‘True Detective’ Season 3 Episode 6 Recap: “Hunters In The Dark”

True Detective Season 3 has been a practice in the art of suspense. But watching this season has been a practice in learning if you can enjoy suspense when it is built on the back of nuanced characters, rich visuals, an engaging nonlinear narrative, and uh…very little plot payoff. As it turns out—I very much can! I have loved this season of True Detective thus far—its vulnerable men, cerebral women, looming specters of loss and withholding, the dance with time and memory…

And yet, I am here today, extremely happy to tell you: Something Has Finally Happened. The sixth episode of True Detective‘s third season ends not with a haunted look or a sentimental moment or a weighted timeline transition, but a bonafide plot-driven cliffhanger. There is no way Tom Purcell drunkenly discovering a “pink room” behind a vaulted door in the basement of the Hoyt family compound goes anywhere but toward some GOSH DARN answers. (And, well, certain doom for Tom Purcell, given the way Harris James was looming over his shoulder just before the credits rolled, cueing up an ominous electric buzz along with them.)

Yes, we come for the detectives’ journeys toward truth, and the tortured screams and tweak-y rants of excellent character actors—but we stay we stay for the reveal that there is a pink room at the bottom of one of Big Poultry’s wealthiest families’ estates. Season 1 promised us a conspiracy the size of the Deep South’s one percent, and against all odds, Season 3 might just deliver on that promise. But that doesn’t mean we have all—or even any—of the answers just yet. We have a visual on one rumored talking point of a girl who might be Julie Purcell…

Still, this is True Detective, where color-based monarchs carry a lot of narrative weight. At a reading of her crime book late in the episode, Amelia says, “A lost child is a story that’s never allowed to end.” Amelia and Wayne’s lives as we know them have revolved around the disappearance of Julie Purcell, but the reveal of the Pink Rooms suggest that Season 3’s story is about much more than one lost child. And the knowledge that there are only two episodes left in Season 3 suggests that this story has to end somewhere. If Wayne’s complaints about God “half-assing it” when he rested on the seventh day is a stand-in for Nic Pizzolatto’s own feelings, let’s hope that episodes 7 and 8 are his way of…showing God how to finish strong???

But that biblical sixth day was reserved for “making man and woman” and all that, so it makes sense that this sixth episode starts with Wayne and Amelia recovering from their first time in bed together, a follow-up to that post-traumatic sex session that we saw get started last week. Given that he just shot and killed Brett Woodard, Amelia asks what his experience with death in the Vietnam War was like, and Wayne tells her he doesn’t really think about it: “Life happens now, and later is now, y’know? It’s never behind you. I’m not avoiding the question, I just really don’t spend time remembering things.”

The choice to spend time remembering or not remembering things is likely one that 2015 Wayne would long for. Elisa is probing his memory particularly hard in this episode, attempting to get Wayne to turn over his full account of what happened after they heard that hotline call from the young woman claiming to be Julie Purcell in 1990…

Indeed, it seems that her plea to tell “the man on TV acting like my father” to leave her alone was the ignition point in 1990 that will ultimately lead us—and perhaps Wayne and Roland—to the Pink Rooms that hold the answers to Julie’s disappearance. Unfortunately, A.G. Gerald Kindt isn’t much of a big-picture guy (and is also maybe, probably involved in this whole Hoyt conspiracy), so he decides that this mysterious female caller is definitive proof that Tom Purcell murdered Will and kidnapped Julie even though there was no other evidence whatsoever to suggest that. All his haughty talk of “how did you miss this in 1980” to Wayne and Roland is even harder to stomach once we see the follow-up to the 1980 Woodard shootout where he takes the backpack and jacket found on Woodard’s property to mean unequivocally that Woodard committed the crimes against the Purcell children, railroading Wayne into backing the indictment, that he’ll later railroad him into redirecting at Tom.

But while Wayne doesn’t seem to believe Tom had much to do with his children’s disappearance, it’s an even harder pill to swallow for Roland who we know has helped Tom heal over the last 10 years. Interrogating him now, after he’s just found out his daughter is alive and wants nothing to do with him, is about to undo all of that healing.

Wayne tells Tom about the hole in Will’s closet and asks him if he ever peeped on Julie; he brings up the rumor that Julie wasn’t his biological child at all. Tom, hurt and confused, asks Roland how he could think he’d do something like that “after everything you know.” Roland tells him they want to help, but they can’t if he doesn’t talk to them, and Tom howls in return. There is no other way to describe his visceral reaction to reopening these wounds that never fully healed. Scoot McNairy has been turning in a perfectly pained performance week in and week out, but with room to really shine in episode 6, he paints the picture of a man destroyed—completely untethered from a life that has taken away the single good thing it ever gave him.

