‘True Detective’ Recap: Lies are Crafted, Cover-ups Revealed, and Things Fall Apart in the Pink Room in ‘Hunters in the Dark’ By Roxana Hadadi | TV | February 12, 2019 | “One thing I learned, in the war? Life happens now. Then later’s now, you know. It’s never behind you.” We know where Julie was: The pink room is in the basement of the mansion of the Hoyt Foods CEO, the man we still haven’t seen onscreen, the person in that hunting photo with police officer-turned-overpaid lackey Harris James. (Fun fact: Lovely Pajiba alumna Joanna Robinson confirmed over at Vanity Fair today that Guardians of the Galaxy’s Michael Rooker will play Hoyt.) The image of James lurking behind Tom’s crumbling face as he sees something on that pink wall that reminds him of his missing daughter is haunting, and I’ve already had a nightmare about it, and maybe that means I’ve moved on from Hereditary, so this is progress! There are only two episodes to go now in this third True Detective season, and “Hunters in the Dark” picks up the pace by filling in some key elements of this story, some of which we’ve suspected, some of which arrive out of nowhere. In 1980, Julie was being held by the Hoyts, and after she left them—we don’t know why—she started running with street kids around 1990, going by names like “Mary Julie” and “Mary July.” Maybe she had to turn to prostitution, maybe she was forced into doing things she didn’t want to do, but whatever happened, it turned her against Tom Purcell. Her uncle Dan O’Brien and her mother Lucy were involved, somehow, in whatever happened to her; father Tom seems totally in the dark. But Tom has his own secrets, from money problems and what seems like a gambling addiction to the issue of his sexuality, being forced to live in the closet, turning to “pray the gay away” programs—now we know why he seemed to cling so strongly to AA, to church, to a way to become “normal.” (Please be aware that Tom’s whole story is one of the primary tragedies of this season, and if you haven’t seen The Miseducation of Cameron Post, do that right now.) And in 2015, that affair we suspected between true-crime producer Elisa and Hays’s son Henry? Yes, totally happening, and the revelation makes Hays turn introspective. Did he withhold love from his family? Did he set a bad example for his son? Why would Henry make these choices? What stuck with him from his childhood? Why does anyone do anything? Lots of lies crafted this week, lots of cover-ups revealed, and lots of realizations that sometimes things just fall apart, outside of your control, outside of anyone’s. Let’s do the timelines thing. In 1980: • We see now how quickly district attorney turned state’s attorney Gerald Kindt throws the whole case on Brett Woodard, how thoroughly he shakes the dead bodies off his conscience, how very little he cares about actually solving this case. “It only goes one way,” these white, powerful men say to Hays, and when it’s clear that he objects to their cover-up, that he finds it distasteful and lazy and weak, it’s not that hard to draw the lines between this interaction and Hays’s failed career aspirations through 1990. And note also here that Kindt orders for Hays and West (still in the hospital for his shot leg) to turn over all their evidence, all their interview notes, every scrap of anything they’ve collected while searching for Julie’s and Will’s kidnapper/s and killer/s. (Funny how quickly Kindt changes his story in 1990 to accuse Hays and West of shirking their responsibilities and not thoroughly investigating Tom, when we clearly see that he decides to lay all the blame on Woodard. Kindt is that motherfucker.) In 1990: • Speaking of Tom: That pink room in the Hoyt family mansion is horrifying, all different shades of pink on the trim and door and wall and light fixture, and it feels like a place stuck in time, very intentional, like a trap. And note its location in the Hoyt house—in a basement, down a hallway, behind a heavy metal door. Whoever took Julie there, and whoever knew she was down there, knew they were doing something wrong. Given that Harris James joined Hoyt Foods as chief of security in May 1981, a short time after Julie disappeared, I’m guessing he’s known what goes on in the pink room for quite some time. • Also speaking of Tom: Roland sure is convinced that Tom couldn’t have hurt Julie and Will, and why is that? Is their close friendship based on a shared understanding—maybe a shared identity? Think of how Roland explains himself to Hays in 2015, how he says that Hays is mistaken when he thinks Roland got married, had a wife, had