‘True Detective’ Season 3 Is Great If You Forget It’s ‘True Detective’

If you could strip True Detective Season 3 from its namesake’s legacy, you would be left with a beautifully crafted character study hiding in a so-so crime saga. Mahershala Ali bucks the trend of fast-talking, all-knowing cops as he takes on Wayne Hays, an intrinsically focused detective who can’t escape the trappings and eventual horrors of his own mind. But as is becoming a trend with this particular anthology series, it’s impossible to evaluate this season without seeing its entire legacy. As a standalone season of television, Season 3 is a masterful examination of one man whose extraordinary skills never eclipse his normalcy. But as a season of True Detective, it stands frustratingly in the middle — not as brilliant as Rust and Marty’s whirlwind season but far superior to Ray and Ani’s embarrassing mess.

It’s a shame because True Detective Season 3 embodies something so many other crime dramas tend to ignore. Truly traumatic, horrific crimes like the ones this series delights in never end, even if the right perpetrator is behind bars. These cases forever haunt their victims and the brave men and women who try to find justice in their darkness. Early this season’s first episode, Wayne Hays — a veteran clearly suffering from PTSD and who later in life displays signs of dementia — notes that he always thought his life would be divided into before Vietnam and after Vietnam. “But more it’s before the Purcell case and after,” he says. “And it keeps coming back.”

More than any other tone that foreboding haunting fuels Season 3. Wayne’s story is divided into three different timelines, his life in the 1980s when he was first working on the Purcell case, his life in the 1990s when the case was reopened, and his life in 2015 when a documentary crew wants to know what exactly happened. Though at least two of these timelines happened roughly 35 years apart, the same false hope and creeping dread festers in the corners of this case. No matter how hard Wayne and his partner Roland West (Stephen Dorff) may work, no solution completely makes sense. Even when they’ve found a viable culprit and an avenue for justice, there is no such thing as closure.

Ali communicates this cesspool of regrets and second guesses wonderfully. Unlike Matthew McConaughey’s Rust, Ali’s brilliant tracker Wayne never says what he’s really thinking but what he means is crystal clear. Long scenes will pass that are solely driven by Ali’s strategic looks and pointed pauses. His strategic subtleties ring especially loud in the stiflingly racist world of the Ozarks in the 1980s. Few of the many people Wayne interviews insult him to his face, but racial hostility is always there, hidden in curt replies and intentionally fleeting eye contact. It’s truly a testament of Ali’s skills as a performer that he can communicate so much pain, anger, and cold understanding through moments where almost nothing happens.

But because this is True Detective we’re talking about, Season 3 cannot merely stand as an excellent character study of a normal investigator who just happens to be good at his job. It must be compared to the crime drama masterpiece that came before it, True Detective Season 1. The case of the missing Purcell children contains enough genuinely shocking twists to build to an engaging mystery, but it suffers from the pacing problem that seems to plague all of television these days. There’s just not quite enough plot to warrant the season’s extended runtimes and rambling, secondary conversations.

Likewise, as has become a trend for this series, its female characters still feel underdeveloped. Amelia Reardon, Wayne’s schoolteacher love interest, feels like a breath of fresh air compared to the used pretty faces of Season 1 and Rachel McAdams’ sex-obsessed Detective Ani in Season 2. Carmen Ejogo plays the role with enough fiery urgency to reflect Ali’s at times infuriatingly calm performance. She portrays the outrage and the emotional highs this story needs. There is a version of this season that could be about a haunted detective paralyzed by the horrendous case that changed his life and the scrappy independent journalist capable of finding the truth, and indeed the series does touch this dynamic sometimes. But it never happens often enough. Despite Ejogo’s wonderful performance, Amelia often feels like another feminine prop. While Amelia lectures Wayne on his own lack of agency, it often feels like she only exists to give his life meaning. 

There are good parts to this season of True Detective — excellent parts, emotional parts — almost all of which can be accredited to this season’s incredible cast as well as Jeremy Saulnier, Daniel Sackheim, and Nic Pizzolatto’s inspired directing. But much like Wayne Hays himself, this is also a season incapable of escaping its past. It’s not True Detective Season 1. And that more than anything else is what hurts it the most.

True Detective Season 3 premieres on HBO Sunday, January 13 at 9/8c.

Watch True Detective Season 3 on HBO Go and HBO NOW