True Detective 3.8: Best Ending

Hats off to True Detective for providing in its season 3 finale something you don't see in a kind of story like this.  Not in any television series or movie I've ever seen, certainly not in the previous two seasons of True Detective, and, come to think of it, not in any novel I've ever read, either.  Imagine Jude the Obscure with a happy ending.  That's what we got in True Detective tonight.

It's not clear if Hays will remember the joy he discovered, the healing of something that was so bad for so long, finally turning out well and beautiful.  Hays comes to realize this, and his vision of his wife Amelia, says this to him, a little after he and West stand at the grave of Mary July - aka Julie Purcell - and West says he doesn't feel any closure.   They then cross paths with a little girl, and her father, a gardener at the convent, and we had to know this encounter was very significant, even though we couldn't know exactly why.  After all, the girl's name was the same as Julie's mother: Lucy.

But Hays realizes the truth, and drives to Julie's place, and even though he forgets why he's there, that's an incredible kind of closure and happy ending for us, the audience.   And it will be for him, too, eventually.  His son has Julie's address, which means that, someday, he'll tell his father what happened and what's going on.  (Yeah, I expect Hays to live that long, and be more or less compos mentis.)

This season of True Detective was a masterpiece of misdirection.   It was great to see Cohle and Hart in that newspaper, as I said last week, but the villain in season 3 was, after all, not some heinous child predation ring.  It was Hoyt's daughter, protected by Hoyt, and the motive was motherly love.  This doesn't negate the horror and pain of the kidnapping - it's a twisted kind of motherly love - but it's a very different kind of emotion than what we saw wild and perverse in the first season.  Indeed, ultimately, the most consistent thing in the first and third seasons was the superlative acting of Matthew McConaughey and Mahershala Ali, and, for that, matter Woody Harrelson and Stephen Dorff, too.  (Ali won an Oscar for best supporting actor tonight - he surely deserves an Emmy for best actor next time those awards are given.)

At least one big loose end:  unless I missed it, I still couldn't tell you what happened to Amelia. Maybe we'll learn more about that in a subsequent season.  Until then, thank you True Detective for a story and an ending like no other.

See also True Detective 3.1-2: Humanistic Disturbances of the Soul ...True Detective 3.3: Unquestioned Witnesses ... True Detective 3.4: All Hat, No Answers ... True Detective 3.5: Tour de Force Scene in the Present ...True Detective 3.6: Great Conversations ... True Detective 3.7: Merge!

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 

True Detective 3.5: Tour de Force Scene in the Present

A decisive episode of True Detective tonight - 3.5 - in which current, 70-year-old Hays, not in full possession of his faculties, nonetheless has enough to convince his erstwhile, burned-out partner West to join him in the hope of finally putting their 1980 kidnap and murder case to rest.

This twilight alliance is all the more remarkable, given that West reveals to Hays that the two of them did something very wrong or bad when the case was reopened in 1990.  Hays doesn't remember this. But some part of his brain, now unavailable to his consciousness, no doubt knows this.

It was a rough and bruising hour, otherwise.  Though Hays and Amelia finally get totally together in 1980, he's pushing her further away in 1990.  It takes their two kids to get them - temporarily, no doubt - to put down their arms.   Hays at this point is clearly getting angrier at Amelia and her book and her author's interest in the case, as it becomes clear that Hays missed something big back in 1980.

Back to the present, it's important to note that Hays, notwithstanding his mental decline, still has a lot on the ball.  He realizes that the kidnapped kids' mother wrote the note that indicated the daughter was still alive, because that note used the same language that Amelia picked up in an interview with the mother and used in her book.  (I'm not even considering that Amelia wrote the note, and that's why the language is the same, because that would be too crazy even for True Detective.  Right?  I hope so.)  And all of this comes out against the backdrop of seeing how the mother died, a druggie in some room.

But the best scene, in addition to being a powerful move in the plot, was Hays and West together talking in West's home in the present.  A tour-de-force of acting for both Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff, and indeed this whole season of True Detective is an increasing tour-de-force.

See also True Detective 3.1-2: Humanistic Disturbances of the Soul ...True Detective 3.3: Unquestioned Witnesses ... True Detective 3.4: All Hat, No Answers

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