True Detective‘s Season Finale Brings Good News and Bad News

The good news is, Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali) found Julie Purcell. The bad news is, he doesn’t realize it.

Anyone who went into the True Detective finale feeling nervous about the show’s potential to walk through all the doors it had opened in one hour—you were right. There just isn’t enough bandwidth for that. For instance, we don’t know whether the mystery of Julie Purcell’s disappearance will come to light or die with Wayne’s faltering memory. We also don’t know what happened to Amelia (Carmen Ejogo). We don’t know what went down between Wayne and his daughter, Rebecca. We don’t really know what’s going on with Elisa (Sarah Gadon), the documentary filmmaker. Sometimes unanswered questions don’t feel like unfinished business. But these ones do. Is Season Three of True Detective a meta-treatise on the elusiveness of “closure?” Perhaps. The writing has generally favored the philosophical. Does it work? Not entirely, for me.

At the same time, there’s a strangely ponderous explain-athon delivered by Junius Watts, the mysterious one-eyed black man who turns out to have been the man casing Hays’ house in his car. He spells out everything that happened—his employer’s tragic family history; Hoyt’s daughter Isabel losing it after the death of her daughter Mary; how Mary had looked so much like Julie that Isabel became fixated on Julie and asked to adopt her; how Lucy had consented to be paid to let the distraught woman play with her daughter and how Will’s death had been an awful accident; how Isabel had drugged Julie out of her mind on lithium until the kid no longer recalled that the Hoyts weren’t her family; and how she’d been locked in the “pink room” in the basement for years until Junius finally helped her escape. The way it’s done makes you wonder how this case could possibly have remained unsolved for a quarter century. It’s so doofy. None of it makes sense and no one is set up to be enough of an evil mastermind to pull it off.