[COLUMN] The Third Season of True Detective Investigated the Stories We Tell Ourselves | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

On the surface, the third season of True Detective looks like a return to formula after the divisive second season.

Like the show’s breakout first season, the third season tells the story of a murder in a rural community investigated by two local officers, jumping across multiple time periods. Just as first season star Matthew McConaughey picked up his first Oscar while the season was on the air, third season lead Mahershala Ali took home his second Oscar on the same night that HBO broadcast the season finale. Time was a flat circle.

More broadly, there was a feeling that the excesses of the previous season were being rolled back and that HBO had learned from the mistakes in rushing the sophomore season into production. There was a four-year gap between the second and third seasons of True Detective, which took the pressure off writer Nic Pizzolatto. HBO veteran David Milch, who had created Deadwood for the cable network, was brought in to give Pizzolatto some assistance in plotting and writing the season.

The third season is recognizably of a piece with the two prior seasons, sharing a number of structural elements. Most obviously, there’s a big action set piece bridging the fourth and fifth episodes, which serves as an excuse and provides a scapegoat for the authorities shut down the central investigation before Detectives Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali) and Roland West (Stephen Dorff) are satisfied the case is resolved, a structural element common to both the first and second seasons.

Once again, the third season of True Detective is about a local community ravaged by industrial forces. Hays and West are tasked with investigating a crime involving two children: the murder of Will Purcell (Phoenix Elkin) and the disappearance of his sister Julie (Lena McCarthy). It’s a community dependent on local industry, with their father Tom (Scoot McNairy) working an assembly line and their mother Lucy (Mamie Gummer) working at Hoyt Foods Company.

It's revealed that Lucy sold her daughter Julie to Isabel Hoyt (Lauren Sweetser), the daughter of her employer, Edward Hoyt (Michael Rooker). Julie is raised by Junius Watts (Steven Williams), who had worked with Hoyt since “his first chicken farm.” Later, both Lucy and Tom are murdered by Harris James (Scott Shepherd), Hoyt’s Chief of Security, whose job consists of “securing without compromise the integrity of corporate assets while guarding against hazards to daily operations.”

However, the third season is more than just a retread of the show’s first season. One of the fascinating aspects of the first three seasons of True Detective is the way in which Nic Pizzolatto filters the show’s core thematic preoccupations and big ideas through different genres. The first season presented its murder investigation as something akin to cosmic horror, while the second applied the conventions of the weird Los Angeles noir. The third season is about true crime.

The events of the third season allude to a number of famous real-life cases and personalities tied up in 1990s Arkansas. The “West Memphis Three” are an obvious point of comparison, with teacher-turned-true-crime-writer Amelia Reardon (Carmen Ejogo) recalling the real-life writer Mara Leveritt. Opportunistic local prosecutor Gerald Kindt (Brett Cullen) invites comparisons to Bill Clinton, while Hoyt may have been based on Arkansas billionaire (and Clinton supporter) Don Tyson.

While the first season’s flashback narrative was framed through a retrospective police investigation by Detectives Maynard Gilbough (Michael Potts) and Thomas Papania (Tory Kittles), the third season finds an ageing Hays interviewed by documentarian Elisa Montgomery (Sarah Gadon). After the initial investigation, Hays married Reardon, who wrote a book about the case that is “considered a classic of literary nonfiction.”

As with the first season, the third season unfolds against three different time periods. The first season ended in 2012, two years before it was broadcast. The third season’s latest timeline takes place in 2015, the year following the premiere of True Detective. However, a lot had changed in that gap. The podcast Serial had premiered in October 2014, changing the true crime genre. By 2015, Serial was a bona fide phenomenon with more than 68 million listeners.

It’s only a slight exaggeration to suggest that this boom turned a generation of internet fans into true detectives. “There's a web forum that posts about real-life criminal cases, things that are unsolved or unresolved,” Montgomery explains to Hays. “They have a whole section on the Purcell case.” Hays is at once curious and uneasy at the idea, “This is what people do now?” True crime podcast listeners have become sleuths and campaigners, often directly inserting themselves into investigations.

The third season of True Detective is wary of this trend. The show understands that there are those who would capitalize on this tragedy for their own gain. Kindt is eager to put himself in front of cameras, even appearing on the chat show Donahue as a minor celebrity. “Dickhead wants attorney general,” Hays muses. Hays’ son, Henry (Ray Fisher), is skeptical of Montgomery. “Do you think she cares at all about you or who did it?” he asks. “She just wants people to watch her shitty show.”

