I guess the light is still winning. The third season of True Detective was a winner, putting the lingering disappointment of season two behind it. At the outset it looked like it may just be a rehash of season one: Two hard and jaded cops driving around trying to solve a case of crimes against children, told via copious flashbacks, with a metaphysical angle lurking around every corner.
If anything, this season was cleaner and better scripted than even the ground-breaking first. In the first season the case played into the Detective Rust Cohle's personal demons, this season the case disrupted Detective Wayne "Purple" Hays' relationships, especially with his family, which brought an added dimension. And instead of Rust Cohle pontificating about metaphysics to Woody Harrelson's chagrin, this time the metaphysical aspect is dramatized mostly through the device of centering on Wayne Hays towards the end of his life and in the early stages of dementia; beating forward into the past, but unsure of the reality of that past. Dramatization over exposition for the win.
The conflicts build not just among the characters but among the point of view of the characters at the three points in their lives we are tracking. The detectives worked hard, caused great pain and suffering in the course of their investigation, and truly believed it had to be done, but was it their own incompetence that caused their failure? They feel they caved to bureaucratic pressure or personal pressure, but was it their own weakness that stopped them?
Cleverly the case provides the direct connection between Detective Hays and his wife, since she is writing a true crime book about it. It is the thing that brought them together and the thing the separates them. It is so interwoven with their lives that when they need to let it go, they risk letting their marriage go. Their interplay slows things down at times, but it is essential.
As one often does, one has to overlook the shortcuts in character and minor implausibilities -- that's just a fact of TV drama. But there are really very few weaknesses.
The finale is a stunner. Even within the span of the final hour, as the aged detectives saddle up one last time in a bid for closure, the layers of the onion are still deep. At first it appears that the case resolved in tragedy, but at least, at the end, there was some form of justice for the final living perpetrator. But wait! A last second clue emerges and Detective Hays is on the case again. It seems there was a happy ending after all and the Detective comes so very close to seeing it and finding some peace, but so much lifetime has passed ("Time is the school in which we learn; Time is the fire in which we burn") that dementia intervenes before he sees it. So in the end we know the ending was happy, but must cry for the detectives, who will continue to suffer. Is that also justice for their committed sins?
And then, yet again, we are offered a tiny glimmer of hope the the happy ending may yet be discovered. As a fact of metaphysics, there is no close to the story -- the end is not the point. At the last, we are flashbacked once more to Detective Hays, attempting to reconcile with his eventual wife who offers him a do-over. A do-over is still what he needs. Maybe he'll get it. After all, time is flat circle.
