1) This. The YK was a diety rather than the leader of a cult and Carcosa was the shrine.

someone posted a picture on reddit guessing that the green ears, were actually noise cancelling headphones for lawnmowing

so i'm sure that would have worked :P

I kept thinking that the green ears were the ear muffs he would wear while mowing the lawn. Kids might struggle to distinguish between that and real ears.

I prefer that explanation instead of a painter who painted a house green.

yep, +1

It's like there was no planning process in the writing - just a free flow of ideas. Then they were stuck with too much too deal with so they had to focus on one part of the plot only.

You guys were really expecting Rust and Marty to bring an end to the cult?

I think the message was that the evil is too wide spread for just a couple of men, warriors of the light, to stop. Especially considering evil people are in positions of significant power in society.

I thought it is a great metaphor for good vs evil in today's society, and how helpless individuals feel when contemplating how they can make a positive and impaction difference.

And managed to paint his ears green in the process. I just spent a couple of days painting a barn of mine red. Don't believe either I day I managed to paint my ears red to boot.

And that it's about "the secret occult history of the United States transportation system" makes me think that it will just be a character study.

And what was the point of the whole Steve guy on the boat? It didn't lead to anything regarding the case. Was it just supposed to be normal people help perpetuate evil in the world? I didn't think he deserved to have his Maserati shot up.

Pretty sure that was a character study bro

After watching the first episode when broadcast I decided this was the absolute perfect marathon prospect. IT WAS! I waited and waited and waited and successfully stayed spoiler free. I timed it perfectly too watching it all this weekend so I was ready for the final episode.

It was an intriguing well told story with truly spectacular performances by Woody and MM. Watching it seamlessly was a true joy as it unfolded. The weekly wait sucks and this show really shines as a whole. The best thing about watching it this way is avoiding all of the speculation and following the joyless ****s on message boards like this one.

This is as good as TV gets and after finally glancing a few comments in this thread I am confused to some of the comments and I am truly happy I was able to avoid all of the jibber jabber.

I guess the internet society we now live in wants to surgically investigate shows looking for clues and conspiracies frame by frame rather than just watch, enjoy and get lost in a well told, well presented, well acted story. I feel sorry for those who can't enjoy the basics of exceptional visual fiction.

That is an interesting point. It does seem like the organized activities had long since been abandoned and that what we saw over the course of the story was the work of Childress as he became a full-blown serial killer.

Fontenot was killed 5-years before Lange. That killing was on video tape. It seems the participants had the tape or at least knew about it. There we no other tapes found. That there was a cult and that sacrifice may be involved became a legend throughout the area.

Perhaps the cult disbanded or at least abandoned Carcosa as their place of ritual. The state of the Carcosa grounds suggests that Childress was the only one using it as it was mostly overgrown and in disrepair.

Childress may have presented a few bodies to signal that the cult was still operating. The higher ups in the cult figured they had to protect Childress as he was a connection to them. Over the years, it became easier to distance themselves from Childress (assuming the tape would remain concealed in the safe), especially since Childress did not exist on paper.

Earlier in the show, the legend was that the cult "marks their young" (or something like that). That suggests there was an organized ritual where even the parents may have been participants. That, in line with the cult's beliefs, certain children are selected (for whatever purpose) and that at some point they will participate in the ritual; at some point they will be killed.

Obviously, we don't know the how's and why's of this - but, we do know that Fontenot was killed as a child, but that Lange was not. We know that Lange had been involved since she was a child, but she became an adult, apparently with a life outside the cult - she became a prostitute. However, she retained some connection to either the cult or Childress as both of them were seen at a revival tent together. Why she was allowed to co-exist with Childress for apparently a number of years, is not explained.

The Lake Charles murder was also publicly displayed and that victim was an adult. Outside of Lange and Lake Charles, there is no mention of other adults. The pile of clothes were of children; the victims identified by the detectives were children from nearby the schools.

In any event, who knows? But, it does seem reasonable that the timeline of the show is probably dealing with killings done by Childress, not the cult.

