10 Best Episodes Of True Detective
8. The Final Country
The episode many of us had been waiting for. After audiences had begun to suspect a link between the Purcell case and the Childress murders in Louisiana, it is finally revealed that season one and three exist in a shared universe.
As the murder investigation continues over three time lines, 1980, 1990 and 2015, some familiar names enter into the investigation. While Hays is being interviewed for a television documentary, Elisa Montgomery, the interviewer, points out the similarities of the Purcell murder case and the Childress murders of 1995 and 2012. Miniature straw dolls found at the scene of the crime have occult undertones that relate to the horrors of the case investigated by Cohle and Hart, and Elisa points out both the similarity and the symbology used by known paedophile rings.
Shared universes are extremely popular in movies at the moment, Marvel, DC and Star Wars for example but in unrelated anthology series it’s almost unheard of. Linking seasons into one story is clever stuff and not entirely unexpected, where season two fits in is unclear, though perhaps it’s safe to assume a link could have originally been part of Pizzolatto’s master plan.
The connection ultimately turns out to be another false lead, one of the many that are used in this series to throw us and the cops off the scent. Too bad, Rust Cohle would've loved this one.