Academy Award winner Mahershala Ali stars as an Arkansas detective.
With the third season of True Detective in the rearview mirror, it seems like a good time to reflect on the eight episodes of the crime drama and what they mean. (Warning: spoilers ahead.)
It’s 1980 in Arkansas, and Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali, who just won Best Supporting Actor for his role in Green Book) is a young police detective trying to solve the disappearance of two Purcell children: Will,12, and Julie, 10. The show brilliantly blends three timelines — 1980, 1990 and 2015 — to tell the long story of what really happened, and how it changed the lives of these characters forever.
The impact of the case on Hays’ life is multi-faceted. He meets his wife, Amelia (Carmen Ejogo, Selma), when she is Will’s teacher, and they marry and have two children together. Many of the conflicts in their relationship arise from the difficult case, which also takes its toll on his friendships and parenting.
But Hays isn’t the only one who suffers. Will is found dead, while Julie is still out there somewhere. Lucy (Mamie Gummer, Ricki and the Flash), Will and Julie’s mother, dies of a suspicious drug overdose in the late ’80s. Their father, Tom (Halt and Catch Fire’s Scoot McNairy) suffers through guilt, addiction and turmoil over his sexuality and is eventually murdered in what is made to look like a suicide.
The series plays brilliantly with the idea of memory. Julie, who is eventually found, has a skewed memory from years of being brainwashed and drugged. In 2015, Hays is an old man, plagued by increasing memory loss and visions of his deceased wife. He’s forced to revisit the case when a young woman making a true-crime documentary presses him for answers. He finds himself motivated to uncover the truth once and for all, and reunites with his estranged partner, Roland West (Stephen Dorff.)
The show plays upon our assumptions, and what we believe people are capable and not capable of doing. Hays and Roland suspect that members of the prominent, business-owning family in town, the Hoyts, are responsible for kidnapping Julie. They also learn that Julie’s mother, Lucy, played a role.
This season goes out on a bittersweet note, as Hays tracks down a grown-up Julie. Is it closure? Catharsis? Whatever it is, this season of True Detective was spellbinding.
