My Review of True Detective Season 1

Some Deep Thoughts on a Deep Show

Apr 27, 2024

Okay, True Detective: you finally got me.

Time, as Matthew McConaughey’s tormented philosopher-dick Rust Cohle (get it? Rust and coal, decay and darkness) reminds us in the show, is a flat circle, which is why I was stunned to realize this show debuted ten years ago. I thought it came out a few years ago! The writer and creator, 48-year old Nic Pizzolatto, is an acquaintance of some friends and is apparently “based,” so I always meant to watch his show but life, uh, finds a way to get in the way.

In my defense, I am not a TV watcher anymore. I used to be a television garbage can, consuming whatever was on, including reality shows. This stopped when I started having babies and I became much more picky with my time investment in stupid series. After The Sopranos ended, I quit watching live TV. The only shows since then I’ve watched in their entirety, and only by binging them after they came out, are: Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, and The Crown.

Whenever I have to watch a live TV event, like the Oscars, the commercials are like my kryptonite. I can’t believe anyone watches live TV—the commercials are like pouring battery acid into my eyes.

Anyway, my reluctance to commit to a show until I’m ready is why I skipped True Detective when it first arrived.

And now, here are my thoughts, organized by theme.

The Heroic Father: Vigilante and Martyr

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!

I really loved the show, after initially having my doubts. But I was confused by Rust’s character at first—why was he so broken, and so obsessed with detective work, even beyond the trauma caused by the death of his two-year-old daughter? What was actually driving him to return, against all odds, to cracking—and then reopening—the Dora Lange murder case they’d already solved?

By the finale I realized what the main theme of the series is. Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rust both embody the powerful instinct of a heroic father, but are handicapped by an inability to express it directly. Unable to fight their own internal demons and put fatherly love into practice in their own families, their father instinct manifests as a fight against external monsters who hurt women and children.

Marty and Rust also share another core trait: they are decent men who have each failed their families and themselves in different ways. They share a deep love for their daughters, but failed, in the end, to protect them from harm. As Marty admits, he was mostly guilty of “the crime of inattention.”

Marty’s daughter, who at a young age makes inappropriate X-rated drawings and plays “gangbang” with her Barbies, grows up to dabble in Goth sluttiness and underage sex. Is this foreshadowing Marty’s knowledge that children are being exposed to sex and are living in a society where some men view them as prey?

I’m not sure, but this Barbie set up his girls made was creepy AF:

How did Nic Pizzolatto predict what we would learn after “Pizzagate” and Epstein? How does the art in the show call to mind some of the pieces in Tony Podesta’s interesting art collection?

These are two of the real works of art Tony Podesta owned, which remind me of the twisted wall art the show’s depraved child killer leaves on the walls in his haunts:

And here’s a mural from the show:

Rust’s backstory is much worse, however. His toddler was killed on her tricycle by a speeding car. Both men’s marriages implode due to their character flaws and inability to process grief, anger, and lust.

Both men also drink excessively. Marty is prone to out of control rage. Rust is self-destructive, open to dangerous drugs, and is haunted by a death wish.

And yet the thing that drives them both, the unbreakable string that connects them, in spite of themselves, through the epic 17-year scope of the case, is their profound need to rescue children from a malevolent presence that refuses to quit.

Chronology is Destiny

“He uses antlers in all of his decorating”

The chronology of the show begins in 1995 with the bizarre ritualistic murder of a young woman named Dora Lange, who is found nude and tied to a tree, crowned with deer antlers.

In their immediate hunt for the murderer, Marty and Rust are stymied by the limits of official police work and essentially resort to becoming vigilantes.

When they finally track down Reggie Ledoux, the loathsome man they’ve been searching for, Marty executes Ledoux point-blank in a fit of fatherly rage.

Marty’s rage is justified. He’d just found two kidnapped and obviously raped children locked in a cage on the property; the boy is already dead. How else was he supposed to react?

Rust reacts with begrudging pride. “You finally committed to something.”

When their paths cross again seventeen years later in the show’s blockbuster finale, we will learn how deep Marty’s commitment goes—and it goes all the way.

Ledoux, moments before his untimely end.

The two detectives conspire with each other to hide the true events of that day so they don’t get in trouble, and remarkably, both stick to the story verbatim for 17 years, loyal to each other to the end, even though by 2012 they are deeply estranged.

The Dora Lange case is closed with Ledoux’s death. Seven years go by uneventfully.

But one day in 2002, Rust is bracing a crying junkie who shot two people during a robbery. He has become a merciless extractor of confessions from murderers.

The junkie tells Rust he didn’t catch the real killer back in 1995—Ledoux didn’t kill Dora Lange. The “Yellow King” is still on the loose.

Rust learns that day after the junkie spilled the beans, he got a mysterious phone call and then killed himself in his jail cell. It’s a moment that seems to perfectly predict the Jeffrey Epstein case. (Although as we all know, Epstein did not kill himself).