Woody and or mm should be the killers in season 2 (alternate world)

Biggest gripe with show is rust would be fatass drinking and living like that. Wouldn't look like mm

Nobody here was/is saying every shot must mean something, but zooming in on the doll scene was obviously meant to signify something plot-connected. NP almost certainly had something specific in mind there beyond "metaphor for Hart not caring about his family" or whatever, that he did not follow through with due to running into time constraints with such a short series, or other reason.

like Lost, TD was overtly designed to make the audience care about BOTH character interaction AND the plot. there is no dichotomy. it was always both.

saying "it was always all about the characters" (as many did after Lost S6) was/is just making excuses for lazy plot-writing in the finale.

I agree.

If this was supposed to be a straight-forward storytelling, why is so much left unsaid about the cult? Leaving this up to the viewer to decide does not seem so straight-forward especially given the wealth of evidence on the subject.

A central point of the story was how Rust was so affected by the fact he realized they did not get all the killers AND that he could not properly pursue the case as a CID investigator. Indeed, the powers that were responsible for the killing were also responsible for keeping him away from the truth. Thus, the futility of the endeavor. He had no means to "pay his debt," and he was forced to just accept it and move on (at least until he worked his way back years later).

That the final brings us only to Childress does not explain the rest. We have good information that the cult involved very powerful people; that (whether the cult was active beyond 1995, or not) they knew about Childress and what he was doing; that they actively conspired to cover it up.

We also know that Lange was killed as an adult and had been somehow involved with these people since she was a child.

Anyhow, these questions were not answered, and that's fine. I suppose it is then okay for the viewer to speculate about these things. Indeed, before watching TD, I didn't know about "Carcosa," the "Yellow King," or the spirals, devil's nests, black stars, flat circles. Those were presented to the viewer as central to the killings. These were not explained as part of a "straight forward storytelling," a lot was left to the viewer (which, again, is fine - the story gave us lots of material from which to construct our own understanding). The writer may claim the story is all there for us, (and that is fine) but I don't think it would be reasonable to say that the viewer has not been invited to look into these other things.

I'm not sure why you're mocking this concept so hard. Again, a ton of fiction is about the characters more than the plot. For example, the first 7 episodes of True Detective? Did you guys get super angry that the first part of the season included all that **** about Marty's infidelity and ****ty parenting?

"This double date scene isn't telling me ANYTHING about the identity of the Yellow King, why is it in the showwwwwwwwwwww?" - you

RacersEdge(between you and him disliking this, are your jimmies rustled because the bad guy was Southern and white?) is weirdly complaining that the boat scene didn't lead to a clue. Correct. They wanted to see what he knew, he explained that he didn't know very much so they went back to square one. What was difficult to follow about that?

(It also introduced that the bar owner was helping Rust and was entertaining because the *******'s car got shot up, and it's fun for the audience when our heroes use their smarts to cow a blustery ******* in silence.)

You're so good at creating strawmen that I think you probably worked on the show props.

1) NP wasn't the director. You don't seem to have the strongest handle on how television gets made.

2) Dude, plenty of people managed to interpret that scene as a straightforward example of the darkness of the job encroaching on Marty's family. You wanted to read more into it, and I guess that's fine if it floats your boat, but don't blame the show for not addressing subplots YOU INVENTED

THIS IS A WORLD WHERE NOTHING IS SOLVED

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I think most of the disappointment stems from all those easter eggs. And imo that's a valid point. Either they mattered, or they didn't. If they mattered, they deserved resolution, or at least some acknowledgment. If they didn't matter, why were they there at all? To get the show TRENDING? To generate discussion/buzz? To just straight up troll the audience? Just poor film editing?

Yo the girl also thought he had a spaghetti face, I don't think we're supposed to think he literally had green ears, just that he got green pant on his hat/face/whatever.

Well, it's straight-forward storytelling. We are not supposed to think anything.

in real life i'm sure most cases don't have every question answered either. the unknown is a bitch sometimes

You're right. Directors invent and insert scenes and film them to look plot-significant entirely on their own without consulting the showrunner and/or script or script writer. That's how it works.

Almost nobody did because that's nonsensical.

Lots of stuff gets poorly executed in directing (usually due to lack of time or misunderstanding the script), often times with the writer in the loop. Once something's shot, you can't undo it, you try to make it work. I personally think the scene in question was meant to underscore Hart's "see something, do nothing" character, and that it wasn't poor execution. I don't think the other two character developments were necessary (though the third was the most interesting of the three), which is a big reason why people are putting so much emphasis on Audrey. The audience likely just misinterpreted it. Hart couldn't help his daughter, despite being a cop...he saw something, but did nothing.