True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto tried to warn you. Without spoiling the plot for you, he said weeks ago via Twitter hints and vague allusions, that it was unwise to focus on the identity of The Yellow King. That cracking the esoteric mythological code of True Detective wasn’t the point. So for those of you who refused to listen, for those who (understandably) got swept up in trying to chase down theories and outsmart the showrunners, last night’s straightforward finale might have been a frustrating anti-climax. Barring the Carcosa reveal, we didn’t learn anything new about the case in the finale. Errol, The Lawnmower Man, makes for an unsettling but, ultimately, unimpressive monster. Either Reggie Ledoux or the horror you, the viewer, dreamt up in your head would have been far creepier. I’m sure, ever since the True Detective audience went full Rust Cohle with their conspiracy theories and obsessive analysis, Nic Pizzolatto has been dreading this finale. (He jokingly said he was planning to leave the country if the reaction was poor.) But it’s not his fault that, like Rust and Marty, the audience has been chasing the wrong demon. The terror and the darkness isn’t external, it’s internal. When you view it that way, the finale delivers an entirely satisfying conclusion.

Taking Off The Mask: During the final confrontation at the center of Carcosa, Errol tells Rust to “take off your mask.” On the one hand, this is fairly standard Carcosian gobbledygook, but, on the other hand, it leads to the most satisfying part of this episode. We finally get to see the cracks in Rust Cohle’s carefully constructed facade. We’ve seen him vulnerable before (needing to get drunk before meeting Marty’s family or angrily throwing Maggie out), but we’ve never really seen all the way inside Cohle. But after Carcosa, he’s an entirely different man.

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Rust finally comes to terms with the pain of losing his child. He’s been chasing down bad guys, self-medicating, and doing just about everything he could to avoid connection to other human beings since we met him. But connection was always what he desperately wanted. Maggie saw that and exploited it. Finally, here, after the inner darkness is defeated, Rust can drop the mask and confront the void.

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Saving Themselves: One of the oft-repeated, “time is a flat circle” concepts of this show is that everything that has happened will happen again. Given that, the audience would expect to see an echo of the children who were trapped at the Ledoux compound in this episode. another pair of children trapped and in need of rescue, echoing the children that were found at the Ledoux compound. To misquote Rust, those children were always in that room, and will be there again.

Do man children count? Because in this episode it’s Rust and Marty who are trapped in the dark, wounded and dying. You could argue that, this time, Gilbough and Papania get to play the hero, but, really, Rust and Marty save themselves. Or, at least, each other.

The Imperfections: For all the interesting things this episode had to say about connections and inner demons and wasted lives, it wasn’t exactly a perfect finale. Even if you set aside the theories and the mythology to focus on the men at the center of this story, there were stretches of the episode that felt like they didn’t belong. It’s perfectly okay that Errol isn’t quite the stuff of nightmares. In fact, as I said before, I prefer it that way. But I’m not sure the context of his crazy ol’ murder incest house added any texture to the story. Similarly, though I appreciated the fact that the long walk into Carcosa mirrored Marty and Rust creeping onto the Ledoux compound, that sequence felt drawn out and unnecessary. In the Ledoux episode, tensions were high because we didn’t know what the detectives would find. In this episode, the tension is already gone; we know who’s behind everything, so the time would have been better spent getting to the fallout a little faster. Or, possibly, we could have spent a little more time on the Hart family’s bedside reunion. I’m delighted Audrey and Maggie weren’t tied up in the killings, but I think that leg of the story could have used more development and a better resolution.

The Love Story: In the end Pizzolatto has written a very effective and engrossing story. No matter what you think of the finale, you can’t argue that spending time with both Harrelson and McConaughey in these roles was anything less than fascinating. If the show didn’t give you the monsters and interconnected conspiracies you hoped for then maybe you, like Rust, should turn your gaze inwards. What kind of storytelling are you looking for? Isn’t the exploration of two broken men who dash their own lives to pieces, and crawl their way back from isolation, a story worth telling? And wasn’t it told well? Isn’t it satisfying to see the call and response of actions that echo across the decades of this series? A gesture of hate becomes a gesture of love and, for a story about darkness, that’s a pretty light ending.

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