This is the turning point of the series; a backwoods junkie has reignited the fever in Rust and he becomes obsessed in 2002, once again, with the Lange case and all the random unsolved missing children reports in the area. Could they be related? Is there a serial killer? A child sacrifice cult? He goes on his own hunt for clues, discovering more disturbing murals inside Dora Lange’s abandoned high school.

He connects the murderer to the chain of Christian schools funded by a powerful blow-dried TV preacher named Tuttle. He interviews the father of the kidnapped boy he rescued from Ledoux’s disgusting sex lair. Billy was already dead when Marty found him, and his broken father tells Rust how his mother went mad after her little boy disappeared, and thought she could hear him calling to her “from under the water.”

It will take another 10 years for the case to call to Rust and wake him up from deep under his own sea of denial.

The partnership comes to a crashing halt in 2002 when Marty has another affair and his wife takes her revenge by seducing the vulnerable Rust and then telling Marty about it. Rust leaves town, Maggie takes the children and leaves Marty, and both men are adrift in the wilderness.

By 2012, both their personal lives and careers have been torpedoed and they are each estranged from polite society and their families. Marty quit the force after seeing a charred infant that was cooked by a junkie in a microwave and doesn’t speak to his children or his ex-wife, Maggie.

Rust quit police work and fled to Alaska to drink for ten years after not being allowed to pursue the case to its conclusion—and betraying his partner.

In 2012, when the finale is set, Rust has gone all in on solving every missing child case along the Louisiana coast and finally put together all the pieces in what turns out to be a massive child sex cult with tentacles that reach all the way to the top of the state government.

He approaches Marty, his sworn enemy, his estranged partner, for help finally solving it for good, and Marty needs almost no persuading to drop everything and join the quest.

In 2014, the idea of a secret child sex cult involving powerful politicians seemed like an outlandish tale, but to viewers in 2024 it is of course prescient and chilling. Why yes, there are real child sex cults in America, only they’re happening along the border and in Tony Podesta’s basement and anywhere the very powerful seem untouchable and above the law. You don’t have to go to the abandoned swamps of the bayou to find the depraved masterminds—you just need to look at Epstein’s client lists.

But the shepherd can’t rest when he senses his flock is in danger. Marty and Rust may have mostly failed at real life, but they are still compelled to follow their heroes’ journey to its ultimate conclusion.

The Flat Circle: An Infernal Plane

I think the reason this single season of the show has stuck with so many people for so long, ten years later, is because it takes place over such a long time. 17 years is an epic scope for a one season TV series to pull off! The complex flashbacks and passing of time force you, the viewer to do some real work to follow along. You have to catalog what happened in 1995, and in 2002, and finally in the “present” of 2012, organizing the characters and details as they age and resurface. This time tracking invests you deeply and your brain performs a magic trick where somehow you feel like you’ve been watching the show for the full 17 years, and not just a single television season.

It’s worth nothing that TDS1 pulls off this magic trick in 8 episodes, while Breaking Bad covers just two years in 62 episodes.

In the most Nietzschean scene of the series, the 2012 Rust delivers his “time” soliloquy. He tells the new detectives (who are investigating him for a bizarre murder that looks suspiciously like the first Dora Lange murder) that “time is a flat circle.”

“Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again. You are reborn, but into the same life that you’ve always been born into. And that little girl and that little boy are gonna be in that room again and again, forever.”

He knows that even if he chases his circle to its origin point, abused children like the two he saved will always be in danger. Evil can never be defeated. The battle with it can never be won, victory and defeat will repeat themselves, ad infinitum.

The “flat circle” seems echoed in the symbol tattooed on the various cult victims in the show, which is also similar to the actual symbol “minor attracted persons” use to mean pedophilia.

The big baddie, Errol Childress himself, also refers to being caught in a flat circle of time when he tells his demented half-sister and lover Betty: “Now, Betty, I have very important work to do. My ascension removes me from the disc and the loop. I'm near final stage. Some mornings, I can see the infernal plane.”

Rust and he are both caught in a time loop—doomed to keep repeating the same patterns over and over.

In 2002, as Rust is revisiting the facts of the Lange killer, he goes back to the scene of the original murder. He stares at the circle of twigs still attached to the tree. A giant crown of thorns; a flat circle of death.

In a neat trick, the viewer becomes a silent version of Rust’s “tax man,” so called because his character is always carrying around a thick ledger full of case notes and drawings. By the series’ end, you end up with a thick ledger in your head of all the names and drawings and fragments you’re trying to piece together in real time—while you watch Rust and Marty doing the same.

Because only the viewer is privy to everything Rust knows, you also become his silent partner, a third “true detective” working the case along with him, pondering the colors of the clues. “A green-eared spaghetti monster! A parish lawn-mowing contract! A Yellow King and his scars!”

One of the rules I was taught in screenwriting classes was never to open with a flashback, but also that rules are meant to be broken. The first thing Pizzolatto does is throw all those rules out the window and the flashback structure works. It works also because the theme of the show is that time will repeat itself on a long enough scale.

