True Detective promises to lift heavy objects but avoids its heaviest problems



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Mahershala Ali
Screen Capture: True Detective / HBO

"The Final Country" has the impression of making an incursion into the role of Becca Hays (Deborah Ayorinde) while Wayne leads her to college, his truck loaded with furniture and boxes. The absence of Becca, an adult, threatens the third season and begins long before Wayne loses her at Walmart. This is a final point that links Wayne to Tom Purcell, whose daughter disappeared at age 8 and repudiated him by phone a decade later. Strategically reserved until the end of the season, Becca's appearance seems important. Perhaps for a future viewer who can get off the season in a long sip, it will be be important.

Deborah Ayorinde, Mahershala Ali
Screen Capture: True Detective / HBO

When Wayne becomes sentimental (and scared), Becca tells his father to stop worrying and start decompressing. "You'll feel better once you lift something heavy," she says, knowing it well enough to understand the truth. Then Becca will disappear again (until the end of next week, presumably). Without the actor's fault, he is not a character; it is an accessory on which to hang the feelings of Wayne Hays and his fear. Always his fear.

Drive

Mahershala Ali did an incredible job embodying a man plunged into a mystery half-conspiracy and half-missing memories, a man passed from one decade to the next without warning. Whether they speak or keep quiet, Hays' expressions are superimposed and complex, even when what he expresses rests largely on a carefully circumscribed fear: fear of intruders, fear for his life, fear for his family, fear for his lost daughters – his and Tom's.

Above all, throughout the season, he fears for his spirit and his memory. He is afraid of not remembering enough to solve the mystery. he is afraid that the mystery is something better forgotten. He is afraid of the empty space in his memory and answers that go beyond this empty space.

This fear – deadly terror and beyond – is best conveyed belatedly in "The Final Country", after Hays and West slipped into the sedan towards the detective's home in retirement. After a fake failed confrontation with the pilot (an effective ploy to get the car's license plate number), Wayne turns to find his partner gone, with all the rest. He is not alone in his street; he is alone in a vast devastating nothingness that extends on all sides.

Mahershala Ali
Screen Capture: True Detective / HBO

Seeing a spark of light at the edge of this nothingness, Wayne Hays attacks him and enters the 1990s, watching from afar his young being burning the bloody suit at the death of Harris James. And while 2015, Wayne is watching the scene, the 1990 Wayne is looking anxiously, feeling that someone is watching. It's a loop. For Wayne Hays, time is not a flat circle. It's a labyrinth and a monster inside.

With only one episode, the nature of the monster becomes clearer, but even here the writer / creator Nic Pizzolatto fires a few shots.

There is some exaltation and some terror to watch West and Hays reverse the situation by putting the targeted traffic stop. There is some sadness in seeing a well-heeled white man, as sure of himself as in his skin, played by two or three policemen looking for an excuse. Refuse to comply, look for a weaponThese are the offenses that West and Hays fabricate to justify what they planned to do from the beginning. The metaphor is captured by Harris's words as he kneels, handcuffed to a pole in the solitary old barn where they try to defeat the truth. "I can not breathe, I can not breathe," he coughs, pleading for his wrists to be released and abandoned.

Scott Shepherd, Stephen Dorff and Mahershala Ali
Screen Capture: True Detective / HBO

But in the end, this scene unfolds. Harris James, bloody and breathable, does not succumb to vicious blows. He does not beg his life, not really. Until the end, James argues out of his handcuffs and attacks Hays, forcing West to shoot. And shoot. And shoot.

It's a small piece of land, but a big flaw. You can almost hear the writer saying that these men did not leave to kill Harris James. They wanted to interrogate him. They wanted to "ask difficultas we did before. But his death is his own action, a choice they were forced to make, and not a natural consequence of their violence.

This is not an ambiguity. It's not poetic. It's narrative cowardice.

Amelia Hays can face the guilt of her husband, even if the writer who created them can not quite. Getting up in the dark and finding Wayne dressed in his boxer, burning the rest of his clothes in a barrel, Amelia is able to understand the scene and its terrible implications and simply say, "In the morning we have to talk. Do you want to talk to me in the morning? And when a mysterious call interrupts this conversation, she understands Wayne and his fear, well enough to let him go one last time.

Carmen Ejogo, Mahershala Ali
Screen Capture: True Detective / HBO

While Wayne asks Amelia for permission, knowing that going out of the house would kill her marriage but still be doing even greater damage, Mahershala Ali shows another submerged fear that characterizes Wayne Hays. He is calm, calm, and firm, but even if he asks, his fear settles in his eyes: she fears not to trust him one last time, or perhaps can not.

She does. She has to do it, if only in narrative, because a woman who has woken up in the middle of the night in search of burning evidence about her husband knows how dramatic her situation is, even if she does not know Why. And she knows that the rest of their lives depends on this phone call.

Amelia, who wrote her first book about Purcell children, believes she is the guardian of their story. It's Margaret (Emily Wilson), Lucy Purcell's best friend (and another True detective so insubstantial, it barely exists), to emphasize that this is not the case. Everyone has a story and everyone thinks they are the best steward in their history. "Someone has to stay," Margaret told Amelia, explaining why she had stayed in the neighborhood even as Tom had moved out. "Someone has to remember." The two women are fighting over this Halloween snapshot of Purcell children (and two adult ghosts watching them) with revealing determination.

Halloween snapshot of Purcell children, in the shadow of ghosts
Screen Capture: True Detective / HBO

Elisa, with her many interview topics and research, thinks she is the one telling this story. She had never even noticed that Wayne Hays had played long games, tying her to half-narrated stories, while he was patiently waiting for her. At the very moment she suspects – that the disappearances are leading to a trafficking network for pedophiles, with a connection to the first season – he has done so.
By the time she divulged the information he was waiting for (his finding that the disappearances were back to a human smuggling ring, with a tie to return to season one), he did so. "I'm tired of walking in the graveyard," Wayne says. "The story is over for me."

The story of Wayne Hays is not over. It's next week and I hope the final will have a lot of weight that previous episodes have spread. J & # 39; hope; we will all feel better once we lift something heavy. This week it was a bit the same: a miasma of uncertainty beautifully shot and beautifully played – not the heady and complex ambiguity of the imponderable, but the lax indecision of a writer who does not really know what what he means.

Observations lost

  • "You have the impression of dropping Tom. That's how you get it, Roland, "says Wayne to his partner … the same partner who had told him," That's our job. It's not there to make you right. "
  • Despite Elisa's theory, it seems obvious that Julie was mistaken for "Miss Isabel" Hoyt, who lost her husband and daughter in a car accident three years before Julie's disappearance.
  • A sad but not very surprising ending for poor Tom Purcell, who worked so hard to get out of this hole.
  • "You manipulators, selfish, fucking shit …" Roland does not have to finish his sentence, because they both know where it's going, and because "crazy people" told him so.
  • For those who have not recognized the voice over the phone, it's Michael Rooker named Edmund Hoyt.

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