True Detective (HBO) TV Show • Page 27

think he was pissed off and just wanted to fight someone

 

A lot of this is purely conjecture on my part, but I really do feel like if Cary Joji Fukunaga had come back on board and directed this entire Season 3, or if Jeremy Saulnier had been brought on to direct all 8 episodes and had stuck out the entire production and not left early due to "scheduling conflicts" / creative differences, then this season would have been right up there with Season 1 as something special and an all-time classic. I think with a director on board crafting the overall project with Pizzolatto and not simply directing the cast & crew on set than his talents and strengths as a writer really do shine and come through to the audience. When he's the sole creative overlord of the entire project and the only one who really gets final say we end up with last night's season finale.

 

Couldn’t make time for the full scene with Hays and Becca, but a literal barroom brawl and pet the dog moment is worth devoting minutes and minutes to.

 

I was thinking that these anthology shows should stick with one director per season but then realized that Fargo is near perfect and they don't do that at all.

 

Imo there was no emotional impact at all in bringing Becca back. Also dont know why we needed to know that he was a campus security guard after the events of the 90s investigation. So much unecessary stuff all throughout this whole season. As @EASheartsVinyl stated, the documentary aspect of this could have been completely left on the floor, it ended up adding absolutely nothing.

 

With a different writer or team of writers this format can absolutely work and does a lot of times. With Nic Pizzolatto, this is not the way to go.

 

I feel like this season ended up being more of a character study or a straight drama than a mystery, but then things like whatever happened between Roland West and Miss Lori being completely left out and not explained are so puzzling and frustrating.

Whether we're talking a mystery or a drama I know not every single detail needs to be 100% explained and shown to the audience, but the massive chunks of information left out of this story compared to what we were shown ended up being very puzzling in hindsight.

 

Also, at the end of the show, all amelia ended up being was a nosy writer. that’s kind of annoying for what i am assuming is everyone who thought she had some larger role in this. And sure you can say its your fault for assuming you knew something but no they specifically intentionally set things like that up and dropped these red herrings along the way to try and throw us off a trail we were never really on to begin with.

 

Yeah. Not calling you out specifically, but I cannot in any way accept this being called a “character study” or “character-driven drama” to excuse what they did with it when there were only two people given care and real thought over the entire series, and even Roland ends up with basically nothing of meaning in the finale.

All of NP’s flaws with dialogue, the way he writes women, pseudo-intellectual nonsense, hamfisted metaphors, and handwaving were all here before, and he has proven that he will go back to that well time and time again if he has no one to check him on it.

I’d be very happy to see HBO cut ties with him instead of giving him another shot and a babysitter to hold his hand next time. There are too many talented people out there not getting even single seasons of shows to keep acting like this dude is some genius worth throwing money at.

 

Think about how much better it could have been to have HER be the one interviewed for the documentary throughout, since she LITERALLY WROTE THE BOOK ON IT. We could have learned more about her every step of the way while seeing Hays struggle on his own in the past to put things together, and have their decisions as a couple hold real weight for what the audience sees and how the “mystery” is solved. Also maybe she would have cared a single bit about Elisa so that poor woman could have had any kind of characterization.

 

I agree with everything you are saying here. I was only calling it a character study kinda flailing around trying to make sense of what I had just watched and invested time and thought in. It's like he didn't realize he hadn't written a mystery or that he shouldn't have been and should have taken another approach to the story.

 

Oh yeah that’s why I wanted to specify that it’s not something you’re doing, but it seems to be a common thought among viewers and I’m just not having it.

It does almost seem like he forgot the show is called True Detective and then threw it all in a blender to pretend that there was anything worth detecting in this story. I would be down to watch eight hours of Mahershala playing an old man falling into dementia who just so happened to be a cop but the focus is entirely on his family and his slipping grip on himself. Not written by NP of course.

Although I just saw Elaine May do exactly that live in The Waverly Gallery, so maybe all I want is a screen version of that play...

 

i really liked it.

 

We zoom into his eye on the porch because it's his last thoughts within the context of this "story" he's been a part of all season. The end of Wayne's arc isn't that he finds Julie, it's that he finds her and doesn't pursue it (the look in his eye as he drank the water - he remembered her for at least a second), decides to stop telling the story and takes himself out of it. We've been leading this way for a few episodes now - in 7 he even tells Eliza "this story's over for me, miss" though of course at that point he's lying. The central idea of this season is the stories we tell ourselves and others - Wayne tells himself this conspiracy story to give something to solve, the nuns tell the story of the HIV to protect Julie, etc. etc.

So, here's the point I'm getting to - where would Wayne Hays choose to end his story? He'd like to end it on what we could assume is his best memory, he and Amelia walking out of the dark bar into the light together, still with a whole potential future ahead of them. But it doesn't always work like that, because some part of him is still in that Vietnam jungle. You can trace it all back there - his need to be withholding which unintentionally rubbed off on his children, his tunnel vision with regards to tracking someone who's gone missing at the expense of his family and career, the way he lashes out when people get too close to him, whether it's Roland sticking his neck out for him in '80 or all the times he pushed Amelia away. This whole season Wayne was stuck in the jungle, and if you like you can interpret that as a grim way to end, but I think the fact that he's finally actually seeing that is him coming to terms with the life's he's had and maybe moving past it.

So yeah, I thought this season was a moving and powerful character study. The mystery was second fiddle the whole time and I personally didn't mind at all

 

How did Amelia die? Did they ever say?

 

I don’t think so

 

No. Her life doesn’t matter, she’s just a plot device for Hays. Can’t have a major epiphany from yourself talking through your dead wife if she is your living wife.

Apparently they actually filmed a scene with her dying but cut it, which is almost worse than not covering it at all.

 

He's already saying what happened to her and other story lines in Instagram comments.

The dude is a child.

 

This post is so elequently written, and your ideas come across so well. I honestly find your post to be written so much better than last night's finale. You should get HBO to give you a show.

 

He’s somehow getting to where JK Rowling did after 20 years of praise in a fraction of the time. Can’t wait to learn about the bathroom habits of these characters.

 

And he’s already liked a comment saying that the jungle scene is his last lucid moment before he slips permanently into dementia (because that’s a thing that happens), so while that comment is very well written, its meaning is misplaced. Unless you want to go full death of the author on it, which I’m happy to do.

 

Also can we talk about how they act like the scene between Wayne and Amelia in the bar in the 90s is some major turning point in their lives and how he treats his family going forward but everything else we see showed that he never changed and has major tension with all of them throughout the whole story?! It’s not like we had years of flashbacks to see how he could go from closed off and cold to a good father and husband and then BACK to closed off and cold in old age, he was just always pretty awful to them.

 

Having worked with patients with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia for many years it's kind of rough watching a writer of Pizzolatto's um caliber we'll say play with it as a plot device.

I could buy that zoom into Ali's eye as being the moment Hays dies (even though I don't think that's what that was) but I can't buy that zoom being his last lucid moment before slipping permanently into dementia.

I did love the idea of Old Roland coming to live with Old Hays though. That was a nice touch.

 

I think I need Dale Cooper today.

 

I need to watch The Return again.