True Detective Season 3

Misdementia

True Detective Season 3
HBO 2019
8 episodes

Warning: Some spoilers

Series 3 of True Detective is probably my least favourite of the three so far. The characters seemed, at first, less interesting and the case involving one dead child and one missing child seemed rather slight compared to the amount of stuff going on in the first two seasons. That being said, the characters in this one did grow on me over time and things were kept fairly watchable without it getting too dull so, yeah, I still enjoyed this one.

Like the first series (and the second, to a smaller extent), this one deals with multiple time zones as an account looking back by central protagonist Detective Wayne Hays, played by Mahersala Ali. He looks at the missing child problem from its original case in 1980, a return to the case after the main characters have gone their separate way and found each other again (as in the previous two seasons), set in 1990 and, then, a third period of him being an interviewee on this great unsolved case, contemporary to when this series was made and everyone is old. 

Well, his partner Detective Roland West, played brilliantly by Stephen Dorff is old. Hays’ girlfriend in the 80s and wife in the 90s, played by Carmen Ejogo, who wrote a best selling book about the unsolved case, has passed away and he is being partially cared for by his son, as he has something like the onset of dementia. The mother of the missing girl and father, played by Scoot McNairy, also come to nasty end in the 1990s.

Actually, as we see the detectives work the case and hold their own dark secret (which again feels like it’s the kind of thing James Ellroy would write), the most interesting aspect of this show is that, due to intrusions of dementia at unexpected moments, we realise from pretty early on that the narrative being spun is unreliable. 

Also, we have the ghostly hallucinations from the past of the modern day version of Wayne both scaring him but, also, in the end, helping him. Where it gets really interesting is the way the various directors start to show this manifestation. So the contemporary version of the character might stumble on a piece of his past playing out and watch it from a window or a door or some such… but then we’ll get a sense of the younger self picking up on that and turning to where the modern version of the character has been watching from… which presents as an almost supernatural manifestation but I think what it’s really doing is showing the audience how unreliable the modern memory of the scene in question is. Because we’re not seeing it like it played out, we’re seeing it as Wayne remembers it and then also the memory of Wayne picking up on himself watching, so to speak. 

Like the previous two series, the titles are nicely designed but rendered almost unwatchable owing to a terrible pop song playing on the soundtrack of each… I watched it once and then skipped it on the remaining episodes, just as I had in the first two shows. And it’s a short review I know but, that’s me pretty much played out on this third season of True Detective… I don’t have too much to say about this one other than a quick aside that I enjoyed seeing the newspaper headline concerning the two detectives in Season One (reviewed here). However, I am looking forward to starting on the fourth, supernatural infused season starring Jodie Foster very soon… which is the reason I started watching the show in the first place. You can be sure I’ll let you know how that one went at some point soon.