Sorting through the reviews of HBO’s True Detective finale has taken more time than re-watching all eight episodes of the first season. With a viewership that peaked at 11 million a week, TV’s slowest burn is also pop culture’s most accelerated phenomenon — and reactions from the critics each week have fanned the flames.
When the clock struck 9:59 p.m. on Sunday night, many were found wanting, while others felt fully satisfied with their 17-year ride-along with Rust and Marty.
Here’s what the critics are saying about the True Detective finale:
Andy Greenwald, Grantland: At the end of the journey was a sharp knife labeled “resolution.” True Detective talked a good game — well, it certainly talked — about the nature of the universe and the systemic rot of evil and horror. But the finale reduced all of those high-minded observations to production design: the artfully scribbled incantations, the haunting sketches of antlers, the broken dolls and accumulated filth that are cinematic shorthand for incest and villainy. In the end, Marty and Rust got their man but what mattered more was that they got each other. Through their reckless, self-harming actions our heroes were able to achieve not justice but closure: Marty reconnected with his family and his mojo, Rust tied off the emotional time-loop on the loss of his daughter. True Detective chose the most ambitious way possible to tell what was, ultimately, an extremely conventional story.
Neil Drumming, Salon: McConaughey, in particular, has been riveting and, as such, is the perfect unreliable narrator. So much of the meandering philosophy he spewed at the skeptical detectives over the course of their investigation could have been drunken bulls—, or worse, subterfuge. But Cohle rambled with such conviction that you just knew he believed every word. So, when he looks up from the overgrown aqueduct and sees the swirling universe just before death comes at him with an ax, you as the viewer must allow that, hey, all is subjective. Maybe it’s an acid flashback. Or maybe for Cohle, at this moment, this is reality. This is how he confronts his life and loss, no matter how loopy it looks to us.
Shane Ryan, Paste: I want to be sincere and tell you that I think True Detective is the best TV series ever made, and that I’ve basically held that opinion since the third episode … The praise for this show was so universally high that it may be absurd to focus even briefly on the negative, but I think the backlash merits some attention because of its defensive tone, and how it relates to the problem of sincerity. Take Cohle’s philosophy, for instance, and how unapologetically it asked questions about human existence. There was plenty of room to disagree with his pessimism (I do), and last night’s wonderful conclusion proved that it never represented the show’s viewpoint (how was that for a definitive answer?), but the knee-jerk negative critical reaction wasn’t to meet the show on its own level, but to try to diminish the philosophy itself.
Jacob Clifton, Television Without Pity: A show that never shied away from breathlessly explaining its own profundity is certainly within its own limits to do so here. But this finale episode, and scene [the epilogue] — if not quite justifying the heavy load that came before it — get a lot closer to transcendence, and beauty, than we’d explained to us anyway. Just an excellent ride, from start to finish. Well done.
Laura Russell, The Loop: “Form and Void” excelled in execution as has become the hallmark for True Detective. Cary Fukunaga’s camera is equally adept at capturing the tension in the tight shots of the Carcosa maze as it is surveying the lush, verdant yet mysterious coastline of Louisiana in beautiful aerial shots. The green and gold colour palette that has dominated the season changed to the dark, dried blood and dusk as Cohle went deeper into the abandoned compound that was called Carcosa. The camera never held too long on the horrors that were discovered in the maze and house. This caused the dual reaction of “what is that?” and “I don’t want to know what that is!”
Ben Travers, IndieWire: I would argue the balance between reality and fantasy was perfectly struck, with the surroundings and Errol’s haunting voiceover carefully countered against the brutal fight scene and subsequent shootout. Yet I can see how some may be disappointed. They may have wanted to learn more about the mysterious killer in a “Se7en”-esque dissection of his terrifying house, or about Rust’s (accurate) conspiracy theory regarding the government … That instinct is understandable, but True Detective was a character study through and through.
