True Detective Season 3 – A Return to Form amidst the Formless Void


Yeah, yeah. You’re all, “Hey, Pierre, are you shilling for HBO? Because this is the fourth consecutive post about HBO and the second about True Detective.”

Which I understand. But then you had to go too far, asking, “Are there spoilers?”

Shouldn’t you be somewhere not vaccinating your kids, you calamity? Of course there are spoilers. Jesus. 

Last Sunday aired the season finale of the third season of True Detective. It defied a lot of expectations– in a rewarding, thoughtful way– and for my money’s worth, was a touching capstone to a season full of loss and tenuous relationships. The finale challenges the viewer to clear away the bullshit distractions in life and, like Wayne Hays eventually does (in triplicate in his dementia-riddled brain), focus on what really matters.

The centerpiece of the series’ third entry is a family torn apart by tragedy. While I’m referring to the Purcells in particular, this could apply to just about every family represented in the season. Isabelle Hoyt’s obsession and then kidnapping of Julie Purcell is borne from the accident that robbed her of her own children, essentially filling a void by causing another. Despite bringing them together, the tragic case is what keeps Amelia and Wayne from trusting each other until they both decide to choose an actual life together, separate from the Purcell case. One could even say that the tragedy Wayne’s dementia is what strains his son to a near-breaking point and is potentially what has kept his daughter away for so long.

But this season spends a significant amount of time with the bereaved family central to the case. We see Tom Purcell destroyed, first seeking oblivion in a bottle, before filling it again with God. Roland West takes him on as an adopted brother of sorts– but we come to learn that he’s filling a void, too, one left from Hays choosing a transfer instead of besmirching his soon-to-be-wife’s journalistic integrity. Lucy Purcell also continues to self-destruct, but now armed with the information that she willingly sold Julie into a “better life,” her cratering lifestyle is a self-flagellation of sorts for silently condoning the accidental murder of her son, Will. The need for her to keep quiet leads to some outbursts and while, in retrospect, Lucy’s “fuck all” attitude might speak to a mother’s guilt alongside grieving agony, she makes a point when she calls out Amelia for being a tourist of her pain. Lucy and Tom are subject to scrutiny, cops and writers looking through their windows during the single-most devastating part of their lives. Lucy can’t cope, eventually dying from a hotshot delivered by Harris when it was apparent that she might come clean. Tom stops punishing himself and seeks to punish others– namely Dan O’brien (no, not one of the funniest persons of internet comedy) — before finally receiving the oblivion that he, in some ways, was seeking the entire time via rigged suicide.

That aspect of voyeurism is played directly back at the viewer, as it is towards Hays. The TV show within the TV show, True Criminal, scrutinizes Wayne Hays hoping to validate their theory of what happened– or otherwise hoping that he’ll contradict himself. The stakes are pretty high once you realize that Hays and West killed a man with the added tension that Hays doesn’t know where he is half the time. But True Criminal also serves up a scathing condemnation of our true-crime infused society. It’s as not heavy-handed as it could’ve been, as True Detective understands that its audience is into grim shit, but it’s also not a wrong assessment, given that Netflix recently released a docuseries about Ted Bundy, seemingly glorifying that misogynistic piece of shit. As much as this story is about the core characters letting go of their obsession with a case that doesn’t need to involve them, this is Pizzolatto telling you to give the family of a murder victim peace by, say, not redditing out theories or saying that a school shooting was staged or poking at the grave decades later.

Amelia characterizes the crime voyeur pretty perfectly. She’s plumbing her husband for details, plumbing other officers for details over promises of dinner, can’t let it go when she and Wayne meet Roland and his then-girlfriend for dinner, and puts it upon herself to interview Lucy, once and again. She’s called out, of course. By Lucy, by the black man with a white eye at her reading, by Lucy’s best friend. The difference between her and True Criminal, however, is that Amelia’s not out to condemn anyone. She humanizes the story of a tragedy the same way she humanizes Wayne– by establishing context and following up on that context, even if she “knows better by now.” It takes a true detective to marry a true detective, I suppose.

