‘True Detective’ Season 3 Episode 2 Recap: “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye”

Season 3 of True Detective doesn’t just take place in three different timelines because that’s the formula that the series had the most success with before. The story of Detective Wayne Hays investigating the death and disappearance of the Purcell children spans over 35 years because this case has consumed 35 years of Detective Wayne Hays’ life.

And in many ways, it seems like the life of Detective Hays has been in a semi-permanent state of limbo since the Purcell case came across his radio. We still don’t know all the details of who was convicted, if their conviction was overturned, or if the truly guilty party was ever found—but we do know that even in 2015, the case of Julie and Will Purcell still doesn’t sit well with Hays. It’s both impossible to move forward, and impossible to look back on the unbearable weight of uncertainty without any foreseeable path out of it.

We hear this sentiment from multiple people throughout the episode as we watch it play out over time in Hays’ own life. When Hays and West interview Brett Woodard, the Native American who became a person of interest in the premiere after he was spotted hauling trash on the same road Julie and Will disappeared from, he ends up talking to them a lot about how the Vietnam War changed him. Woodard wants to make it clear that he’s not a burn out or junkie; he’s a productive member of society, it’s just that…when he came back, he couldn’t carry on with the life he had before—the one with a wife and two children. But he also couldn’t completely let it go.

“You ever been some place you couldn’t leave and you couldn’t stay?” Woodard asks Hays—it’s worth noting—inside a memory that Hays is reliving in two different future timelines. (So, I think that would be a yes.)

Tom Purcell is having a similar experience as he waits to find out the fate of his daughter Julie, already knowing that his son Will has been killed. After being asked to leave the mechanic job he’s had since he was 14, the detectives Tom up walking home, and as he swills from a flask, he asks desperately, if they’re going to find his daughter. “If we’re not gonna find her, I just need to know now,” Tom pleads. “Because I can’t go to sleep…and I can’t wake up.”

Thirty-five years later, in 2015, that feeling of walking through life halfway between asleep and awake is registering with Wayne Hays more than ever. The Purcell case is how Wayne Hays met his wife, and now, with dementia seizing his mind more often than not, retelling the case to a the very meta TV crew of True Criminal is how he’s remembering her too. If he can’t leave the Purcell case behind, then somehow, sometime—he’s going to have to figure out a way to move forward on it instead.

By the end of the episode, it seems that some part of Hays’ mind has figured that out, as well.

Back in 1980, it’s been determined that Will died from blunt force trauma to the head and a cervical fracture; someone broke his neck, put him inside that cave, and folded his hands over his chest. In 1990, Hays is still attempting to pry more information from his two deposition interviewers about Julie Purcell’s prints being found 10 years after she disappeared, but he’s still getting shut out, especially by the younger, snarkier of the two played by Josh Hopkins. “I’m pretty easy going,” Hays snaps at him: “But go away already.”

This second installment has a few brief moments of levity, and they are all welcome. As it turns out, watching Mahershala Ali be sad in very convincing old-man prosthetics takes its toll after awhile…

Old Wayne Hays stares up at the West Finger Community Center sadly. There’s a reason he has an easier time with the other interviewer, Alan Jones—it seems they’ve worked together before. He’s works under the D.A. (Chris Cooper, surely up to something) that we see giving a press conference in this very Community Center in 1980. Hays and West patrol around the room looking for anything suspicious as community members ask about who’s being investigated in the murder/disappearance of the Purcell children. But there’s one community member Hays is particularly interested in: Amelia Reardon.

I don’t know how these two both manage to show interest in each other without ever smiling, but all of their interactions are rich witch chemistry, even when they’re just talking about the Purcell case. Hays goes out on a limb and shows Amelia a photo of one of the corn husk dolls found near Will’s body. And it was a good instinct because, while she doesn’t recognize it, she asks around school, and one boy does: Mike, the one we saw wave to Julie as she and Will rode off into a memory.

Detectives Hays and West come to the school to interview Mike, but he clams up in front of the men—so it’s Amelia and her own personal brand of investigative know-how to the rescue. Carmen Ejogo is so warm in this role, while still fitting into the sort of outcast darkness this series specializes in; she make me want to seek out her performances anywhere I can get them (hello, Fantastic Beats franchise!).

Amelia comforts Will into telling the detectives that he saw Julie with a doll like the one in the photo when they went trick-or-treating together on Halloween, the week before she disappeared. He thought she got it along their trick-or-treating route in the neighborhood because she didn’t have it when they met up, but showed it to him in her haul at the end of the night. He says that they were only apart briefly, and he saw Julie “talking to some people, some adults maybe—there were two ghosts, dressed in big sheets.” Sounds totally chill and not at all like bad news!

