What struck me most about the taut, brooding third episode of the third season of True Detective - they all are, of course - just on tonight was what we find in the present, when the TV interviewer tells Hays about that bevy of unquestioned witnesses back in 1980. Hays recalls one of them - the farmer - and we saw Hays and West question him in 1980. But what about the others? Hays in the present may have forgotten them, but apparently they were never really questioned in 1980. There was no reason the TV interviewer would be making that up.
These witnesses and their reports of a brown sedan etc cruising the area get to the crux of the case so far. There was a lot more that happened back then that we don't know about, obviously. But so far everything we've seen shows Hays and West being good, highly motivated detectives - to say the least - so what really happened back then?
Clearly, it put a serious crimp in Hay's life. He's worried Becca's been kidnapped when she leaves his side for a few minutes in a store in 1990. Understandable. But he snaps at his wife when she tells him the progress she's made on the case - he can't bear to see her happy or satisfied about this case. What did he do so wrong, what he is so guilty about?
As I mentioned last week, the one bright side of this for Hays is that the documentary on the case in the present is getting him to "work" his brain, which can forestall at least some of his mental decline. My guess we'll see an ending in which Hays in the present solves what he couldn't in the case decades earlier, and then sinks into decline, deprived of the challenge of solving this puzzle.
Certainly not a happy ending for Hays, but it should be fascinating to see how he gets there.
See also True Detective 3.1-2: Humanistic Disturbances of the Soul
And see also Season Two: True Detective: All New ... True Detective 2.2: Pulling a Game of Thrones ... True Detective 2.3: Buckshot and Twitty ...True Detective 2.4: Shoot-out ... True Detective 2.7: Death and the Anti-Hero ... True Detective Season 2 Finale: Good Smoke but No Cigar
And see also Season One: True Detective: Socrates in Louisiana ... True Detective Season One Finale: Light above Darkness
philosophic crime fiction: The Plot to Save Socrates
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