The finale for True Detective's first self-contained season airs Sunday, ending the story of Detectives Marty Hart and Rust Cohle's hunt for a cabal of serial killers — and, surrounding it, a deluge of speculative bullshit big enough to drown the Mississippi Delta.
To be fair, the show opened the floodgates: It is a murder mystery, after all, and it's one dotted with enough references to weird-fiction classics and government-conspiracy paranoia to turn obscure terms like "Carcosa" and "The Yellow King" into mainstream-media clickbait. But the idée-fixe insistence on solving the show rather than watching it — feverishly fueled by pretty much every publication on the web, capitalizing on the show's ratings success with pieces on, like, the real meaning of Maggie Hart's yellow blouse in that one scene, man — is swamping the series. The demoralizing and dislocating effects of rural poverty, the way powerful people adopt various fictions to justify their misdeeds, the strange and sad performances of Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, the top-drawer direction by Cary Joji Fukunaga, all of it gets shoved aside for freeze-frame screencaps of restaurants with yellow-crown logos in the background. Fuck the forest, people seem to be saying — look at this tree I found!
Creator Nic Pizzolatto has even made the unusual move of stepping in to stem the tide. In an interview with BuzzFeed's Kate Aurthur, he's gracious enough about fan fervor for outlandish theories — "this is what it means to resonate with people." But (SPOILER ALERT, if telling you what won't happen can be considered a spoiler) he dismisses the possibility of a twist involving the surprise involvement of Cohle or Hart in the killings as "terrible, obvious writing." Ditto a potential reveal of some Lovecraftian monstrosity that eats time in the enchanted land of Carcosa: "to date there hasn't been a single thing in our show that's supernatural, so why would that suddenly manifest in the last episode?" (Apparently "Because that would rule" is not an acceptable answer.)
My own wild speculation is that clue-hunting and twist-anticipating entered the hive mind via cinemas in 1999 with the one-two twist-ending punch of The Sixth Sense and Fight Club. Sure, The Crying Game was still a recent memory, but not for the fanboys who flocked to Shyamalan and Fincher's films and whose tastes were about to become post-millennial mainstream culture's bread and butter. On the small screen, the phenomenon had its precursors — "Who killed Laura Palmer?", The X-Files' sprawling and eventually suffocating mythology — but the blame-slash-credit must be laid at the four-toed feet of Lost. Fueled by decades of pulp-fiction tropes and pop-philosophy mindbenders, structured as a Russian nesting doll of mysteries within mysteries, and riddled with more Easter eggs than the White House lawn, ABC's sci-fi smash knowingly worked fans into a frenzy of message-board theory-mongering. Turns out it was more or less a shaggy dog story the creators were making up as they went along, but this didn't stop viewers from applying this mode of audience speculation-cum-participation to virtually every big series since.
Which is fair play, when the show in question invites it. For example, Lost's big nerd-culture contemporary, the cult-classic critics' darling Battlestar Galactica reboot, teased its big mysteries in the opening-credit text of every episode, and thus had nothing but itself to blame when viewers gave the whole series a thumbs-up or thumbs-down based on those mysteries' solutions. But even relatively realistic shows, based not around unraveling enigmas but on studying the complexities of human relationships, are now treated like glorified Sudoku puzzles by vocal viewers. The Sopranos' David Chase worked overtime to design a series finale that would actively defy this kind of clue-hunting closure, but that didn't stop a host of amateur sleuths out to close the book on that infamously open ending. More recently, the ostensibly sophisticated audience of Mad Men treats everything from promo art to costume choices the way medieval soothsayers treated goat entrails. In this light, the decision of Game of Thrones to largely drop its epic-fantasy source material's host of cryptic prophecies and hidden truths (google "R+L=J" if you want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes) in favor of character work and realpolitik seems like the smartest act of adaptation since Francis Ford Coppola dropped JohnnyFontane as a main character in The Godfather.
These detail-driven, point-missing posts reduce fiction and drama to puzzles you can solve, codes you can crack. Which, I realize, is a backhanded compliment to the shows in question: If you've got enough going on in your series that thousands of people can spend hours pulling apart the slightest minutiae, you must be doing something more than your average CBS alphabet-soup cop show. But if fiction's just a game, that game can be beaten. You make your guess, it's right or wrong, game over. The lasting pleasures of any great show come in the form of performance, dialogue, cinematography, pacing, setting, emotional and ideological impact — all shit you ignore when you're hitting Wikipedia every five seconds. The real themes of True Detective are designed to haunt you the way they've haunted Rust and Marty. Great art, like the perfect murder, is unsolvable.
