WiC Watches: True Detective season 3

Episode 1: “The Great War and Modern Memory”

True Detective goes back to familiar territory for its third season. While season 2 spread the story among too many main characters, this first episode focuses on a pair of detectives: Mahershala Ali as Wayne Hays and Stephen Dorff as Roland West, who in 1980 are charged with finding a missing brother and sister in a small poor Arkansas town.

And really, Pizzolatto is drilling down further. Hays is the focus of the story and Ali the star of the show. We see him in three different time periods: in 1980, as a young detective with his experience in the Vietnam War still looming large in his rearview mirror; in 1990, now with a wife and kids; and in 2015, as an old man who begrudgingly dredges up his memories of the investigation for an interview. Pizzolatto is taking a big narrative risk here — splitting a story across three different time periods could quickly become tedious or pretentious — but it holds together nicely for the first episode, partly because of Ali’s magnetism and partly because the story seems to know where it’s going.

On the surface, this is a grim potboiler, moodily shot. Director Jeremy Saulnier takes us through the beats of a pretty basic cop story. Two children, Will and Julie, go out riding bikes. Various people see them on the day of their disappearance, and we know those people will become witnesses, and perhaps more. We meet the parents, Tom and Lucy Purcell. They’re estranged but still living together for the kids. Someone has drilled a hole in the wall of Will’s room, possibly a cousin of Lucy’s who did it so he could see into Julie’s room. At the end of the episode, Wayne finds Will’s body in a cave, his hands folded together in prayer, the path to him marked by creepy homemade dolls that recall the gnarled wicker brambles of the Yellow King’s lair from season 1. We’re ready for a pulpy detective story set during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, where there was widespread fear of ritualized abuse happening across the country.

But True Detective has always been about more than what happens. This season, the theme is memory. It’s right there in the title, and name-checked in several ways throughout the episode. “What you don’t remember you don’t know you don’t remember,” Wayne is told during a deposition in 1990, somewhat obnoxiously. In 1980, a teacher (Carmen Ejogo) is reciting a poem by Robert Penn Warren. “Tell me a story,” she reads to her class. “Make it a story of great distances, and starlight. The name of the story will be Time.”

And then there’s Wayne himself, for whom past and present sometimes merge. There’s a particularly great moment where Wayne, as a young detective, sees a light reflected in a puddle at night. This is a light fixed on him 2015, where he is recounting his story to the interviewer. It shudders out, and suddenly we’ve jumped forward 35 years.

And really, there’s a fourth period we don’t visit directly: Wayne’s time in Vietnam, which still colors his personal and professional life. I’m interested in seeing how Pizzolatto, his slate of directors and Ali will blend all of this. What does Pizzolatto have to say about memory and time? Will it hang together like it did in season 1 or fall apart before our eyes like season 2?

Other stuff:

• We can tell Roland West is bad because he wants to shoot a fox. He doesn’t get to, I guess, so maybe he can come back from that. I’m watching you, Roland.
• This season being set in the ’80s, there are a couple of sly Stephen King references. The Trashman, a local oddball who saw Will and Julie on the day of their disappearance, shares a name with a King character from The Stand, and Roland playing with the refrigerator in the Trashman’s cluttered yard reminded me of a scene from King’s IT, currently being adapted for the screen by Cary Fukunaga, who directed every episode of True Detective season 1. It’s all connected, I tells ya.