True Detective - Season Finale - Recap: Everybody's Got A Choice
Recap video and review of True Detective - Season Finale - Form and Void:
Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, through the vessel of Sherlock Holmes, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." Even though it's only been two months, it feels like a lifetime since attentive viewers everywhere made True Detective their collective obsession, dissecting every clue and nuance, looking for potential meaning as if searching for key to all existence. And I was one of those people, trying to puzzle out the possibility of the supernatural in a work that only rarely dabbled in magic realism, and instead remained rooted in Southern Gothic traditions. "Form and Void" is a season finale that illustrates that sometimes, there is no Yellow King. There is no Carcosa. Sometimes, there's just a madman...who bangs his sister and keeps his father strapped to a bed in a shed out back, and who makes it his business to murder children because the voices in his head told him to. Is this a needlessly reductive way of phrasing it? Probably. But we never got the reveal the world seemed to be expecting. No big bombshell surrounding one of Marty's daughters, no big twist involving Maggie's father, or one of the cops whom we've met over these eight episodes. Hell, we didn't even get the character deaths people were predicting, as both Marty (Woody Harrelson) and Rust (Matthew McConaughey) made it out of the finale alive. And yet, of course it happened this way. Because as insufferably worn-out as it might be to say, True Detective was never about the destination. It was always about the journey. And damn, what a journey.
Credit: HBO
The episode plays out like one long, isolated nightmare, with a denouement that acts like that foggy feeling you get after you wake up. Nothing is really resolved in the traditional sense. The bad guys who were theorized to have been behind the entire criminal conspiracy at the root of the murders get away. But then, that's kind of a comment on the illusory nature of justice. It's visited upon some, but not all; and yet, it's better to nab some than none, no? And so it is here, with Marty and Rust piecing together the identity of the culprit after strong-arming Steve Geraci (Michael Harney) into giving them the info they need. The killer they've been searching for all this time is one Errol William Childress, a redneck nightmare who's as cold and calculating (shifting fluidly between an effortless British accent and his natural bayou brogue) as he is off-his-rocker, living on the fringes of society in a musty hellhole of a house alongside his sister-wife (and with his formerly abusive dad chained up in a shed out back, for good measure). The house is a marvel of production design, its low ceiling conflicting with the endless stacks of books and other bric-a-brac, a cluster of air fresheners forming a kind of twisted chandelier, and clothes of all different sizes and styles lining the floor, implying that all manner of victims have graced this terrible abode. Thus, Rust and Marty's task grows more ominous: while Childress is still just a man, his created a Carcosa of his own design that excludes all outsiders. Any that trespass are immediately taken off-guard by a sense of displacement, since, like the play in Robert Chambers's The King In Yellow, this is a place no sane man could hope to know without going mad.
Credit: HBO
The nightmarish maze in which Marty and Rust venture to find Childress is a gnarled, twisted labyrinth of branches that protrude like the trees in a Tim Burton movie, with dark corridors leading into dead-ends and darker halls. The maze is reflective of the circular motif, from the tattoos on the backs of the Yellow King followers, to the idea that everything that has happened has already happened and will happen again. Death is inevitable, and so it's with a grim expectation of the worst that we find Rust coming face-to-face with Childress at the maze's center. Rust is stabbed, but he's able to continue fighting for his life, nailing the killer with four straight headbutts to the skull (it should be noted that the visual of Rust being held aloft by the knife stuck in his gut is a terrifying visual that is brilliantly captured). Marty intervenes by gets a hatchet to his chest. It's looking like the end for both of the detectives, until Rust lets off one final gunshot that finds its mark right in the back of Childress's skull. The cops arrive to clean up the mess, which seems to be the only real function Papania (Tory Kittles) and Gilbough (Michael Potts) ultimately served, other than to provide the scenario for the framing narrative that carried us through the first six episodes. Thinking on it, I kind of missed the frame story of those episodes, as the narration provided us with a deeper understanding of Marty and Rust, in that they would leave certain things out of their recollections, while inserting other details to cover for what really happened. Of course, I long for those episodes, knowing that the frame story was a narrative device that could never have lasted any longer than it did. The story would have to catch up to the relative present, with Marty and Rust putting it all on the line to fix their own mistake.
Credit: HBO
And yet, while both men expected to die from their mission, neither does. Marty is relieved that it's all over, particularly after his family comes to visit him. As Maggie (Michelle Monaghan) holds his hand, Marty breaks down, insisting that everything is okay. There are plenty of ways to read Marty's breakdown: relief, guilt over Rust's condition, happiness that his 17-year case is close, sadness over everything he's lost in closing it. Yet there isn't any other way to read Rust's reaction, as he straight-up tells Marty he isn't supposed to still be here. It's not simply survivor's guilt, but also a deep sense of loss over what he might have had if he'd died. After admitting a while back that he believed death to be the end, he recounts to Marty his near-death experience, in which he could feel his late daughter, and even his father, waiting for him in the unknowable beyond. Rust tells Marty he'd "let go" and prepared himself to pass on -- which is the exact moment that he woke up, and felt the tremendous sense of loss at having that peace ripped away from him. Rust has long been a man for whom the world holds no import, and in preparing himself to die on his mission, and resigning himself to the inevitability of that death, he never once considers that things might turn out differently. That there could be a different end to him than being killed at the hand of the Yellow King.
Credit: HBO
McConaughey is absolutely devastating in this scene, and he pretty much locks his Emmy win with his performance here. It goes so much farther than the tears: McConaughey portrays Rust as a man suffering under the weight of simple existence. And it's an utterly winning portrayal -- one that Harrelson nearly matches, by playing the yin to McConaughey's yang. True Detective may have been a character study-as-detective drama, but one could easily argue it's about the friendship between two men bound together by their mistakes. Really, the best moments of the show are those that explore this partnership and, later, this friendship. And that's exactly what it is as the series comes to a close, as Marty pulls Rust out of his funk by recalling a story he once made up at dinner about looking at the stars to make it through any hardship. Arm-in-arm, Marty and Rust leave the hospital, and you could be forgiven for mistaking this for an old western about two old lawmen finding affirmation and strength in one another, despite the increasingly savage nature of the world in which they live.
Credit: HBO
The season finale to True Detective essentially bucked every trend that one might have expected going in. There's no big twist, no last act reveal, no supernatural mysticism anchoring the whole thing and revealing that maybe the killer wasn't crazy after all. Nope. True Detective succeeded not simply by being a show of immaculate composition behind-the-scenes and in front of the camera, but by being a series whose biggest twist was that it was ultimately about the simple battle between good and evil.