True Criminal also serves a pretty ingenious narrative function in that it drives the viewer’s expectations to believe that the Purcell case is tangentially related to Season One’s Yellow King and Season Two’s hippie-occult orgy. Personally, all of my theories centered around the possibility that it’s all connected, man. But it’s pretty satisfying to have Rust and Hart pop up on a computer monitor only to have all of that shit cleared away to discover that the mystery had been so much simpler than bureaucracy and the personal obsession of detectives, crime writers, and viewers thought.

Which all comes down to a reveal with Junious in 2015. Old men Hays and West put their unsteady guns upon him, himself an unsteady old man. While gardening. The moment’s tense but it also doesn’t let you forget that these are septuagenarians, even when they sit down to get the full story from him, Hays’s gun is on the table. And Junious spills.

It’s a classic noir trope set by Raymond Chandler– the end of the mystery culminates in the culprit spilling beans. By the end of the confession, Junious demands justice to kill him but our detectives give him the high hat, choosing instead to leave the man in groaning agony. It’s a complete juxtaposition to Woodard– the Native American Vietnam vet who cracked, not under police scrutiny, but under the system that fucked him with local racists attempting to lynch him  for no other crime than talking to children. He seeks retribution, and he gets it, only after making the decision Hays’s. Makes you think he was atoning for sins he wrought before he started shooting rednecks. He had the munitions. He had a plan. Yet, he made Hays pull the trigger.

We see a lot of “self-flagellation” in this season. After they torture and kill Harris, Roland West goes the Tom Purcell route of drinkin’ and causin’ ruckus. But this time, West wants to get the shit kicked out of him. And he provides a pseudo-comedic reason why. The motherfucker Wolverines out and gives more than he takes until a crowd overwhelms him. We see him weeping later in a gravel parking lot, without Tom, without Hays, without the girlfriend that Hays half-forgot. West seeks judgement, as Tom Purcell did. In that low point, a dog adopts him despite his fucked-up flaws, signifying why he prefers his family in a kennel while “passing time” in the country. Hays’s self-flagellation comes in the form of re-entering the Purcell case, via his late wife’s words. He puts himself on the rack of public opinion, agreeing to do the interview with True Criminal, and justifies it by saying that it’s helping him remember his life. Objectively, he’s only making more trouble.

But. There’s the annoying fact that the tracker Wayne “Purple” Hays is always right.  On the personal level, he’s right that Amelia is fucking with shit beyond her responsibility as a journalist, although the way in which he informs her of his opinion is pretty shitty. He’s right to defy the brass. He’s right to get an aged West on his side to complete the puzzle of the Purcell case, despite that he was wrong to force West to murder Harris. Mahershala Ali embodies Wayne Harris with a strident confidence and a reserved manner of speech– you get the sense that Hays always knows what he’s doing, even if he forgets why he’s doing it, and doesn’t feel the need to explain it.

Which brings us to what I think the core theme of season three to be. It’s summed up by “Amelia’s ghost” when she tells Hays to “know himself.” He might not remember where he is, but by God, he knows he’s there for a reason– hence waking up on Shoepick Lane and hence following up on Amelia’s ghost tip to determine whether or not Julie Purcell still lives. I like the AV Club’s take on that scene where it seems that Hays has a flickering notion of why he’s there and who this woman is before it disappears again– for the better. For all the tragedy wrapped up in the complications of dementia, the ability to forget is also Hays’s strength. Slowly, as the case is left to the past, Hays’s family finally comes together, including West, who has also let go of years of resentment and bitter loneliness to become a brother again to Hays. Since Hays is a tracker, a seeker of truth, forgetting the ending is the only way his story continues– or as Amelia ghost puts it, “the story goes on, healing itself.”

That last shot of Purple Hays in the jungle, his truest self, is going back into the tangle of his own mind. There, he’ll get lost in the Purcell case again, but he’ll also be with his wife, and make the same mistakes and loving commitments to her over and over again. But before he gets lost in the thicket, Hays looks directly at us, confident and wild, as if to say, “I know who I am. Who are you?”


If you get down with hardboiled detective noir fiction, maybe you should give Muddy Sunset a read before the followup comes out in a few months.