Although Cohle is still looking to pursue new angles in 2002, his efforts to uncover something in the Bayou that happened near where the Wellspring schools were set up is not what his chief wants. “The alligators are swimming around and we don’t even know they’re there,” he pleads to the Major. Opening up closed cases seems to rile up the police force more than we would expect – perhaps there is a connection here that may be explored in the series’ last two hours. Meanwhile, while the two partners have shown signs of solidarity in past weeks, that collaboration heads downhill in 2002. First, Cohle dismisses Hart’s duties as a police officer (“Without me, there is no you”) and the two butt heads and trade punches outside of the station after Maggie reveals to her husband that she had sex with Cohle.
“Haunted Houses” is not close to True Detective’s finest hours, as we move back to the more leisurely pace of the opening episodes and do not get a ton of development rolling on any story. The reason that Cohle abandoned the police force in 2002 – the central mystery Papania and Gilbough want to uncover this week – is what drives the action, which is not as compelling as the typical questions that a whodunit tries to answers.
Dirtiness pervades in nearly every scene, from the grungy prisons at the start to the still-damaged headlight at the back of Cohle’s truck in 2012 shown in the end (that we find out was the result of Hart punching it ten years earlier). There is something amiss about Wellspring and the mysterious deaths surrounding the organization. Behind every door, character and positive plot revelation on True Detective, there is something dark, foul and unwanted. The number of times that True Detective flips our expectations through unreliable narration and showing us the dirty, unhinged sides of the characters has got to be some sort of record, as well as an indication of masterful storytelling that we’re still engaged in these characters’ plights, even if we know they cannot be redeemed.
The more I watch Pizzolatto and Fukunaga’s series, filled with striking visuals of a strewn Louisiana and its equally tattered characters, the more I think of the film Memories of Murder, a great South Korean crime procedural from 2003. In that film, also filled with spare, disturbing visuals, the chaotic personalities of the detectives on the case ended up as a detriment to solving the serial murders. The messiness of the crime mixed with the macabre tone of the detectives ended with an unsolved case. True Detective may owe much to that fine drama, stylistically and narratively, but let us hope the last two episodes provide us with the answers we crave, offering a clear conclusion to these enigmatic people.