Reardon’s book is a constant source of tension in her relationship to Hays. “I think you're a tourist, okay?” he admits at one point. “I think you're a voyeur. Lifting yourself up on people's bad luck.” He presses the point, “You... I think you use people. Like we're all stories to you, and you use 'em to make yourself bigger than us.” When the publisher calls about the “opportunity” presented by the reopening of the case, Hays scoffs, “I get troubled callin' what happened an ‘opportunity.’”

There is something inherently exploitative about this process, and it is one of the longstanding criticisms of the true crime genre, one particularly relevant in the wake of the podcast explosion. “I open up to you, and you're tryin' to work me,” Lucy admonishes Reardon. “Spillin' my guts. Who are you takin' this to, huh? Pretendin' you're listenin'.” At one point, Watts interrupts one of Reardon’s readings, “So you don't know nothin'. You just… you just makin' your money and milkin' they pain.”

Pointedly, the third season of True Detective is the only season to feature a victim and a suspect as a credited lead. Scoot McNairy is part of the season’s primary cast, and the season treats Tom with a lot of compassion and empathy. In particular, West clearly feels for Tom. He acknowledges Tom’s complexities and contradictions, a grieving father caught in this maelstrom outside of his control. Tom’s pain is foregrounded, contrasted with the cold construction of narratives around him.

At its heart, True Detective is an existential horror story. The show is underpinned by the constant fear that nothing makes sense, that this is a world where “nothing is solved.” Hays and West are detectives, but they live in a world where they know they may never find meaningful answers to their questions. “It's all maybes, man,” West concedes. “You do the maybe that gives you a shot.” At the end of the case, West asks, “Do you feel like any kinda closure?” Hays replies, “I don't.” West agrees, “Me neither.”

As such, the third season of True Detective understands the appeal of true crime narratives as a way of imposing an external meaning on events that might otherwise seem meaningless. Of course, this can be a dangerous thing. After all, the third season repeatedly invokes various conspiracy theories around the Clintons without making them text, acknowledging the extent to which conspiracism had become part of the American political mainstream in a way that intersects with True Detective.

At one point, Montgomery brings up photos of Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson). She details the first season’s sinister conspiracy. It’s an interesting scene, because it threatens to become the sort of fan service that defines a lot of True Detective: Night Country and so much modern pop culture. It’s also making a not-unrelated point about the way in which modern hypermediated minds desperately seek connections that allow conspiracy theories to fester. It’s all connected. It’s the ultimate shared universe.

“I think what happened to the Purcell children was connected to a similar group,” Montgomery proposes, as if pitching both a gigantic multimedia crossover and a vast sinister conspiracy. Hays dismisses the notion as ridiculous, and he’s right. It’s a clever sequence, because it makes that connection between narratives and conspiracism, understanding that the urge to tie everything together isn’t just an impulsive driving franchise entertainment, but larger American culture.

While True Detective is understandably uncomfortable with where that impulse to narrativize everything can do, it also understands the appeal. In his old age, Hays mellows a little bit on Reardon’s book. “It's as much about us as anything,” he eventually concedes. “And I think her and me, it was as close as she could give the thing a happy ending.” There is something comforting in that idea, in an attempt to fashion something of value from senselessness.

Throughout the third season, Hays struggles with dementia. His memory plays tricks on him. He suffers from lost time and experiences hallucinations. There is something very poignant in this. Pizzolatto’s co-writer, David Milch, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in early 2015, and would openly acknowledge the diagnosis just months after the third season wrapped up. In a very literal sense, Hays lives a life with no possibility of closure or resolution, where meaning itself slips away.

Towards the end of the season, Hays is confronted by a vision of Reardon. She proposes a story: what if Julie Purcell didn’t die? What if she, against all odds, found a happy ever after, with a loving husband and child of her own? Hays tracks down this older Julie (Lena McCarthy), living a tranquil and peaceful existence. However, as he pulls up to her house, the memory slips away from him. He forgets where he is and what he’s doing. He never gets to speak to her about why he came.

This is a fitting ending, and it gets at something profound about why people relate to these sorts of narratives. Truth is messy and uncertain, it rarely offers easy resolutions or satisfying explanations. Sometimes, it’s easier to believe the story.