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

5. Elisa Could Find Out

After Hays goes out to play with his grandchildren, his son, Henry, finds the bit of paper with Mike Ardoin's address on it. He briefly contemplates it, and it looks like he's about to throw it away, before he instead decides to pocket the paper.

So, what exactly is Henry going to do with that? One possibility is that he'll pass it on to Elisa. That he realises it's connected to the Purcell case, and he'll give it to the woman he's been sleeping with so that she can connect the dots and finish her documentary with a closed case. Or perhaps it's to give it to her so that she'll appreciate Julie is alive and well, and let the case go. Henry knows his father wanted the case solved, but also what it cost him. By passing it on to Elisa, he can ensure it's closed without his dad getting involved again.

There's a possibility he just wants to keep it from his father, but that doesn't explain why he'd keep it, rather than destroy it. It seems likely he has some plan for it, but it's left deliberately ambiguous. Much of the season can be read as a commentary on true crime series themselves, and this kind of nugget fits with that: designed to make everyone go crazy speculating as to what it means, when we're not going to find out the answer. But if he does give it to Elisa, and the pair do re-open the case, then that too is fitting, because it's all "one long story that kept going and going".