As you rehash the events of 1995 with the ones in 2002 and 2012, you the viewer are forced into the flat circle of time—right along with the characters.

Time, in the end, is in control, and we are all just unwitting passengers.

The only way out for Rust is to find a way to break the flat circle—by punching a hole through it and finding a way out—either into the light, or the dark.

Redemption for the Little Priest and His Acolyte

The finale is an absolutely spellbinding, heart-pounding hour of storytelling. The two fathers finally achieve the divine redemption they’ve been seeking for years in the bowels of Hell as they face down Death himself. In this episode, the literary and historic references are as thick as the menacing antlers and branches that line the pathways into the cult’s secret underground temple, Carcosa.

While Rust the wild loner heads into the wild underworld alone to pursue his demon, Marty, the domesticated family man, heads into the house next to it. The Childress home is one of the greatest haunted houses ever committed to film.

What a set! The dilapidated Antebellum mansion is filled with trash, piled with horrors, and echoing with the memories of great evils committed there. We get an incestuous brother and his mentally retarded (inbred?) sister, piles of broken dolls, and a bedroom filled with bloodstained mattresses, a horror stench and trash.

As Rust pursues the true murderer, Erroll Childress (child + distress, get it?), into the bowels of his Hades-like chthonic lair, he is taunted by the killer’s voice calling him “little priest.” Here it all the Christian allegories fit together: Rust, the martyred shepherd, must descend into the underworld like Jesus redeeming the soul of his cousin, John the Baptist. Rust doesn’t turn back even though he is facing almost certain death at the end of the hellish lair.

This scene of course calls to mind the finale of Silence of the Lambs, when Detective Jodie Foster is trapped in a dark basement alone with trannie maniac James Gumm, unable to see, groping wildly for him as he hunts her.

The most interesting moment is when Rust, an atheist who has philosophized and medicated himself out of believing in God, looks up sees a vision of the center of the universe, right before he is attacked—a celestial splendor of stars.

The monster strikes, stabbing Rust in the gut and sending an ax into Marty’s chest. Just before Childress kills Marty, Rust saves him by shooting Childress in the head, the same way Marty killed Ledoux 17 years earlier. Interesting, Childress refers to Ledoux his “acolyte.”

Marty saves Rust by calling for help from the police who arrive a little too late to do much. Rust’s wound, the long knife to the stomach, underlines the Jesus allegory.

As the two men lay there together, a platonic Pietà at the foot of the evil King’s throne, light from the police flares illuminate the cavernous space through the perfectly circular opening in the roof of the fortress (a flat circle!).

Rust punches his hole through the circle.

This reminded me of the start of the series when Marty asked Rust the atheist why he has a cross in his apartment. Rust says its because he meditates on Jesus’s agony in the garden of Gethsemane and how Jesus was able to agree to let himself be sacrificed for mankind.

Then Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to them, “Sit here while I go over there and pray.”
He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.”
—Matthew 26: 36-38

Time is a flat circle; an infernal plane. But maybe it can be flipped, like a record. Below is darkness, above is light. All you have to do is punch your hole through it and ascend.

The finale is the neat tying up of that thread. Rust’s descent into the wild and unkempt reverse Garden of Gethsemane outside the evil fortress of Carcosa is where he, too, makes a deal with God to be sacrificed for the good of mankind if necessary.

Rust’s long, excruciating walk through the twisted tunnels of Carcosa, lined with barbed branches, crowns of antlers and thorns, also calls to mind the Stations of the Cross: Jesus’s journey to his own death. Rust, the “little priest,” is speedrunning his own scourging and crucifixion.

Later in the hospital, Rust tells Marty that in those final moments he could feel his daughter’s love next to him, real and warm and solid. Dying, he finally found what he’d always been fruitlessly longing for—heaven and eternal life.

He’s angry for surviving—”I’m not supposed to be here, Marty.” He was supposed to die, in his mind, to earn the redemption.

In the hospital, Rust’s long hair and white hospital gown make the Jesus metaphor explicit.

The last line of the show is surprisingly upbeat. Rust tells Marty that everything comes down to a battle between good and evil, light and dark. Against all odds, Rust’s encounter with his daughter’s love in the beyond has burned away his nihilism and he says, “the light is winning.” The rust has been bled out of Rust, and he now shining clean.

Rust, the “little priest,” has redeemed himself and his acolyte, Marty Hart. An unexpectedly happy ending on a show filled with true horrors.

Will the circle be unbroken, by and by Lord by and by?
There's a better way to live now, we can have it if we try.
I was born down in the valley where the sun refused to shine
but now I'm climbing - up to the highlands

Gonna make all those mountains mine.

—The Carter Family, “Can the Circle Be Unbroken”

The End.

Thanks for reading and for subscribing! Tell me what you thought of the show in the comments!

—Peachy

Peachy Keenan's Extremely Domestic

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