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15 Unanswered <em>True Detective</em> Questions
By
John Del Signore
Published Mar 14, 2014
Modified Mar 14, 2014
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By
John Del Signore
Published Mar 14, 2014
Modified Mar 14, 2014
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To say that True Detective is over is to deny that time is a flat circle—we are always watching and rewatching the first season in our heads (always fast-forwarding through episode 8's incestuous "flower making" lapdance though). Yesterday we explored the common ground the show shares with Twin Peaks, and last night our sleepless dreams were filled with all the questions left unanswered by writer Nic Pizzolatto.
The more we thought about it, the more realized there are a lot of loose ends and open questions left behind by the season finale. Some, like Ross Douthat at the Times, argue that this is a major failure SPOILERS WATCH OUT:
If you tell a mystery story, the way you solve the mystery matters to the success of your art. And then, more specifically — if you tell a story in such a way that the audience knows the mystery is sprawling and capital-B Big (and not in an internet obsessive sense of “knows,” but in the sense that the show’s creator concedes, explicitly, that there are actually at least ten men involved in the murders, not one) while dropping clues that suggest still more complexities and entanglements, and then you shrink the resolution to something smaller, a single scapegoat, while supplying no new information whatsoever about the conspiracy that your heroes were obsessed with — well, then you’ve made your whole story smaller, less interesting, and less important than the architecture of the first seven episodes suggested that the audience should think.
We don't consider the finale a failure—in a culture where almost all popular entertainment ends in two hours with everything tied up in a contrived little bow, there's something very refreshing about ambiguity. One could argue (as Pizzolatto has) that the most fulfilling aspect of this crime story is seeing how it impacts the detectives who force themselves to plumb its depths, and if that's your metric, you can't ask for more than Rust's emotional breakdown outside the hospital, when we realize the experience has transformed him from traumatized suicidal pessimism to a man who believes that Light is winning.
That said, we can't deny being somewhat disappointed that so much of the "sprawl" was left uncovered. And more than that, we have to wonder why a mystery that seemed, at first, to reward obsessive attention to detail ultimately brushed off so many details' significance? Here are some of the questions we're left to wrestle with for eternity in our locked room:
- Why and how is the painting above Marty and Maggie's bed an exact replicaof the mural in the hospital where Rust visits Kelly Rita, the girl he rescued from Ledoux's compound?
- Was Audrey stealing the crown from her sister and throwing it into the tree really just a symbol of lost innocence?
- Okay, then what about her dolls being arranged in a disturbing sexual tableaux?
- Sure, maybe that was just kids experimenting with taboos! But then she's drawing a guy with a mask and a giant erection and a half-naked woman with her hands behind her back? Where'd THAT come from?
- Don't even get us started on that spiral drawing in Marty's kitchen.
- Speaking of which, guess the spiral insignia the killer drew on the corpses was never explained... should we assume it was a pedophilia symbol the real-world FBI warned about?
- Did anyone ever untie poor Ginger?
- Who or what is the Yellow King? And don't say Errol Childress, because that was never confirmed.
- Errol's daddy gave him those scars, but how? And why? On second thought, maybe we don't want to know.
- And who were the other masked men?
- What is the connection between Dora Lange and the Lake Charles murder and the pedophilia ring?
- Does Rust know he has an upstairs?
- Who convinced Guy Francis to commit suicide/who killed Guy Francis? Yes, one of the guards was named Childress, but that still leaves a lot of unanswered questions as to how Francis was threatened and by whom and how that individual even found out he was going to talk.
- What was the deal with the Marshland Medea, the woman Rust advised to commit suicide? A class photo suggested she was a Light of Way student.
- What is it Rust, and subsequently Marty, doing with that little circular mirror in Rust's apartment?
There are no doubt more loose ends than that, which you are invited to share with us in the comments. See you back at the storage locker!
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John Del Signore
Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.
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