I sold ten of those dolls to a one eyed black man. Was it really that hard to find that guy in a small town?

Did rich white people really let one eyed black men who used to kill chickens for a living raise their daughter while they are on safari? Seems like this was written in just for the hood scene.

The actual core crime elements were always lazy, shallow and derivative, case gets dropped after authorities lazily pin it on the crazy loner is a trope older than television for example.

It was always carried along by the acting, the relationship between the detectives, the new trope of senile cop tries to solve cold case and the three time lines conceit.

In the SF the lazyness of the actual case itself came front and centre to the point that all the good stuff suddenly just seemed contrived and cosmetic. Lipstick on a pig.

If the case had some real depth and twists and you add it to the all the really strong elements, you could have had a top tier show up their with the colossi of television.

I really hate how they kept referring to the guy as having one eye, or missing an eye. If Im looking for someone with only one eye, Im not looking for someone with two eyes wide open with one gray iris/pupil.

I thought it was weird that Stephen Dorff's character had Chuck Norris level fighting skills. It took like 9 big ass dudes to stop him.

That was indeed another horrible aspect of the episode.

well, after they stopped him, he sat outside the same bar staring at it, drinking a beer and barely bruised.

And then 10 years later another loner (the dad) dies, and they say, OK now we'll just pin it on THIS guy!

Time is a flat circle I guess

I feel dumb I was imagining some massive conspiracy involving the cops and the gay conversion church... but it was just a nutty lady who pushed a kid into a rock. Which we learned thanks to old man Junius Exposition.

Junius yelling "But you have to punish meeeee" as Hays and Roland walked away, was such cringeworthy cliche.

How come nobody else gives a **** about the two unnecessary eye birthmarks?

I thought the first nun had a cross tattoo

I didn’t notice any on the lil girl

I thought it was just so West could call him a Cyclops Mother Trucker!

I think the genre predisposes people to expect some big payoff. I thought the last 20 mins really clearly shows that the show was never about some big murder mystery. It's about us, and also about the way time manages to take something horrible that happened, and fix it by itself. He starts (and ends) as a soldier in Nam, and all his life actions take him to the end, where he forgets why he's at that house. It was all supposed to happen exactly like that. Time is a flat circle, they just kept reinforcing it here (when he'd see himself in various time periods and could sometimes feel himself being watched).

If you wanted a big reveal, for sure you'd be disappointed. I could see that.

I actually don't mind that there wasn't a big reveal or conspiracy. However having the old one eyed black dude show up and explain everything, was terrible.

I think the main theme was about memory. A lot of the show was about people forgetting, or trying to forget. Or trying to remember.

Hays talked to Amelia about not remembering Vietnam. Clearly not true, he just tried to forget it. The scene in his room where the Vietcong surrounded him was showing the memories were still there.

The last scene with Amelia was a happy one, where they made up and he told her he wanted to marry her. I suppose the decision to not show how she died, was a reflection of Hays' desire to forget.

I think some of the other random scenes (Hays dropping his daughter at college, Amelia teaching at the college) were just random fragments of memories coming to him as he is succumbing more to his dementia. The final scene of him disappearing into the jungle was likely a metaphor for this as well.

I just assumed it was a Christian thing that I know nothing about.

When they went into Hoyt's estate right before they get to the pink room there was a mirror and I swear the reflection was of a younger Hayes. Did he find that back in the day or was that just some random imagery that meant nothing like the rest of this season??

Yes it was the younger reflection. I don't know the meaning Pulazzo meant to pass though.

Same actress that Amelia interviewed there as a runaway teen who knew Julie (1990), so guessing they were just trying something to make her look older.

I coulda wasted the 8 hours I spent on this show jerking off, watching paint dry or peeling the flesh off of my bones. Instead I wasted it on this nonsense. Oh well see you guys for a disappointing next season!! WEEEEEEEEE!!!

I mean I think this is right. The point was here is this sort of bumbling guy who is not really changing the course of much as much as floating along. He is kind of weak in general. There is no part of the case where the cops do anything of value at all or even come close to figure out what happened. The entire investigation does nothing but create many more victims. In the end, nobody even gets close to the real story no matter how hard they try or how obsessed they are. He finally figures out the truth and he forgets immediately. None of it mattered except for the considerable damage it caused. Got it.

But I stopped rewatching The Wire for the 5th time to catch the finale and that was a mistake for me to give that hour and 15 minutes up the same way it was a mistake for them to give their lives up.

Dating back to Raymond Chandler, detective/mystery genre has always been more about atmosphere, gritty characters, and tense scenes, rather than a cohesive story that builds and ties everything together, which I guess is why this finale and the finale of s1 (and even to some extent the entirety of s2) were inoffensive to me.

It is also plausible that Pizzolatto was purposely going after the armchair detectives/conspiracy nuts, who are addicted to shows like Serial, Making a Murderer, etc. He seems to have purposely loaded it with as many red herrings as humanly possible, while making the actual explanation banal and ordinary. In a sense he was encouraging wild conspiracy theories (even dropping in the reference to S1), only to show how dumb it is to assume wild conspiracies to real-life murders, when real life is usually not like the movies.

This is a massive hot take.

Raymond Chandler stories are incredibly tightly plotted and satisfactory revelation of mystery that is consistent with the story so far is the core of detective fiction.

lol fair enough sometimes I just don't know what I'm talking about it's been a very long time since I read his books. I guess I more meant that it's typical with the detective/mystery drama to be more about one gritty encounter after another with lots of false leads rather than everything being relevant and paying off in the end.

I would say it was a satisfactory revelation of mystery. There is one big mystery, and that mystery is solved with all the big pieces of the puzzle coming into place. I also liked that it turned out there was no pedophilia or malice involved in the killing and kidnapping. Everything did kind of tie together and get resolved in TD season 3 also, which I like, even if the reveal was anticlimatic and lazy.

That's all well and good...Pizza could teach a class on that or something. Someone should remind him that most people are watching True Detective to be entertained/creeped out.