But he’s just a bachelor, not a guy who sleeps in a bare room with a crucifix above his mattress. Like McConaughey’s tortured cop, Wayne is lonely. The maker of a true-crime documentary interviews him about the murder, and a later incident between Julie and her father Tom that seems to have ended with their house burning down … which we learn when the elderly Hays awakes from sleep-driving to the ruins in the middle of the night.Īlready you can see that this isn’t just Season One Redux. He’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, losing some memories and finding that others blur together with the present day. Wayne - still played by Ali, in some eerily convincing old-age makeup - is now a widower, cared for by his son and estranged from his daughter. But the suspect seems likely to have been the wrong man and fingerprints matching the missing girl have turned up at the site of a drugstore robbery. She’s about to release a highly acclaimed book about the case. In 1980, Hays, his partner Roland West (Stephen Dorff) and schoolteacher Amelia Reardon (Carmen Ejogo) hunt for a murderer who killed 12-year-old Will Purcell and kidnapped his 10-year-old sister Julie.įlash forward to 1990: Wayne and Amelia are married with children. Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali stars as Detective Wayne Hays, a Vietnam veteran (his nickname overseas was “Purple” Hays) with a quiet disposition. Small wonder the writer-showrunner would return to safer stomping grounds.īut based on tonight’s two-episode season premiere from Green Room director Jeremy Saulnier, it’s the differences rather than the similarities that are the most striking … and potentially the most revealing.
The backlash that followed (perhaps unfairly) was so strong that the very future of the series seemed in doubt. That changed with Season Two, set amid the freeway sprawl of Los Angeles and pitting Colin Farrell and Rachel McAdams against a corrupt police force.
Starring Matthew McConaughey as philosophizing cop Rust Cohle, it drove fans wild with theories about the Yellow King’s identity, soldified the McConaissance and made its creator one of the buzziest names in Hollywood.įlashback: Tina Turner Covers Dolly Parton, Kris Kristofferson on Debut Solo Album Granted, the anxiously - and we’re using every sense of “anxiously” here - anticipated return of Nic Pizzolatto’s crime anthology does read like a full-scale retreat to the Southern Gothic style of the show’s first outing. Yet there’s more to True Detective‘s round three than the storyline and structure it shares with its breakout inaugural season.
We promised ourselves we weren’t gonna say “Time is a flat circle.” But if the disc fits … And in the present day, the more soulful side of the partnership fights painful memories as he revisits the case for one last stab at justice. Years later, questions arise about whether the real killer had ever been caught. Their investigation leads them into dark and depressive corners of the downwardly mobile American South.
The victim is posed in ritualistic fashion, with handmade pagan symbolism left at the scene.
An odd couple of cops catches a disturbing murder case.