TV REVIEW: No mystery - Season 3 of 'True Detective' is good
Stephen Dorff and Mahershala Ali star in season 3 of True Detective.
I was cautiously optimistic about Season 3 of True Detective, Nic Pizzolatto’s haunting crime anthology that launched the McConaissance into higher orbit but then crashed underneath its own weight with a forgettable Season 2. There was no way True Detective would’ve continued if Season 3 also flopped, and so they played it safe, replicating much of the story structure and relationship dynamics in Season 1.
Season 3 begins with Arkansas State Police detective Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali) investigating the kidnapping and murder of siblings Will and Julie Purcell. He’s aided (and sometimes impeded) by his partner, Roland West (Stephen Dorff), and a strong cast of supporting characters who pull the trail of clues in all sorts of sprawling directions, including Hays’ wife and true crime writer, Amelia (Carmen Ejogo), and their son, Henry (Ray Fisher), who is also a state police detective.
(Side note: There hasn’t been a run of outstanding projects quite like Mahershala Ali’s in quite some time. From House of Cards to Moonlight to Luke Cage to Green Book to True Detective, his ability to dominate and transition easily between film and prestige TV has been pretty incredible.)
Like Season 1, the investigation spans several decades and generations, from the initial disappearance of the Purcell children in 1980, the re-opening of the case in 1990 and the re-examining of the case with a documentary film crew in 2015. The similarities continue: we learn very quickly that the case never reached its proper conclusion, Hays and West’s partnership deteriorates at some point during the investigation, a greater conspiracy is implied, new clues surface and force them to re-unite, and stories about a monster in the woods – this time, a one-eyed black man – and a mythological setting – a pink castle – are a running theme.
Mamie Gummer as Lucy Purcell.
As usual, the hard-nosed detectives are forced to deal with all the things Pizzolatto likes his characters to ruminate on: politics, cover-ups, socioeconomic conflicts, personal relationships and each other’s shortcomings. The one major wrinkle this time is Hays, whose memory is starting to deteriorate in his old age and at times becomes an unreliable narrator. While Season 1 immersed itself with biker gangs, huge bags of cocaine, alcohol abuse and nihilism, and some edge-of-your-seat sequences, Season 3 prefers the slow burn, with tension, intrigue and drama taking center stage. We discover and learn about the clues as they’re slowly revealed to us, but through different perspectives we learn that not everyone is honest. The characters in the show reveal their cards at different times and for different reasons, and the cat-and-mouse element is a big strength.
The unraveling of the mystery in the final two episodes is truly hair-raising, during which the clues finally fall into place in such rapid succession and its implications so emotionally draining that Hays and West literally stagger under the weight of their discovery. Their investigation comes to a conclusion, but not in the way we might think with a clear delineation of right and wrong – heroism in True Detective only exists in shades of morality – but I personally found it more satisfying than Season 1, which ended with a gruesome death to supposedly end all deaths, a typical ending of its genre.
Of course, certain things remain ambiguous, and True Detective remains a place in which idealists are harassed, beaten and defeated by the realists, and in Cohle’s famous words, each season shows how “human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution.” It is not a coincidence that in both Seasons 1 and 3, the final shots are of tortured souls continuing to wander into the dark under the moonlight, still unsure of what terrors that may haunt them, but still hopeful for the good that may come.
What kind of kills the show and prevents it from being truly fantastic is its pacing, which lags at times, especially in the middle episodes when character development moves ahead of plot development. It feels like half the series takes place in the Hays’ kitchen, where an unhappy couple talk about who’s upsetting whom. It can also be hard to create a sense of danger if all the characters are revealed to be alive in the present day; a tense scene involving Hays and a powerful local figure in the woods loses its threat when it’s already revealed that Hays survives the incident.
Scoot McNairy as Tom Purcell.
None of this works without some truly great acting, and while I’ve pointed out Ali, the biggest and most wonderful surprise is Dorff. He made a name for himself as the scruffy, mysterious action hero nearly 20 years ago with (what were supposed to be) breakout roles in Blade (1998) and Cold Creek Manor (2003), though I remember him best as that guy from the Britney Spears music video. This season showed Dorff was miscast by Hollywood from the beginning, and his turn as the sensitive and sensible detective as a foil to the obsessive and impulsive Hays is one of the big highlights of the show.
(Side note: Pizzolatto’s idiosyncratic and tortured characters has become a sort of jumping point for actors to re-ignite their careers. The big question now is what Dorff chooses to do next in his Dorffisance (Renaissadorff? Dorenaissance?) – I hardly think a police procedural TV show on Fox, called Deputy but not based on the old Henry Fonda show, would garner the attention he deserves. If we’re ranking performances on True Detective, McConaughey is first and Ali is second, and I would make a strong case for Dorff to be third.
Going back to what works was a good move for True Detective, even if it was a little less exciting, but if there is a Season 4, I wonder if the structure would become too rigid and predictable. The show shouldn’t stray from its non-linear structure because its entire premise is based on flashbacks and clues missed in the past, but structuring it too closely to the other seasons and having too many similar elements might impede the show from taking risks and going into more (possibly) interesting directions.
True Detective Season 3 gets three and a half stars out of four.
