I skipped the controversial second season for "True Detective," but was lured back to the third with the promise of Mahershala Ali in the lead role, and co-writers like David Milch being brought aboard to help out series creator Nic Pizolatto. Though it shares quite a bit in common with the first season, this year of the show isn't quite at the same level. Directors Jeremy Saulnier and Daniel Sackheim are solid, but turn in far less memorable work than Cary Joji Fukunaga. Pizolatto gets a little over-ambitious, juggling three different timelines, but delivers a mostly satisfying story. The one person I felt was doing something really special, though, was Mahershala Ali.
Ali plays Wayne "Purple" Hays, an Arkansas detective and war veteran who tackles the case of two missing children in the early 1980s. He's partnered with Roland West (Stephen Dorff), a state investigator, and meets a teacher named Amelia (Carmen Ejogo) during the case. Ten years later, Wayne and Amelia are married with children, and the case is being reopened due to new information. And twenty-five years after that, in a third timeline, Wayne is retired and being interviewed by a film crew making a documentary about the disappearances. Wayne also suffers memory problems that worsen with age, and some vital pieces of the story take quite a bit of effort to uncover.
I confess that I wasn't able to keep up with the ins and outs of the mystery from week to week after a few episodes. Occasionally I had a tough time keeping the events of the first two timelines straight, and wasn't ever particularly invested in learning the truth about what happened to the missing kids. The performances of Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff kept me coming back though. Ali does well with a very complicated part here, playing Wayne at three different stages of his life, where his relationships to his loved ones are very different. He's a quieter, more introverted character, and the show is at its best when it's peeling back his layers and showing different facets of his nature by comparing and contrasting different episodes in his life.
Unlike the first season of "True Detective," the multiple timeline approach helps when it comes to exploring Wayne's character, and ultimately this season works far better as a character study than it does as a crime story. If you're watching this for the crime story, you may come away disappointed. The investigation is central to the whole show, but it's an investigation full of dead ends and red herrings by design. Every time it feels like the detectives are getting anywhere with the case, they're stymied. And when we finally do get to the resolution, it becomes apparent that the major players in the crime barely appear in the show at all. In addition, there are some frustrating questions left unanswered that really shouldn't be - like what happened to Amelia between the second and third timelines.
I also found Saulnier's more subdued style disappointing, even though I knew what to expect. We witness some incidents of violence and an especially ugly interrogation that goes wrong, but nothing like the six-minute tracking shot from the first season is even attempted. I miss the thick atmosphere and the real sense of place that the Fukunaga gave his "Detective" story. The visuals for this year aren't very evocative and the production is very low key, though impeccably executed. The old age makeup used on Ali and Dorff is very impressive stuff. No corners were cut, and no expense was spared.
Still, while I found most of the mechanics of the story pretty rote, and the execution pretty pedestrian, the show managed to deliver one of the most satisfying, if bittersweet endings to a televised serial that I've seen in a while. I'll give credit to Pizolatto that he had a great idea and knew what to do with it. Even more importantly, it really gave Mahershala Ali a chance to shine. I actually like his performance in the last episode better than I like either of the ones he won Oscars for. After all, he had a full eight hours with Wayne, to really explore his ins and outs.
And ultimately, that was enough to win me over.
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