The first season of True Detective was rightly hailed as being groundbreaking but when reviews of the follow up were disappointing, it was easy to just drop the show due to it being an anthology. I heard that the third season is a fantastic return to form and so added it to my watchlist. I’m pleased to report that it is indeed excellent while being sufficiently distinctive from the first season despite sharing some common features. This time around there is really only one lead character with his partner being only a supporting character and the show is as much about the case as how his life has been warped by it across the span of decades.

Across no less than three separate time periods in 1980, 1990 and 2015, this season relates the involvement of state police detective Wayne Hays and his partner Roland West in the so-called Purcell case. It begins when two children, Will and Julie, go out to play one day in a small town in Arkansas but fail return home in the evening. The father Tom calls the police and a search is quickly organized. The two detective quickly realize that the parents are estranged from one another and that the two children never showed up to play at their friend’s house as they said. In the woods, Wayne who was a tracker in the Vietnam War, finds Will’s body in a cave but Julie remains missing. Meanwhile in 1990, the Purcell case is reopened and its original conclusions called into question when Julie’s fingerprints are found in a pharmacy robbery. We also learn that Wayne has married Amelia, a schoolteacher who taught Will and helped the investigation, and later wrote a book about the case. In 2015, Wayne is old, Amelia has passed away and he is suffering from memory problems. He is interviewed by a true crime enthusiast who ask why so many of those involved in the case have ended up dead.

As before the cinematography is top notch but what stands out the most is the incredible acting by Mahershala Ali as Wayne Hays. In what must surely be the defining performance of his career, he portrays the same man during three very different periods of his life. He meets Amelia who he would eventually have two children with during the investigation, going from a young man who is surprised at having survived the Vietnam War to a someone who very much has something to lose. In his old age, he has lost his wife, is no longer a police officer, and is losing his memory. But this also gives him the renewed sense of freedom to chase down the old loose ends of a case that both he and his wife have been obsessed with all their lives. As so much time passes in between each period when the investigation becomes active once more, we’re led to wonder what good it does for Wayne to doggedly pursue the case as so many of the principals are long since dead and justice is clearly no longer possible.

The show is reasonably satisfying as a police procedural with the duo noticing small clues like a pinhole in the wall between the children’s bedrooms and going through years’ old phone records to trace connections. Yet while the two are far from bumbling detectives, this is ultimately a story of failure. They forgot to follow up on some clues. There are many red herrings, especially as they drop hints that this case may be connected to others. Some of the key people involved in the case successfully hide information from them. They tried their best and they genuinely do care but the fact remains that in the end their efforts didn’t matter very much at all. Both justice and the truth are elusive and the best intentioned people are imperfect. It’s such a drastically different ending than the first season. Even so Wayne married and gained a family, made peace with his past as a veteran of the Vietnam War and perhaps gained a friend, so the story still ends on a positive note.

This season didn’t hit with the same kind of impact its predecessor did and it was smart of them not to even try. Instead this feels like the story of the life of a police detective whose life has been inextricably bound to this one single high-profile case over the course of decades. The writing is excellent, the performances superlative and its lessons are original. I’d rate this as a strong recommendation.