Matt Zoller Seitz, Vulture: I loved the finale anyway, though, because — like the rest of True Detective — it had a slightly crackpot vision and stayed true to it. The tale kept track of a dazzling array of motifs throughout its eight hours and stocked the final hour with callbacks to them. And it struck just enough peculiar and surprising notes throughout (particularly by setting the story in three different time periods, which gave the repeated situations a poignant and sometimes haunting quality) that you never felt that you were just being jerked around.
Alan Sepinwall, Hitfix: At the same time, because I cared so much more for the men than the story, the fact that so much of the finale dealt with a bogeyman in a haunted house was disappointing. Not enough to reduce my feelings about the season as a whole, but enough to remind me of some of the show’s flaws, and to make me wish that somehow Pizzolatto had constructed the entire thing as a story being told in those interview rooms by Cohle and Hart. As was the case throughout these eight episodes, Cary Fukunaga did beautiful, darkly original work shooting the Carcosa sequence — the way, for instance, Cohle’s hallucinations returned at the absolute worst moment — so that it never felt exactly like a rehash of the denouement of every serial killer movie ever made. But it still felt more simplistic and formulaic than previous episodes had suggested.
Isaac Chotiner, New Republic: Well, it’s over. After eight weeks, two great performances, brilliant direction, and endless speculation, True Detective came to an end tonight with a superb episode. It may disappoint people who were hoping for earth-shattering revelations, but this was a brilliant hour of television with the best-written dialogue of the series.
Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker: I am certain there are people who found all this experimental and profound. To me, it was a near-total wash. And what was most striking was that every one of show’s gross-out victims — the dead “prosts,” the raped little girls with the blindfolds, the genderqueer hooker who had been raped as a boy and filmed for porn movies, Marty’s own screwed-up daughter — were just there to ease our heroes into these epiphanies. After all that talk about how the two men hadn’t “averted their eyes” to evil, the show did just that. And it ends with stories told in the stars? We’re in Successories territory here, and even great actors can’t pull that off.
Matt Hannigan, What Culture: Writer and showrunner Nic Pizzolatto dug himself into a hole in several ways with True Detective, foremostly by turning out a phenomenal, pitch-perfect pilot and a five-episode arc that brought with it the most intriguing hour “The Secret Fate of All Life.” I didn’t hear any major complaints after the first three episodes, and only when the fourth episode “Who Goes There” indulged in an action sequence did reviewers post fears about the show becoming “just another procedural.” Now, it seems, we have something of the reverse: “Form and Void” was unarguably, inescapably, and at times frustratingly revelation-free, instead providing a straightforward “resolution” where most fans (myself included) pined for a major twist involving the unveiling of the Yellow King.
Maureen Ryan, Huffington Post: It’d be easy to launch into digressions about the show’s aesthetic choices and its ambitious metaphors, but I have a pretty good idea of what I’ll remember most about True Detective a month or a year from now. To watch the show was to revel in Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson’s wily good ol’ boy chemistry, and without question, the high points of the finale revolved around scenes that those two knocked out of the park.
Amy Sullivan, The Atlantic: I vowed to watch the finale as a fan, not as someone trying to figure it all out. But even as a fan, I still found these dangling threads and implausibilities frustrating because the show practically begged us to get into the weeds, to wade into swampy waters. That’s okay if it winds up giving viewers some extra insight. But it’s another thing entirely if the show is just messing with us. In the end, what I enjoyed most about True Detective was the pairing of Hart and Cohle that drew me into the show from the start.
Drew Magary, Deadspin: I really liked True Detective, and by the end of last night’s wildly entertaining (and f—ing terrifying) season finale, it became clear that the show is, at heart, your standard buddy-cop movie. It just happened to be brilliantly crafted, impeccably acted, stretched out to eight hours, and riddled with lots of Cormac McCarthy-style manly manspeak. Just how many buddy-cop cliches does the show hit? I counted.
What did you think of the True Detective season one finale? Fresh or Rotten?