But a lead is a good thing, and not only does Mike know Julie received a doll like that from someone in their neighborhood on Halloween, he’s also able to show the detectives their route and which houses they went to. That’s especially good given that Lucy Purcell’s creepy cousin Dave who probably drilled a peephole into Julie’s room provided the detectives with a (yet to be confirmed) alibi for the night the children disappeared.

Now, armed with the map of Julie and Will’s trick-or-treat route, West and Hays propose to a newly formed Purcell children task force (which includes their commanding officer, two FBI agents, the D.A., and Alan Jones) that they gather as many officers as possible, ask people on the trick-or-treat map to let them voluntarily search their homes, and keep the entire neighborhood under surveillance for a few days to see if anyone starts acting jumpy when they start sniffing around. The D.A. doesn’t like it, saying even if they found anything, the voluntary search tactic could be problematic at trial. Hays, who’s been letting West do most of the idea-pitching to this point, replies with some heat: “This is about the girl, not a trial.”

The director of the 2015 documentary, Elisa Montgomery (played by Sarah Gadon, hopefully getting to do a little more in later episodes), asks Hays off-camera if he thinks his leads and theories were ever discounted because of his race, and he says no. But in 1980, he had a different feeling. After showing up at a bar Amelia frequents and having just a lovely and rare exchange of vulnerabilities, Hays has to rush out because he spots the D.A. on television giving another statement. He’s telling the public about the dolls, and revealing that Julie was likely contacted by her abductor during Halloween last week.

Presumably the D.A. makes the dolls and Halloween public knowledge so that so that people will come forward with information they didn’t previously know was relevant. But as Hays later complains to West, the D.A. basically gave away their only advantage on the suspect. Hays tells West the he should have stopped them because he knows they won’t listen to Hays. But West doesn’t seem to know that, asking Hays where he thinks he is talking about these people not being his “tribe.” In the first tense exchange we’ve seen between the two, Hays spits back, “Son, I know where I am in a way you will never understand.”

Indeed, West does not seem to understand that his black partner’s ideas would not be received by their superiors in the same way that he would. But eventually, they move on because West has a new lead from a Vice cop: some creep named Ted LeGrange, fresh out of jail, using an alias, and not very discreetly asking around for “young” porn and prostitutes. So, West and Hays sidle up to him at a diner…

Take him to a barn, handcuff him to a wooden beam, and West absolutely beats the shit out of him to see if he has any connection in the Purcell case. He doesn’t admit to anything, but the last we see of him in the episode, he’s in the trunk of their car, being threatened by Hays with some language and suggestions of what they could arrange to happen to him in jail that I absolutely cannot print here.

It is unclear if he’s still in tow when they show up to the Purcell’s house after getting an emergency radio call to go there. When they enter the house, Lucy is weeping, and Tom is screaming, “What is that huh, what does that mean?” He shows them a note that’s appeared in the house, written with cut-out magazine letters: “DO NOT WORRY JULIE IS A GOOD PLACE AND SAFE THE CHILDREN SHUD LAUGH DO NOT LOOK LET GO.”

Tom gets no explanation as to what it means, but given that we’re told Julie is alive 10 years later—could it possibly be true that she was safe in 1980? As promised, Alan sits down with Hays and gives him a few more details about Julie Purcell’s sudden reappearance: the fingerprint found in the pharmacy was a full print, there’s no way to know if she was a customer or part of the break-in, and they’ve tried to subpoena any video footage, but they’ll have to wait and see. So basically, Hays says—they have nothing. “Man’s family doesn’t have the resources for an investigator,” Alan says, reminding us that we still don’t know just which man was—seemingly incorrectly—charged with the crimes against the Purcell children.

“But I bet they would like to find her,” he tells Hays pointedly.

In 1990, Wayne tells Amelia that Julia Purcell is alive, and in 2015, at his son’s family dinner table, he’s still thinking about it. “Going back over the story, it’s good,” he tells Henry and his wife. “Making my brain work, I mean, it’s leading me to other stuff.” It’s also leading him to wonder about the next time he’ll see his daughter Rebecca. And after Henry explains to Wayne that Rebecca lives in LA now, and she doesn’t much like coming home, Wayne looks over at his granddaughter who looks so much like Rebecca and says once more, as if he hadn’t already said it just moments before: “Maybe you guys could see about getting Rebecca out here.”

Henry leaves the table frustrated, and Wayne turns sadly back to a photo of Amelia, then—BOOM.

He’s suddenly standing outside in his robe on Shoepick Street, the very street from which Will and Julie disappeared 35 years ago. There are plenty of questions about how he got there but the most important one to ask is: where will it take him?

Jodi Walker writes about TV for Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, Texas Monthly, and in her pop culture newsletter These Are The Best Things. She vacillates between New York, North Carolina, and every TJ Maxx in between.

Stream True Detective Season 3 Episode 2 ("Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye") on HBO Go