‘True Detective’ Season 3 wants you to let the mystery be

There are a lot of mysteries on HBO these days. Even when a show isn’t about getting to the bottom of crimes or catching murderers, the interactive element of getting an audience to “solve” what’s happening onscreen is a vital part of the entertainment landscape. Look at Westworld, a show that has ten times more mystery than it actually has plot, or Game of Thrones and its hundreds of fan theories, or Sharp Objects and its laundry list of dead little girls. 

At the center of these is True Detective, a show that is outwardly about mystery but in its three seasons has used the framework of crime to explore the interiority of its characters and the effects that One Big Case had on their lives. Most of the characters in previous seasons are left worse off by the time their story is done, which tracks as far as they’ve been dealt awful hands and witnessed terrible things. But True Detective Season 3 did something different. It gave its characters, all of them that are still alive, a happy ending. 

Episode 8 “Now Am Found” fakes it audience out by first delivering a more classically True Detective-y ending to the case of Julie Purcell. She was kidnapped by Junius Watts (the man with the milky eye) and held prisoner as a replacement daughter for the mentally unstable Isabel Hoyt. Her brother was killed accidentally when Isabel fought with him in the woods, and Julie was given lithium to numb the pain of her brother’s death and further accept her imprisonment. One night, Junius helped Julie escape with the intention of meeting her at a secret location, but she lost her map and wandered out into the world, where she contracted HIV and worked alongside nuns at a convent before succumbing to her illness. 

Roland and Wayne get this story from Junius Watts himself, who has given up his life in search of Julie. After he confesses, he begs the former detectives to take him in or shoot him, because he can’t live anymore knowing that he lost Julie forever. They don’t have the authority to arrest him and don’t want to kill him either, so they leave him a broken man. Watts is left to live or die on his own time, and the detectives have their answers. 

Well, almost. This is True Detective, and here was always going to be another shoe to drop.

Wayne realizes that Watt’s story might not be what actually happened. Julie may have gone to the nuns and gotten the help she needed to overcome the trauma of her kidnapping. She may have reconnected with a childhood friend who recognized her while landscaping at the convent and fallen in love. It’s possible she asked the nuns to fake her death, complete with a gravestone, and become a wife and mother in a pretty house in a town a few hours away. That’s another way the story could go. And that’s the way it did. 

When Wayne finds out Julie’s husband’s address and drives out to see if he’s right, he is greeted by the sight of a grown-up Julie, safe and happy with her daughter in their garden — and due to his dementia, is unable to recognize her for who she is. He comes to her, the person he’s been searching for half his life, and only thinks to ask her help in getting back home. 

At one moment in his interaction with Julie, a shift in Wayne’s gaze implies that he does remember her. It’s the kind of eye-acting that earned Mahershala Ali his Academy Award on the day this finale aired, and he seems to allow the recognition to wither away before it grows too strong. Wayne chooses not to interrogate Julie Purcell in that moment, honoring her right to be forgotten, as he surely will forget. 

Wayne chooses not to interrogate Julie Purcell in that moment, honoring her right to be forgotten, as he surely will forget. 

True Detective has always been about solving the case, but the fact that Wayne might never know he solved it is a fascinating twist that puts his character’s journey into a new perspective. 

The Purcell case affected so much of Wayne and Roland’s lives. It brought them closer together and tore them apart. It derailed Wayne’s career and sent Roland careening towards rock bottom. It threatened Wayne’s marriage and killed just about everyone else who was tangentially involved. And at the end, the only choice both detectives have was to put it down and move on. 

After Wayne returns home with his daughter, he has a pretty great day. There’s iced tea and sunshine and a dog. Roland comes over and joins his family for dinner, and the two old men sit together as friends for the first time in over a decade. Wayne is still losing his memories to dementia and Roland is still a gruff dog hoarder, but the case is in their rearview mirror and their lives once again belong to them.

This theme of putting the case down is echoed in Wayne’s other flashbacks in the final episode, which go back to the two times he let it get in the way of his relationship with Amelia. The first time the case interfered with them, they fought, made up, and married. The second time, after Wayne is driven to murder Harris James and refuses to tell Amelia what happened, they both decide to put the case (and Amelia’s second book) behind them and move on together. 

Those periods of forgetting the Purcells brought on some of the happiest times in Wayne’s life: His marriage, the birth of his children, and his final years with his wife. When he solves the case and returns to his family and Roland, he is making the same choice he made twice before, to get over it and focus on his own life. Just like Julie Purcell did when Mike Ardoin showed up at her convent. 

There are only two options when it comes to a harrowing case like the dead and missing Purcell children. You can let it consume you, as Junius Watts did, or make a choice to stop thinking and life your damn life. The fact that True Detective’s finale prioritizes peace over answers is a rare sentiment in an even rarer crime TV show.