children, had a family. Why wouldn’t Roland want those things, or make those choices? Maybe because he’s hiding the same thing that Tom was? • I thought last week that maybe it wasn’t really Julie calling the tip line and launching into that tirade about Tom, but no, it was—the finger prints on the truck stop pay phone match the ones from Walgreens. But, now for another question: In 2015, is Julie still alive? Or did she slip through everyone’s fingers back then? • Far less relationship drama between Hays and Amelia this week, but still, they’re not on level ground, especially when she reveals she is working on an update to the book now that Julie is revealed to be alive. This would probably have required too much effort, but if HBO had paid for a ghostwriter to write a version of Life and Death and the Harvest Moon as a tie-in for marketing purposes, I would 100% buy and read that shit. Amelia has a good voice! “A lost child is a story that is never allowed to end” is a good line! • Oh, and yeah: Looks like we found the guy with the filmy eye and the scar! He comes to Amelia’s book reading to harass her (with language that seems very similar to her husband’s: “making your money and milking their pain”), and yup, he sure seems like someone who is after finding out where Julie is. Kind of like the men Dan O’Brien warned Hays and West about … • Dan O’Brien, you twitchy, sketchy scumbag. What did you and cousin Lucy do? (Aside from probably fool around, which, gross.) I’m not surprised in the least that he tried to sell his information to Hays and West, and that he later folded when a fallen-off-the-wagon Tom threatened his life, but I am a little surprised he managed to stay off the grid for 10 years. But do we think now that his death, and the abandonment of his bones at the bottom of that Missouri quarry, are Hays and West’s doing? I’m not so sure anymore. But I do think he gives us our clearest glimpse into Lucy’s motivations when he describes of her, “She didn’t know when to stop pushing … She’d keep on pushing until she got what she didn’t want.” Was she complaining about her children at work? Did someone offer to take them away? Did she agree to something from which she couldn’t then back out? The woman seems consumed by self-loathing—think of her continued nastiness toward Amelia in 1980—and maybe it’s because of something she did. Something she thought would help her children (who we know now were passing notes through that hole in their bedroom walls—not a peephole, but a communication bridge) laugh, but that didn’t work out the way she anticipated. Finally, in 2015: • The show has obviously focused a lot on how the Julie Purcell case has haunted Hays over the years, but I wonder what other detective work may come back to Hays in the middle of the night. His “It’s terrible what this work makes you ponder” suggests a weariness that goes broader than this alone.<doc-sep>Hays is juiced, between the "queer underground" angle on Tom and the squirrelly nature of Dan teasing that he knows something, but West thinks they need to slow down and do this right. He also knows Hays needs to stop hiding from his family by burying himself in work which leads to a fight between the two. Hays ends up jumping out of the car and storming off down by himself. He ends up wandering back to the Purcell house where he puts together what the peephole was actually for. Will would pass notes to Julie assuring her that everything was going to be alright. Oof, that is a sweet, heartbreaking detail, and pretty revealing to the type of homelife these kids were subjected too.<doc-sep>True Detective type TV Show network HBO genre Crime True Detective‘s third season is grim-faced bummer TV. And like any prestige-bait drama shot in self-serious grayscale, it can be very funny when it doesn’t realize it’s going off the rails. To be clear, Sunday’s sixth episode, “Hunters in the Dark,” had one legit great moment. As grieving father Tom Purcell, Scoot McNairy looks like an exploded electrical socket of pure trauma. In 1990, Tom’s the new hot suspect, interrogated by his own pal Roland (Stephen Dorff). Tom buries his face in his hands, a man discovering that the Hell he was living in was just the waiting room. His cry turns into a roar, and for a moment McNairy’s eyes look like two black holes. Tom’s jailed for 24 hours while Roland and Wayne (Mahershala Ali) continue their investigation. Released, Tom runs up to Roland’s office. Lieutenant West’s not around. But hark, from down the hall, could that be the siren song of Policeman Loudly Revealing Important Plot Points? POLICEMAN #1: “That was the Lieutenant! They just had lunch with our dirtbag. The uncle or whatever? Dan O’Brien? Met him at some diner. Says he had the whole story, wants a payout.” Say now, this is some very important secret information Tom can use! Dan O’Brien (Michael Graziadei) was Tom’s mysterious brother-in-law, after all. Good thing these detectives are both speaking through megaphones while they describe recent events in precise detail. Tom approaches the door, which is cracked open just enough for anyone walking through this public corridor to overhear this conversation about a somewhat secret investigation into an infamously bloody local mystery. POLICEMAN #1: “They wants us to get phone records. Diamond Cactus Motel in Paradise, Nevada. Two years back. Lucy’s phone records.” Now, we can set aside the fact that this is a show where a young boy died in Devil’s Den and his mother died in a town called Paradise. (Perhaps there will be a final shootout at Purgatory Falls, New Hampshire?) And we can set aside the fact that some of these lines sound like painfully stapled-on ADR. Note how the camera cuts away from Policeman #1 as he piles exposition onto his exposition, not just “phone records” but “Lucy’s phone records,” that phrase “two years back” because when you’re crafting a timeline-shifting story with no confidence in your own narrative clarity you have to make every character constantly reference the chronology. But on every level, this is raggedy storytelling. Grieving Dad Accidentally Overhears Crucial Information At The Police Station: That wouldn’t fly on Criminal Minds, and everything flies on Criminal Minds. Also raggedy: This episode’s non sequitur revelation of Tom’s big secret. Wayne and Roland interrogate his old boss, and find out that some of Tom’s co-workers “saw him going into a queer club.” “Repressed Homosexuality” is a potentially fruitful plot point, especially given the period setting. Wayne gets more suspicious of Tom, declaring that “Devil’s Den was a homo cruising spot,” promising to “talk to somebody in Vice about the Queer Underground.” Investigating the Queer Underground would definitely improve this season’s music! And you can kinda believe, unfortunately, that a smart policeman circa 1990 would wrongfully equate homosexuality with all-purpose murderous deviancy. But this is a weird return to a narrative well that already ran dry for creator Nic Pizzolatto. In season 2, he conjured up Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch), a closet case who always felt beamed in from some 1970s morality tale. And at least Woodrugh’s melodramatic internal struggle was dramatized on screen! Whereas we seem to be learning this crucial information about Tom right as his story line comes to an end. He finds O’Reilly, beats him up, then follows a clue-direction to a Hoyt-looking mansion. There, poor Tom discovers an ACME™ Brand Murder Cellar, complete with pink walls. “Julie?” he says mysteriously, as local symbol of moral corruption Harris James (Scott Shepherd) sneaks up behind him. I gather that most of the theorizing around True Detective this season has focused on all things Hoyt-adjacent. But “Hunters in the Dark” also featured a goofy appearance by one of this season’s hottest clues: The One-Eyed Black Man. Who is played by Steven Williams, a wonderful actor from everything (The Leftovers! The X-Files! The Chi! ). And if you thought the Halfway Opened Police Door Full of Plot was fun, wait till you see the Bookstore Reading Interrupted By A Tantalizing Soliloquy. Amelia (Carmen Ejogo) is reading some overripe prose from her non-fiction classic. And then she’s interrupted by a nameless man asking loud questions about the case. Or maybe he’s a super aggressive book critic. “You’re just making your money, and milking their pain,” he accuses Amelia. “Shame you on, woman!” Now, this scene could only be a little silly. It’s disappointing that Amelia’s main subplot lately is Getting Excoriated By Dudes Mansplaining The Ethical Problem With Her Book. And it’s a bit of a contrivance for this man — who matches the description of a key red herring suspect — to just start blathering on mysteriously about this unsolved case in public. But then you get to the final moment. A close-up on Amelia, her eyes remembering something, and then her climactic stage whisper: “Dolls!” Goodness, could this be the mythic cyclops who purchased those scary dolls all those years ago? Is the Pink Room pink? I remain hopeful that this season will justify all the monolithic frowning with a fascinating and complicated final act. I also remain hopeful that they’ll figure out Stephen Dorff’s old-age makeup so 2015 Roland looks less like a werewolf mid-transformation. But this episode bent over backwards to juice this season’s slow-paced plot towards a reckoning. At this point, I am mainly watching True Detective to root for Elisa Montgomery (Sarah Gadon), the 2015 documentarian. “Have you ever sat back at any point over the last two decades,” she asks Wayne, “and thought about the sheer number of fatalities surrounding this case?” She sounds incredulous. She can’t believe this crap, and neither can I. Related content:<doc-sep>
