Spoiler alert: this blog details events in the fourth episode of the third season of True Detective, which airs on Sunday nights on HBO in the US, and Mondays in the UK on Sky Atlantic at 2am and 9pm.
We’re four episodes in and the third outing of True Detective has settled into its rhythm. Is it working? Well, it’s an improvement on season two. The plot makes sense; it has returned, appealingly, to the southern gothic of the first outing, and its stars are actually able to deliver their lines. But I’m not sure it will meet that first season’s heady level of quality. It is much more conservative in its ambitions, with a storyline that has lost its existential layer, and which instead relies on the well-worn Satanic Panic narratives of 80s America. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.
‘You’re this grown man with no agency of his own’
In 1980, Hays and West are questioning the Roman Catholic priest who took the picture of Will with his arms folded and eyes closed in prayer. (The pose represents “rebirth and innocence in Christ”, the priest claims.) He has an alibi and isn’t a suspect, for now. The detectives also find out that Lucy told the priest she had a mystery aunt; the dolls were made by Patty Faber, “a good woman”, apparently, and that Hays used to be an altar boy (West was a Baptist). West and Hays visit Faber, who tells them a black man with a dead eye bought 10 dolls from her at a fair. He told her they were for his nieces and nephews. She couldn’t remember any other details but assumed he lived across the tracks “where the rest of them live”, near Davis Junction. It’s another not so subtle nod to the racism that Hays faces on the job.
In 1990, Hays comes home to tell Amelia about his successful meeting with West, who has offered him a spot on his task force. We know this doesn’t work out in the end, but he is beaming at the prospect of doing proper police work again. Amelia is still annoyed about Hays’s reaction to her book. She dresses him down and tells him he needs to take responsibility for his actions. It’s a pretty abrasive exchange in which neither comes out looking any better. Are the cracks in their relationship ravines? Was Hays’s vision from the last episode a harbinger of something darker around the corner?
Back in 1980, Hays and West are crossing the tracks to Davis Junction. They’re hunting this one-eyed doll buyer, but are not getting much help. The liquor store manager eventually sends them in the direction of a Sam Whitehead at a trailer park where a couple of cops – especially featuring a white one – are unwelcome. It all kicks off when West starts to question Whitehead, so they duck into his trailer to avoid an escalation. Whitehead tells them he was at the park on the night of the seventh and that he works at the Hoyt chicken plant, as well as hauling freight and trapping. The crowd outside Whitehead’s trailer chuck a rock through the duo’s cop car and they leave, tails between legs.
“I didn’t see no one-eyed brother”
In 2015, Hays visits his son, who is now a detective himself. He wants him to look up some people, including Roland West, to help with his own “investigation”. Reworking the case is his way of staying alive, he says. Henry reluctantly agrees to help. In 1990, Hays has another meeting with West, who has climbed the greasy pole. The meeting’s other guests are the major and the state’s attorney general, who are warm as can be towards West but cold shoulder Hays, apparently for his – yet to be disclosed – outburst(s). West is firmly told that his task force needs to vindicate the original conviction. Hays is told that if he can toe the line he could find himself back on major crimes. “We’re not going to do any of that shit they just said?” asks Hays. “Wasn’t planning on it,” retorts West. The old gang is back together … or is West setting Hays up as a fall guy? That pained glance he gave him behind his back suggested it.
Ten years earlier, West and Hays are at a service presided over by the Catholic priest. They stalked the room as they did in the town hall meeting, scanning for suspicious congregants. “I didn’t see no one-eyed brother, but there’s some serious ass up in here,” says West, who uses the opportunity to come on to a pious churchgoer. Is this his road to Damascus moment? The priest is very keen to have Hays confess, but he’s not game. The priest tells him he doesn’t know any parishioners with dead eyes, and certainly not any black ones in segregated small-town Arkansas.
Later that evening, Amelia and Hays have a dinner where she does some digging about the case and talks about her time in California. (“I used to be something of a mess,” she says before quaffing a gin and tonic.) Hays tells her that he found the place in the woods where Will died and that he thinks he and his sister were meeting someone. “There was almost an element of affection in it?” asks Amelia, referring to the toys that were found close to where Will died. Hays isn’t convinced. Meanwhile, West is at the Sawhorse dive bar where Tom Purcell has been getting drunk and disorderly. The bouncers filled Purcell in after he started a fight with the owner – Lucy Purcell works at the bar and Tom thought she was having sex with the owner. West offers him his couch, and their unlikely friendship begins.
‘I want to know the whole story”
Hays pays a visit to the documentary maker, Elisa, who shows Hays the new evidence she’s uncovered. The remains of Dan O’Brien, the kids’ uncle, have been found in a shallow grave somewhere in Missouri. She won’t go further, but tells him that she isn’t trying to lay the blame at his door. Back in 1980, Kent is on local radio putting fuel on the fire of the raging moral panic that’s seizing the town. Hays and West are very unimpressed, but their mood changes when the FBI say it has a lead: there’s a DNA match on the bike that Hays found and it’s the “Black Sunday kid”, Freddy Burns of the VW gang.
Meanwhile, Woodard is spotted talking to some kids by the redneck who stomped him last episode. He calls the boys up to dish out a second round of ass whooping but things play out slightly differently this time. When they chase Woodard back to his house he sets up some anti-personnel mines around his property and whips out that bag of guns he got out last week. It’s like Home Alone meets Predator.
In 2015, Hays is having visions again. He’s sitting in his study and is suddenly surrounded by North Vietnamese soldiers. “I felt like I made all y’all sick,” he says to himself, speaking about his family rather than the platoon. “Like I poisoned you.” He mutters something about not wanting to be alive without Amelia, and that he wants to find West to tell him about O’Brien. He spots a car outside. Is someone watching him? It look as if his dementia is really taking hold.
We end with the interrogation of Freddy Burns in 1980, who tells the detectives that he stole Will’s bike from him after he came up to Devil’s Den while looking for his sister. Hays hits him with the prison rape threat and they let him stew. No one thinks he actually killed Will but they want the whole story. I have a funny feeling Freddy won’t be able to give them that.
Notes and observations
There’s a theory knocking around that Amelia is the killer and uses Hays to avoid capture. That scene where he pleads with her to stop “talking shit about him” or “he’ll start crying” shows the vulnerability needed for him to be manipulated, possibly.
Mr Whitehead’s “come watch these nefarious men and what they’re trying to do to me” might be the most eloquent way of preventing a wrongful arrest that’s ever been uttered.
Did anyone else feel the scene in the car with Tom Purcell using the N-word feel laboured? Four episodes in, I think everyone gets that small-town Arkansas in the 80s could be very, very racist.
Elisa says she is alone when Hays visits her in the hotel, but there’s a ruffled bed and two empty wine glasses. Could Henry, who knew her first name, be the visitor?
Who was Lucy shouting at on the phone when Amelia popped round to drop the kids’ things off? Lucy admits to “running around on Tom”, having “the soul of a whore” and to treating the children very poorly.
Did anyone spot the white man hidden among the Vietnamese soldiers in Hays’s vision?
