Was it satisfying, though? I’m, guessing that a sector of viewers looked at Marty and Rust’s male-bonding heart-to-heart and saw a repeat of what they hated about the Lost and Battlestar Galactica finales: all this buildup, and it’s one more freaking show telling you that all you need is love.Īnd if you judge the series as a mystery-which it was, Nic Pizzolatto’s protestations notwithstanding-the plot payoff was meager. And it was, in a way I never expected from this series, beautiful and moving. Get it?) It’s a secular argument for finding wonder in the vastness of the universe.
(I keep flashing back to the moment in the premiere in which the minister played by Clarke Peters calls the devil-nets a myth for children–“tell them stories while they’re tying sticks together”-as the camera closes in on a cross on the wall. It’s a remarkably generous take on the power of story and metaphor to give hope to a bleak existence, especially for a series that often seemed to be 100% simpatico with Rust’s bleak view of spirituality and religion. He and Marty were given their one bit of the dark to extinguish but, just as with the men in the masks, they’ll never get it all. There’s a story here, one story-the oldest-about the fight between light and dark. Then, having found whatever kind of peace he did, he was pulled back into the world, and in one last tour de force performance, Matthew McConaughey’s shattered face conveys his devastation at losing his daughter one more time.Īnd-and here’s the ending I never saw coming: he goes on. If he didn’t get religion, he got where religion comes from. It might have been, or it could have been one of the hallucinations he was prone to it could have been the sort of hallucination we’re all prone to, facing the end.
I don’t think this was necessarily about atheist Rust literally finding heaven.
It was darkness, but it wasn’t nothing it was the point. Like a substance”-and it held everyone he’d ever loved. Rust started to go into that good night and, being Rust, found more darkness, except this darkness was good-”deeper. As he lay comatose in the hospital, his long-lost daughter returned, not as a final piece to the puzzle or shocking link to the Yellow King investigation, but as a lost child haunting her aching father. There was a twist ending, though, and it had nothing to do with the plot but rather the psyche, or dare I say the soul, of bleak-hearted Rust Cohle. Why? Ritual abuse, occult worship, pretty much exactly what it looked like. Errol Childress, ol’ Scarface, was indeed the killer-or at least, a killer, the one Marty and Rust would have to content themselves with nailing. There was no such whammo twist: the investigation took us right where it suggested it was leading, even if it took us through a creepy backwoods haunted house / cloister to get there. The one thing that I would not have predicted, though, was that this dark, brooding series, this recruitment video for nihilistic pessimism, this express elevator to the sub-sub-subbasement of human degradation would end up… Hopeful? Optimistic? Even spiritual?īetter scenario-spinners than I have spent the last few weeks concocting elaborate resolutions to True Detective‘s mystery, positing one or another character-or supernatural force-as the Big Bad.