Spoiler alert: this blog details events in the sixth episode of the third season of True Detective, which airs on Sunday nights on HBO in the US, and Mondays in the UK on Sky Atlantic at 2am and 9pm. ‘No way we could be that wrong’ Hays and Amelia are in bed in 1980, partaking in some post-coitus pillow talk. He tells her the shots that killed Woodard were the first he has fired as a police officer. She wants him to tell her about his time in the jungle during the Vietnam war, but he’d rather not. “One thing I learned in the war is that life happens now … I really don’t spend time remembering stuff.” In 1990, the task force is chewing over the Julie Purcell voicemail and the idea that Tom was in on his son’s death and daughter’s disappearance. The bigwigs want someone to “go at him hard”, and West says he is up to the job. “I don’t know what that call was but no way we could be that wrong,” says West before the pair talk to Tom. Hays suggests giving the interrogation to another member of the team, but West is adamant. “Them mothers will eat him alive,” he says. Lucy and Tom Purcell, parents of the missing children. Photograph: Warrick Page/HBO The interrogation sees West and Hays adopt a bad-cop-bad-cop routine with Purcell, who seems genuinely horrified by the suggestion that he is involved. “We don’t have anyone who saw you after 6:30,” says Hays. Purcell turns to West for help but gets nothing but a grimace back. He tells them he went back inside after working on his car and then listened to a St Louis Cardinals game. Hays tells him about the peephole they found in Will’s room. The bosses now believe it was Tom who planted the evidence at Woodard’s home. The phone call that Julie made came from a truck stop in Russellville. The duo head out there and Hays explains why he didn’t mention that he thought the backpack and other evidence was planted at Woodard’s house. He didn’t want to give the bosses that info yet, he says, because he thought the timing was off, but also possibly because he knows that they can use information like that carelessly. He has another argument with Amelia, who reveals she is writing a sequel to her first non-fiction book. They spar about Hays’s new position and his lack of ability to knot a tie. Amelia heads to a nunnery to talk to girls who might have ran with Julie. One tells her that four or five months ago they were together and Julie went by “Mary”, “Mary Julie” or “Mary July”. There’s more talk of the “Pink Castle”, too. ‘We tell it all the way this time’ Hays and West visit Tom Purcell’s factory. Photograph: Warrick Page/HBO The pair move on to Tom’s old factory. His boss – the guy who sent him home in 1980 – tells Hays and West that Tom was on the way out before the disappearance of Julie and the death of Will. He was drinking on the job, he claims, and there were rumours he was gay, or at least frequented “queer clubs”. During a search of Tom’s home, they find poker chips, pictures of Julie and a church leaflet for “curing homosexuality”. That’s enough for Hays to suggest Tom could be in on it. “We don’t stop,” he says. “We tell it all the way this time.” Back in 1980, Hays is at the station dealing with the aftermath of the shooting. The bosses want to pin it on Woodard, but Hays is unsure. Their motivation is purely political; the situation and subsequent moral panic is making the region into a “hee-haw county”. The bad press needs to stop and Woodard is the perfect fall guy. At the Hoyt factory, the duo interview Harris James – the man who found the backpack. He’s dismissive, cocky and combative when Hays tries to make fun of his position. “I do miss my days cruising around, eating donuts,” he says, in what must be a few weeks before his disappearance. In 2015, Elisa is questioning Hays about James and suggesting that, like Dan O’Brien, his body might be found in a drained quarry one day. Hays bites back. Was this “the thing” that West and Hays did in 1990? Did they kill James? Amelia (Carmen Ejogo) promoting her book.