He talked about losing 5,000 men in Korea, and he talked about losing a wife and a daughter.
He said so many things, and yet he had nothing to say.
Im in the fing dark, he explained.
Credit: Warrick Page/HBO
Do I look like a man with fing answers?
His entire time onscreen, he slurped joylessly from a bottle labeled BOURBON WHISKEY.
Roland (Stephen Dorff) ordered Bud and a shot of Jack before his barfight against the world.
Guess I should sober up, he said, an implicit promise of great personal improvement.
You could tell their talk was turning gloomy when Amelia said, Ill take that drink now.
Thats what Hoyts bottle of whiskey looked like: The brooding cherry on top of a nonsense sundae.
Hoyt had little connection to the great mystery of this season.
He reallydidnthave any fing answers.
Then Isabel raised Julie for a couple years in a subterranean pink room.
The finales director, Daniel Sackheim, tried hard to put a florid touch on this loopy material.
Junius grinned as he butler-ishly took care of Isabel and her daughter.
The vibe was Fascist Disney Nuclear Bunker Tea party, with crushed lithium poured into Julies teacups.
Junius helped Julie escape.
See, at the convent, Old Wayne randomly ran into a landscaper with a cute blonde daughter.
Then, that night, he flipped to a random page of Amelias book.
What if it was really one long story that just kept going and going?
Amelia told Wayne, right as the episode hit the one hour mark and just kept going and going.
And then the final contrivance: Sudden-onset memory loss at the most inappropriate moment.
Thus did Old Waynes mental corrosion enter fullblownMementoplot territory.
Alis performance was quietly heartbreaking, a triumph against ludicrous plotting.
Confused, he walked up to the woman he spent 35 years searching for and asked for directions.
She kindly offered him a glass of water.
Did he recognize her, just for a second?
Unfortunately, this season got lost in its own maze.
Its telling, I think, that Isabel was barely even a proper character.
She was a face in flashbacks, a madwoman for men to describe.
This season, men knew truths they could never tell the womenfolk.
Ejogo never got main character material, though, and Amelia proved an empty challenge for Wayne.
But theres nothing here.
Tough words, with no backup.
First, she drove to the VFW and apologized for being such a pill.
You could have been good at just about anything.
If thats what it sounds like when married people argue, then count me in, honey!
I think Pizzolatto wants to write a compelling female character into hisTrue Detectivemythos.
What did they accomplish in 35 years of accumulated investigation?
Fair to say that Roland and Wayne only made things worse?
Women, it turns out, were the cause and solution to all this seasons problems.
There was the mentally traumatized Isabel, who killed Julie by giving her a new name.
(Isabel swallowed a bunch of suicide pills with her wedding dress on, going full Havisham offscreen).
In the middle of all this was poor Julie.
It still feels strange that we only found out about Toms homosexuality right before he died.
And yet, we saw the complete Origin Story of Rolands Friendship with Stray Dogs!
There was Wayne, working campus security sometime after 90, smiling at his professor wife.
There was that tantalizing moment when Henry pocketed grown-up Julies address, a son catching his dads disease.
But then Wayne saw a couple kids riding bicycles, an echo of the long-gone Purcell children.
And then one final memory, long-range recon in the Nam, walking into the darkness of the jungle.
I guess you could say: He went to heavenandhell, ah, the duality of man!
This felt to me like a cake had and eaten.
Meanwhile, you had to grapple with the finales stupidest sequence.
In 80, Wayne left his pal Roland behind, walked up to his new desk job.
It was bureaucratic work, documents intaken and output.
The camera pulled back gracefully, revealing two rows of desks.
Besides Wayne, everyone sitting at that desk was a woman.
The feeling of horror was as palpable as anything in the Pink Room.
Twelve years on the job and Im a fing secretary now!
Wayne complained to Amelia.
and the truth of their detection.
In the season finale, Roland asked if he could move in with Wayne, and Wayne said yes.
It was a sweet moment, with a rather eerie undercurrent.
