WiC Watches: True Detective season 3

Episode 7: “Now Am Found”

The third season of True Detective is about how a man loses his identity as he loses his memory. It’s about child abduction, and festering family wounds, and crippling resentment. And yet we get a happy ending, with Wayne Hays sitting on the deck of his son’s home, once again on good terms with his daughter and his old partner, watching his grandchildren bike on the street, happy and healthy.

Is that fair? Is that an honest ending to such this grim story? Yes, because as revealed in “Now Am Found,” this season was never really about the abduction of Julie Purcell. Oh, that mystery gets resolved; Old Wayne and Old Roland find the one-eyed black man, finally identified as Junius Watts, and he tells them everything. Julie was abducted by Junius and Isabel Hoyt, who were that mixed race couple witnesses remembered seeing over the years. Isabel was Edward Hoyt’s daughter, and mentally disturbed. She’d lost her own daughter and husband in a car accident, and latched onto Julie as a replacement. Will’s death was an accident, and Julie arranged his hands to make them look like they were in prayer herself.

Isabel and Junius took back to the Hoyt estate, where Isabel drugged her and raised her as her own daughter, until she got fed up and ran away with Junius’ help. Harris James paid off Lucy Purcell, and Edward Hoyt eventually killed her when she threatened to reveal all. It was all quite tidy.

But we knew all was not as it seemed when the mystery was solved with a half-hour still left to go. As Roland said, he didn’t feel like he had closure. “Now Am Found” is smart enough to know that perfect closure isn’t really possible, so don’t try for it. This was always Wayne’s story, so the ending has to revolve not around the answer to a mystery but how he feels about what he finds.

Wayne does find Julie, who now has a young daughter of her own. After escaping the pink rooms (which look incredibly well preserved when Old Wayne and Old Roland find them in 2015, by the way), she lived on a streets for a while before taking shelter in a convent, where she healed and reconnected with a friend from her childhood, Mike Ardoin, the sensitive young boy we met early in the season. The nuns, knowing people were looking for Julie, faked her death, and she goes on to live what looks like a happy life.

Wayne learns all this, and there’s a quietly beautiful full circle moment where Julie’s daughter brings him a glass of water, and he explains to an adult Julie that he can’t remember why he came to her house. Henry comes to get him, and we get our placid family scene. Wayne remembers not the sordid details of the Purcell kidnapping but the day he sort of proposed to his wife, the same wife he backed off the Purcell case for 10 years later when Edward Hoyt threatened his family. Mahershala Ali and Carmen Ejogo have had crackling chemistry all season long, and that spark is a fine thing to end on. That’s Wayne’s happy ending, not that the Purcell case is solved, but that his life is about more than solving it.

All the same, I do think there are gaps in the fabric of the season. The relationship between Wayne and his daughter Rebecca feels roughly sketched for how often it was teased, and although I’m sticking by my assertion that Wayne’s personal development is more important than the central mystery, it does feel a little lackluster that the mystery hung so crucially on characters we never or barely met in the flesh, most notably Isabel Hoyt. Even Michael Rooker’s swaggering performance as Edward Hoyt at the top of the episode feels a little wasted; their back-and-forth explains why Wayne never looked into the Purcell case in the past 25 years, but it doesn’t make any grand statement about class or privilege or sin or depravity, the way I thought it might.

But that may have been expecting too much out of it. Like I said, perfect closure is impossible. True Detective took the smart route by going for emotional and thematic closure. Best of all is that final shot, of a (very) young Wayne disappearing into a thicket of jungle in Vietnam. He’s disappearing into his life, disappearing into time. We’ll never find all of him, no matter how hard we look.

Detective’s Notes

• I loved the music that played when Old Wayne and Old Roland approached the abandoned Hoyt estate, even if what they found didn’t quite live up to the swelling strings.
• I’m not 100% sure what the point of that scene with Roland in the biker bar was, but damn was it entertaining.
• Actually, let’s talk about Roland for a minute. He gets a happy ending, too, kind of, moving in with his old partner and bringing along his dogs. Remember: Roland never had a family of his own, and now he’s welcomed into Wayne’s. That’s very nice and I was happy for him, but were the producers hinting at anything deeper than friendship here, at least on Roland’s side? Was this lifelong bachelor in love with his partner, or am I doing the thing where I watch close male relationships and can’t help but read gay subtext into it?
• Junius Watts begging Wayne and Roland to punish him read just a little too hokey for my tastes.
• The lady playing the nun Old Wayne and Old Roland talk to looked way too young to have known Julie Purcell back in the early ’90s.
• The actress who plays adult Julie resembles Mamie Gummer, who played Lucy Purcell. good going, casting team.
• Wayne is finally ready to let the Purcell case go, but his son is a detective, too, and can’t help slipping Julie’s current address into his pocket at the end. Maybe he’ll get his own season of True Detective, and maybe it’s just the show’s way of saying that the cycle goes on.

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