True Detective Doesn't Dissapoint

And... exhale. I feel like I just held my breath for the last two months watching a great premiere by auteur Nic Pizzolato. The eight episode first season of True Detective was nothing short of captivating, awe-inspiring, and at times terrifying.

Set in the bayous of Louisiana, it tells the tale of two detectives, played by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. There is a strange, ritualistic killing of a young girl that the two are called in to investigate, but this quickly becomes about far more than just a murder investigation.


But what is it? Obviously, this is far more than a typical detective show. But there has been quite a lot of speculation by internet forums and writers who recognized all of the ulterior themes hidden throughout the show. There is the mention of the Yellow King and Carcosa throughout, a tribute to Robert W. Chambers' 1895 work.

There is also plenty of not-so-subtle implications of a state-wide cover up of a deeply rooted, powerful family and their ritualistic, devil-worshiping murders. All season long, the audience was left trying to figure out: Who is the Yellow King? Raymond Tuttle? Joel Theriot? Marty's father in law? Marty himself?

Pizzolato admitted himself that the audience kind of ran away with it a bit, but he set it up that way, didn't he? They cast the net wide, but there was always the sense that it was something under their nose. Personally, I'm glad it wasn't Marty or Cohle.

No, the killer was Errol Childress, a man-child living in a rotten, centuries-old estate with his sister deep in the bayous of Louisiana. He is the victim and product of sexual abuse at an early age, and he carried them with him his whole life no doubt. He is bizarre and terrifying, but he's also a complex character that you can feel bad for. But no, I don't sympathize with him. He is evil incarnate.
A long line of clues finally brings Rust and Marty to the estate twenty-something years later, where they face off with him in an old abandoned labyrinth of a fort that Childress used for his killing and torturing. After he maims both of them, Childress finally gets his brains blown out by an injured Rust.

So the good guys got the bad guys. Some people found the ending too typical and predictable, but I liked it. I liked it because it's not black and white, it's incomplete. As Marty says, they got one guy. But there's plenty more out there.

That's what I got from the show: its universality. It wasn't about the killings of Dorothy Lange or Marie Fontenot, it wasn't about the complex "bromance" between Cohle and Hart, and it wasn't about the decades of rapings and murders by the Tuttle family. These were just vehicles to tell the story.

It was, at its root, about good and evil. An infinite, biblical war between black and white. Cohle recognizes this from the beginning, and Marty realizes it at the end. It's not a war they can win. All they can do is be soldiers in it and do their part. It's a steep hill, but like Cohle says, "Once, there was only dark. You ask me... the light's winning."


All in all, this show was nothing short of phenomenal from start to finish. McConaughey and Harrelson were at their best, director Carey Fukunaga did a fantastic job, and Pizolatto wrote one hell of a show. I can't wait for next season. Though I will miss the rhetorical banter of Cohle and Hart, I want to see what True Detective has up its sleeve next.