10 Best Episodes Of True Detective

In the first episode of True Detective season three, we return to the familiar territory of season one, rural, small town U.S. of A. Nic Pizzolato again asks questions concerning the philosophical nature of a broken, apathetic, modern society and of America as a failed social experiment, represented by the increasingly sordid murders, the incompetence of the police and the greed of corporate controlled political systems.

The theme of time as a commodity is reintroduced here, illustrated by an aging Detective Wayne Hays struggling with onset of dementia and the exhausting, elusive scale of the thirty five year investigation that has almost ruined his life. A missing brother and sister case interrupts Hays (Mahershala Ali) and his partner West (Stephen Dorff) from their usual night of drink driving and shooting their pistols at the local wildlife, so they reluctantly respond to the call, unaware that this night will shape the next 35 years of their lives.

When the missing boy is found dead and ritualistically posed in a nearby woodland and the sister unaccounted for, it’s clear we are back to the sinister, poverty stricken, isolated rural tone of season one. Even in the first episode the suspects begin to mount up quickly to keep the viewer guessing: the parents, with implications of abuse, a local indigenous American 'trash man', underscoring the issue of racism in the town, are flagged immediately.

As if Pizzolatto was ever going to make it that easy, for both us and the law.