the memory seems to return to him. But then the camera zooms into his eye, revealing that he’s thinking about the fateful conversation in 1980 when he admitted his love for Amelia. The last scene places him in a dark, wet jungle, young and hale, in his Army poncho, staring into the camera with something like resignation. As the camera zooms out, he disappears into the shadows.
Nonsensical as they may be, I liked these final few scenes, with their heavy sadness and Jacob’s Ladder insinuations. Wayne forgets why he drove to Greenland, Arkansas, but his son, Henry (Ray Fisher), pockets the slip of paper with Julie Purcell’s address on it—just in case that information might be useful later. It’s a seed; a hint that a faint sliver of truth washes forward, even as memory recedes back to the beginning. Wayne’s brain, quite tragically, is caught in an eddy of the past, and clarity may never return to him again. The story is left to Henry, and the documentarian Elisa (Sarah Gadon), and to Julie Purcell’s young daughter, too (Ivy Dubreuil), if it comes to that.
When it comes to memory, and legacy, and the struggle between succumbing to despair and maintaining hope, True Detective offers many little threads to untangle. There’s something satisfying about stretching your mind around the different potential interpretations of the show’s convolutions—especially those that concern life outside of the case. For much of the season, I got that feeling when the show explored partnership—not Wayne’s partnership with Roland (Stephen Dorff), but his marriage to Amelia.
This was one of the finest subplots a True Detective season has managed to offer—a verité stage play between two characters struggling to express their needs, in the midst of a pulpy crime thriller. If there is one arena in which it seems that Pizzolatto has updated and altered his approach, it’s here, in the perpetual ebb and flow of understanding between Wayne and Amelia. The season faked out the audience with their story; it first presented their marriage as if they’d suffered a terrible rupture, only to slowly come around to show just how much common ground these two had. Ali and Ejogo have chemistry to spare; their characters also have perceptibly different worldviews, which adds much more dimension to their conversations than, say, the scenes between Wayne and Roland. (Dorff, by the way, did his best with Roland, but somehow, the character was a thousand times more interesting when interacting with Scoot McNairy or a dog than with Mahershala Ali. Those two didn’t have the energy that Ali and Ejogo did, and the show suffered as a result.)
But even here, in the show’s richest vein, the finale wound up faltering. In episode seven—a wonderful and terrible installment—Amelia and Wayne, who have been investigating the Purcell case in very different ways, find a way back to the same revelation, and to each other. It’s a resolution of sorts, a synthesis in their efforts. But it’s sort of lukewarm—and trumped, immediately, by an act of machismo, as Wayne gets into a mysterious black car to face an unseen baddie. After that encounter, Wayne withholds the information he learned from his wife; we the audience see that he’s got a history of unilaterally making decisions for the both of them, borne out of his fear of hurting those around him. Amelia, for her own reasons, loves him anyway. It’s somewhat unsurprising that True Detective this season was always less invested in her half of the marriage than in Wayne’s, but it’s still disappointing. Amelia disappears at the end of the finale, as much of a mystery as she was when she started.
My colleague Joanna Robinson argued last week that the entire plot of this season, laced as it was with dead-ends and red herrings, was Pizzolatto’s way of thumbing his nose at the conspiracy theorizing that characterizes the True Detective fandom. She’s right—but the problem is, True Detective Season 3 still arranged and presented itself in a way that invited any and all conspiracy theories. It had three timelines, three entry points into the same mystery, three detectives (I’m counting Amelia, too). There was a preponderance of clues—several characters in True Detective talk as if they are N.P.C.s in a video game, there to fulfill exactly one role: drop another hint.
A frequently mentioned sex-trafficking ring—which, for a wild moment, created a True Detective cinematic universe in which Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) are two other washed-up detectives searching for truth—appears, at the end of the season, to be nothing but a distraction. The conclusion of this season is deflection and deflation; it lacks the confrontation that the audience so desperately craves at the end of a horror story. It’s adroit, I’ll give Pizzolatto that: at the end, the true horror of this season is not evil, but aging; not badness, but the obsolescence of goodness. But I remain unconvinced that we needed such a complicated set of eight episodes in order to work our way to that conclusion. And even at the end, I cannot answer, with satisfaction, why the show didn’t just present the events of the Purcell case in the order that they happened. It’s as if the show was embarrassed about telling a limited story about getting old, so it hid it inside a nesting doll.
Perhaps that checks out. After all, True Detective is the theater of the oppressed masculine, and I say that with only a little bit of arch disdain. The show moves slowly because it is weighted down by crushing despair—a horror at the world at large, reflected by an ocean of self-loathing within. Wayne and Roland are bad cops—not just middling investigators, but brutal interrogators, too—and they’re constantly hampered by their own guilt and anger. I wonder if Pizzolatto has found a way not just to express this attitude but also to appeal to it, via the trickery of puzzles and layered timelines. So much of the show’s aesthetic touches—its pacing, its painfully ungraceful transitions between timelines, its highly stylized character/caricatures, its evocative but overzealous score—rely on the audience feeling the full weight of this existential despair. Every scene is heavy; there’s no lightness, no nimble movement, to be found here. It’s difficult to imagine how a parody of True Detective would be appreciably different from what we have seen of the show itself.
So: this season was fine. It had fantastic elements. It never got as scary or mysterious as the first season, save for that one scene when McNairy, as Julie Purcell’s sad father, wandered drunk into a glowing pink room, followed by a sinister agent of evil. Visually and narratively, it felt cobbled together. The characters never quite communicated their truths to us, though they did try. The end didn’t quite mean anything, although it attempted to. The mystery was solved, but it didn’t matter. In a shorter season, True Detective’s efforts would have been an intriguing interplay—perhaps still not entirely profound, but interesting and loaded enough to provoke thought. As it is, the show is too damn long to be successful.
This story was originally published by Vanity Fair
via USAHint.com
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