True Detective Season 3: What Does The Ending Really Mean?

4. This Was A Love Story

In the end, True Detective wasn't really about the Purcell case, in a similar way to how Season 1 wasn't really about The Yellow King. Nic Pizzolatto likes to build conspiracies and then defy those expectations, but more than that he likes to examine the relationships between people.

That's particularly true in a masculine sense - Cohle & Hart, Hays & West - but what makes this season stand out is the relationship between Hays and Amelia. While they're together in two timelines, it's her spectral presence in 2015 that is most important. She haunts Hays' memories, as something he can neither let go of nor ever fully capture.

The larger point of the case was Hays' connection to both West and Amelia, and how that had affected their relationships. As pointed out by Tom Knauer on Twitter, this was how he kept her memory alive, and only in 'solving' the case, or rather, letting it go, was he able to find his way back to her, and remember their life and love. This matches with his friendship with West too, and the way they're eventually able to come back together.

The biggest themes of the season speak to time and memory, but they directly connect to what become its other major themes towards the end: love, family, friendship, and conenctions lost through time. In 2015, it's not about Hays solving the Purcell case. It's about him rediscovering what he lost: his friendship with West, his relationship with his daughter, and the memory of the love he shared with his wife.