And lo, the scriptures proclaim that never was there ever a detective more true than Wayne Hays.
The Arkansas policeman served two terms in the Nam, long-range reconnaissance, the stuffRambodreams are made of.
Now he tracks wild boar for fun, as all human males must do.
Credit: Warrick Page/HBO
Waynes favorite comic book heroes are the Batman and the Silver Surfer, two multiverses moodiest loners.
On the job he hunts by moonlight, trail-tracking missing kids and the monsters who snatched them.
Its too dark, man!
I dont care, Wayne responds.
Waynes a true detective.
Too darks not dark enough.
ET on HBO).
This thirdTrue Detectivelooks so much like the firstTrue Detectiveand emphatically nothing like the secondTrue Detective.
We meet Wayne in three distinct time periods.
In 1980, hes investigating two lost children.
In 1990, hes haunted by that case.
In 2015, hes double-secret-haunted by that case.
(Old Wayne also suffers from creeping dementia, which conveniently keeps important plot points out of reach.)
You recall Matthew McConaughey pondering beer-can philosophy during Rust Cohles neverending police interrogation.
And Wayne has a very Cohle-ic personality, cerebral, ruminative, another world-weary workaholic.
And remember those scary devils net things Rust found on the trail of the Yellow King?
Were miles from the trashfire excess of season 2.
The acting is very strong.
Scoot McNairy and Mamie Gummer are believably demolished as the missing kids parents.
Ali finds reservoirs of warmth in his chilly, paranoid outsider.
Dorffs a laconic delight.
One memorable shot of a search party walking through the woods resembles a boggy fairy tale hellscape.
But Saulnier departs the series after the second hour.
Wayne and Roland drive, talk, moan, interrogate, drive, talk, moan, interrogate.
She exists as a foil for Wayne, prodding him toward action across three timelines.
Pizzolatto was the sole credited writer on the secondTrue Detective, which became a ludicrously go-nowhere saga.
The most interesting thing about Pizzolatto is the way his narratives feel both nostalgic and apocalyptic.
Apocalyptic, because Wayne and Roland explicitly represent a world thats long gone.
Ali tries hard to suggest the traumatized psychology pushing Wayne forward.
Meanwhile, their very names evoke cluebaiting nostalgia.
Wayne, as in John.
West, like the wild one.
(Googling Roland West will lead you, inevitably, to Batman.)
True Detectives success in 2014 prompted a renewed fascination with serialized crime narratives.
And you could draw a hazier line to the True Crime renaissance, fromSerialandDirty Johnto the wholeMaking a Murdererdocugenre.
So this seasons attempt to bring back the oldTrue Detectivemagic also feels a bit stale.
This seasons Big Action Thing is a snooze.
This years hallucinations are less haunting than inadvertently funny.
The documentarian filming Old Wayne by is a director named Elisa (Sarah Gadon).
(Pause for eyeroll.)
It gets a bit grating.
Quoth Don Draper: Jesus, maybe its a metaphor!B-
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