True Detective: episode recapsTelevisionSo our duo have patched things up – for now – and are hot on the killer's trail. But what did you make of the heavy hints that things won't turn out well for Rust and Marty?Spoiler alert: we are recapping True Detective after UK transmission. Please don't read on if you haven't watched episode seven. If you have seen further ahead in the series, please do not leave spoilers.
Read Gwilym's episode six recap here.
As anyone familiar with the HBO dramas of the past decade will tell you, the "penultimate episode" is the new "series finale". Where once television's showrunners would allow their various narrative concoctions to simmer through to the final episode, now things tend to come to the boil a little sooner. The Sopranos creator David Chase started this trend, saving many of his most notable departures for the penultimate episodes of seasons (remember that excruciating car journey into the woods in Long Term Parking?) while, on The Wire, David Simon resolved season-long investigations, leaving the final episodes free for reflection (often through the show's signature montages). And Game of Thrones… well, we all know what happened in Game of Thrones' season-three penultimate episode.
True Detective's After You've Gone doesn't go quite as far as those shows in its adherence to the rule. Granted, it's an episode that resolves the show's central mystery – the identity of the "scarred man" – but much of the hour is about laying groundwork. The many pieces of the series are being shunted closer together in anticipation and we get the reunion of Rust and Cohle (with the latter following the former to his mysterious storage locker. It is there that the true extent of Cohle's obsession with the case is laid out for us in full, the locker containing a collage of maps, newspaper clippings and strange wicker sculptures. It's with these props that Cohle argues that a systemic "sprawl" of child abuse and murder across southern Louisiana is clearly linked to the Tuttle family, who we learn have historic roots in the state. Cohle paints a picture of a family still partaking in the antic rituals of old Louisiana, donning robes and animal masks. "A very rural sense of mardi gras", though with a very dark underbelly.
A vast, overreaching conspiracy of this nature is a tough sell, particularly to Hart, who still feels bitterness over the way his partnership with Cohle came undone in 2002. "If you were drowning I'd throw you a fucking barbell," he tells Cohle early on. Cohle's response is to play up his and Hart's culpability: earlier in the series Cohle described the pair as "bad men who keep the other bad men from the door", but in this instance they have failed. "You have a debt," he says to Hart. More to the point, Cohle needs Hart – he can access the police archives. And it's Hart who makes the real headway with the case here, digging up a lost relative of Reggie Ledoux and discovering that Steve Geraci, one of the officers from 1995, may have been involved in the coverup of Marie Fontenot's death. When Rust concedes he's impressed by his partner's work, Hart's reply underlines the power shift in their relationship. "High praise from a bartender," he says.
Being able to assert his dominance over Cohle is a massive boon, but what really triggers Hart's recommitment to the cause is viewing the videotape of Fontenot's murder, swiped by Cohle during a raid of one of Tuttle's mansions. The tape was the piece of evidence that assured Cohle that this grand conspiracy wasn't all in his head - and rids Hart of his last scintilla of doubt over the veracity of his erstwhile partner's claims. We don't actually see the acts perpetrated on the tape, only Marty's tortured reaction to them and that's consistent with the rest of True Detective, a show which has seemed remarkably uninterested in the sort of gratuitous nastiness seen on other shows (I'm looking at you, The Following). Later in the episode we glimpse the event that triggered Marty's decision to leave the force: the discovery of a baby in a microwave, but all we see is an out-of-focus white blob., That brief image is stomach-churning enough but creepier still is the scene where Rust and Marty interview Miss Dolores, who did domestic work for Reverend Tuttle's father, Sam. She's quiet and reticent when answering questions but her mood shifts when Cohle asks her about Carcosa. "It's time," she says, echoing Ledoux's garbled utterings in The Secret Fate Of All Life. Her strange, trance-like state is deeply unsettling.
Less convincing was the reveal of the scarred man, who, it turns out, was the guy mowing the lawn of the Tuttle school way back in episode three/1995 (though back then his scars were obscured by a beard). While the series creator Nic Pizzolato has done a tidy job of subverting crime procedural tropes throughout True Detective's run, this feels like a lapse into cliche (the scarred man saying ominous things to no-one in particular –"my family's been here a long, long time" – to the use of the "discordant music box" soundtrack. It's a scene that, to me, feels beneath what True Detective aspires to, given how artfully the show has depicted an unsettling sense of shared complicity and a world in a state of permanent decay. Part of me hopes it's a red herring of sorts, and that the finale has a little more shade and ambiguity.
So, what else can we expect from next week's final instalment? Will Rust and Marty get their man, or would that be far too tidy a resolution for a show like True Detective? I'm sure you, like me, noticed the heavy hints this week of impending doom for the pair, with Maggie concerned Marty's visit to her house was a "goodbye" and Rust speaking ominously of finding closure on the case before "getting on to something else". Even if Hart and Cohle do manage to close the case, there's very little awaiting them on the other side. Their lives, as depicted in a crushing montage, are pitiably lonely: Rust drinks himself into a stupor and Marty has no relationship with his kids, and sits at home browsing Match.com. You wonder whether going out in some triumphant blaze of glory (maybe something like the shootout in The Secret Fate of All Life but, you know, real) might be the best solution for both of them.
Loose threads and other observations
Miss Dolores says that the scarred man is Sam Tuttle's illegitimate grandson and that his surname is Childless. Slate did some sleuthing and dug up the audition video for an "Errol Childress" (The video itself has, sadly, now been taken down). Related: Steve Geraci mentioned a Ted Childress, who was the former sheriff of the parish that dealt with the Marie Fontenot case.
I'm still a little puzzled as to why Dora Lange and the 2010 murder victim were displayed so publicly by the killer, given how the rest of the abuse has been so secretive. Any ideas?
That scene where Cohle broke into Tuttle's house dressed as a ninja was very daft, but definitely consistent with his character.
Circle allusions update: Cohle describes his life as a "circle of violence and degradation" while Hart wonders aloud whether Cohle has alienated every other person in his life, "and then come back to me in the rotation", suggesting a purgatorial cycle of sorts. And then there's the scarred man, mowing the lawn in a circle at the episode's end.
Given that we've now reached the last episode, I can finally pore through Vulture's extensive True Detective glossary, which I've avoided so far for fear of spoilers.
Quote of the week
"Time has his way with us all … looks like you must have pissed him off." – Marty remarks on Rust's appearance.
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