Wayne and Amelia have another unresolved tussle over who has the unhealthiest attachment to the Purcell case as Wayne continues to spend less and less time at home, and Amelia’s publishers see Julie’s reappearance as a “good opportunity” for a second book. I don’t love it for their relationship or how their emotional constipation seems to shape Wayne’s future with his children, but…

I would throw just about any character under the bus in order to get more information about the Pink Rooms, and that’s just what Amelia’s continued journalist prying does. Though we’re not told how she gets the lead, Amelia shows up at a nun-run shelter for young women, and talks to a girl who says she knew Julie once she was going by “Mary July,” as another runaway told the detectives last week. The young woman tells Amelia that Mary July used to mention “living in the pink rooms” and “a queen in a pink castle,” but she chalked it up to Mary July not really knowing who she was: “I think she just pretended.” The girl gets thoughtful for a moment, and then tells Amelia she ought to write a book about “what happens to kids out here—what happens to girls.”

Cue a 1990 visit to Hoyt Foods as Roland and Wayne dig deep on the officers that uncovered Will’s backpack and Julie’s jacket a the Woodard house, including Harris James, the man whose disappearance following the 1990 investigation Elisa keeps bringing up. It seems that after the 1980 investigation, James left the police force to become Chief Security Officer at Hoyt Foods. He tells the detectives he worked the security nightshift for five years before the CSO position came open, but they seem to be most interested in the fact that he gets paid a ton of money. When asked what he’s getting paid so much to secure at a chicken company, James responds from memory: “Securing without compromise the integrity of corporate assets while guarding against hazard to daily operations.”

Yeah, okay sure. Wayne asks why it took two days to find the backpack on Woodard’s property in 1980, and James responds, “Took God six days to make the world, I can believe it took a bunch of GEDs two days to find a backpack.” Which leads to Wayne’s later iconic note about God’s seventh resting day: “I always thought he should have put that extra day in, instead of half-assing it.” Perhaps Wayne thinks that seventh day would have meant less disappearing girls in the world…

But Wayne and Roland keep digging into what they could have missed about Tom Purcell in 1980 and find one pretty glaring omission. His former boss tells them that he didn’t want to say anything at the time but, even before Tom quit his warehouse job, he was on the verge of being fired. He caught him drinking on the job multiple times, and he wasn’t getting along with the rest of the guys; they’d been giving Tom a hard time about being spotted going into a gay club. Later, inside the now sober and religious Tom’s trailer, the detectives find a pamphlet (beneath a ton of condoms in his bedside table, it’s worth noting) eerily titled “Homosexuality can be cured.”

That gives a little more credence to the in-show and out-of-show idea that Julie might not be Tom’s biological daughter. There are a few theories as to who her father could be then, but Lucy’s cousin Dan likely pulls ahead in Reddit points when he shows back up in 1990, calling into the tip hotline to request a meeting with the detectives. But he’s not exactly tipping altruistically. While smoking a cigarette, eating scrambled eggs, drinking coffee, and maintaining crazy eyes, Dan (Michael Graziadei showing up to play in a 1990 wig) tells Wayne and Roland that they’re way off the mark if they think Tom had anything to do with Julie’s disappearance, but he’s got the answers to all their questions…if they just give him $7,000.

Wayne offers Dan plenty of threats that would sway plenty of men, but Dan says he’s been getting beat on his whole life, and he’s not scared of whatever they could do to him. But he does give up a few answers seemingly by accident, like the fact that Lucy came to live with his family when she was four and they “sorta shared a lotta milestones.” Yeesh. He also tells them that every minute they’re not paying him $7,000 is a minute that other people are out there trying to make sure they never find Julie: “people who do not renegotiate—people who it was in their interest to make Lucy look like she OD’d.”

Driving through town, Roland says it’s crazy how quickly the community died, and Wayne responds: “Didn’t die, it was murdered.” When Wayne realizes that Roland has the car headed toward home, he gets angry, saying they still have work to do, but Roland tells him if he doesn’t want to go home, don’t go home, but don’t pretend it’s about the job. They get in a hissy fit so severe, that Wayne demands Roland stop the car, and he gets out and starts walking.

After that, Things Start Happening, and they start happening fast. Wayne walks and walks until a full moon is shining brightly overhead and he’s standing in front of the Purcell’s abandoned old house on Shoepick Lane. Inside, the walls are covered with enough graffiti to inspire 1,000 screengrabs of 100 suggestive spirals and random words (“time,” “summer,” “girls”), but Wayne is there for one thing: to make sure he didn’t imagine that hole in Will’s closet. But when he spots it, he gets another idea; he tears a small piece of paper out of his notebook, rolls it up, and passes it through the hole.

“They were passing notes,” Old Wayne tells Old Roland in his study in 2015. That’s what the hole was for. He tells Roland that Elisa brought up Harris James again, then leaves to go to the restroom while Roland looks at a marked-up version of Amelia’s book Wayne has been reading (another opportunity for enough screen grabs to keep me occupied all week). When Wayne comes back, he’s surprised to see Roland standing there, and asks how he’s doing. Roland plays along, sorrow written all over his face, but then Wayne gets a concerned look on his face. He asks Roland to look outside and tell him if there’s a sedan idling down the street. Roland says there’s not.

Next, Amelia is at a packed reading of her newly released book, which she opens up to questions at the end.  A voice calls out asking about the new revelation that Julie Purcell might be alive, and as Amelia answers that she’s actually working on another book to investigate that very revelation, the voice steps into view…and further into view…aggressively forward into view. It’s a black man with a milky eye, as we’ve hear described my multiple witnesses, but not the same man that Wayne and Roland briefly investigated in 1980. He’s demanding to know if Amelia knows where Julie is, and then accuses her of “just making money and milking their pain.” As he shouts “shame on you woman,” and storms out of the venue, a look of clarity passes over Amelia’s face…

“Dolls,” she gasps.

At this very same time, Tom has been released from the holding cell the police kept him in for 24 hours, and when he angrily storms up to Roland’s office, he instead overhears other detectives talking about Dan O’Briens reappearance on the map. Tom tracks him down at one of his old drug haunts and pulls a gun on him: “Heard you want a payout, let’s pretend each of these bullets is a thousand bucks.” We’ve never seen Tom this volatile, and when Dan get the gun away from him, he resorts to beating Dan’s face against the ground, and then against his fists, demanding Dan tell him where Julie is.

Dan doesn’t know. The only thing he was had to tell the cops if he ever got his money was that he knew people were paying Lucy for the eight years she was alive after Julie’s disappearance, and they weren’t happy when she started asking for more money. We don’t know if Dan tells Tom who those people were…

The only thing we know is that the next time we see Tom, he’s drunkenly driving past the Hoyt estate…drunkenly hopping the fence inside…and drunkenly breaking a window to get in the house. We know this, because we watch someone else watch Tom do it all on security cameras. But that someone doesn’t make a move to stop him. No, that someone waits until Tom has made his way down to the basement…made his way through a vaulted door…and made his way into a pink room where he looks up in horror, saying:

“The hell? Julie?”

But we don’t get to see what Tom sees. We only see Harris James approaching him from behind.

CREDITS.

THIS IS A RECAP, NOT A REDDIT THREAD, BUUUUUT:

When Kindt announces at a press conference that new evidence suggests Brett Woodard murdered both Purcell children, Lucy Purcell storms out, followed quickly by a female reporter…then Amelia…then her ever-present neighbor friend/guardian. It’s the latter I’m most interested in…

While Amelia is talking to the girl who knew Julie at the Catholic shelter, she briefly gets distracted by a young man getting out of a truck outside labeled “Ardoin Landscaping.” That’s the same last name as the little boy, Mike,who Amelia thought had a crush on Julie and later revealed that Julie had gotten the cornhusk dolls from someone while trick-or-treating.

Also, True Detective and landscapers…always worth a second look.

Harris James telling Wayne that he’s “got a good body” in an episode where Tom is revealed to be living a closeted life in Arkansas is…again, worth a second look.

I present this fact without any suggestion whatsoever that there could be anything suspicious about Old Wayne and Old Roland’s beautifully rekindled friendship: Roland tells Wayne there’s no car outside his house in 2015, but we don’t see that there’s no car.

WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN TO TOM? WHAT’S UP WITH THE HOYTS? HOW DID JULIE MAKE IT OUT OF THE PINK ROOMS? HOW MANY PINK ROOMS ARE THERE??????

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 6 ("Hunters In The Dark") on HBO Go