TV Review : True Detective “After You've Gone”
By Brandon Wolfe
With the flashback/interrogation structure officially put to bed, we’re now firmly in the 2012 portion of the story. Rust has successfully managed to convince Marty to have a beer with him, where he attempts to recruit his former partner back into the investigation that has bedeviled them over the past couple of decades. Marty, as ever, thinks Rust is a kook and wants no part of the tree that he continues to bark up, but Rust, alluding to the debt Marty still owes him from the Ledoux cover-up, gets him to come at least as far as the mysterious storage unit that Rust guards so closely.
The unit, it turns out, is a de facto office space that Rust has made his base of operations in the Tuttle investigation, and it’s there that Rust lays out his case to Marty. At first, Rust offers intriguing but thin missing-persons data to an unimpressed Marty, but his argument grows more compelling when he reveals that an interrogation of a former student at one of the Tuttle Ministry schools recalls waking up in bed as a child surrounded by men with animal masks, a memory that the now-grown man chooses to chalk up as a dream. Finally, when Rust presents Marty with evidence obtained by breaking into one of the residences of Reverend Billy Lee Tuttle, in the form of photos and a video of children having unspeakable acts performed onto them, Marty is officially onboard.
Using the 'in' he still has with the state police, Marty gathers files pertaining to the ’95 investigation under the guise of research for a “true crime” novel he claims to be writing. This provides the men with a handful of leads, including an elderly woman who once worked for the Tuttle family, was privy to many of their darker secrets and has a spooky familiarity with Carcosa. It also leads them to an old colleague from ’95, now a sheriff, who covered up aspects of the Marie Fontenot missing-person case and doesn’t seem willing to elaborate on why, despite Marty’s gregarious attempts to draw it out of him conversationally. This opens a path for Rust to draw the intel from the man in a far less neighborly manner, with Marty providing assistance. Through it all, the primary suspect shaping up appears to be the man with the facial scars that our detectives have heard mention of going as far back as ’95, whom we learn in the closing shot remains an active presence in the area and has a penchant for lawn maintenance.
“After You’ve Gone” marks a pivotal shift for ‘True Detective’ with regard to the Cohle/Hart partnership, which is ultimately what this show is fundamentally about. After last week’s episode focused almost entirely on the ugly dissolution of the partnership, this episode not only reunites the duo, but strengthens their bond to a level heretofore unseen. These two men have never liked each other and have rarely, if ever, found themselves on the same page, but time has a way of sweeping away the dirty residue of the past. A key factor in the shifting of the winds is that the intervening decade has not been kind to either of these men. Rust retreated to the Alaskan cold that he hates so much before deciding that his unfinished business in Louisiana could not be left unfinished. He works as a bartender in a pitiful dive and doesn’t have anything to invest himself in beyond his investigation.
Marty possibly has it even worse, since he doesn’t even have that much in his life to focus upon. His marriage ended shortly after his partnership with Rust imploded, he left the force in 2006 when a microwaved baby proved to be a horrific last straw, and now he runs a P.I. service to little success and spends his evenings perusing Match.com profiles and eating TV dinners alone. Though resistant at first to follow Rust down the rabbit hole that he has long dismissed as nothing more than the paranoid ravings of a crazy man, Marty finally adopts the quest as his own, and one gets the sense that he is grateful to find a modicum of direction in what has become an aimless, regretful existence. Perhaps he even sees it as a means of redemption for all the transgressions that led him to a very empty place. Like Rust, this case is really all he has now.
At any rate, watching these two men finally united in a cause, operating with mutual intent, and possibly even experiencing what, for them, may amount to genuine bonding registers as a thrill to we in the audience who have witnessed the tumultuous nature of their relationship over the previous six episodes. This feels like the episode that really earns the series its title. Rust and Marty are true detectives in “After You’ve Gone,” putting their investigative skills to work in unison and getting the results that they perhaps could have had ages ago if either of them would have bothered to try to work around the disconnect between their personalities.
And now we have but one episode left with our flawed heroes, as they finally horn in on the Yellow King before leaving us forever. It hardly seems like enough time to wrap up the final leg of the saga, but whatever Rust and Marty’s fates turn out to be, it’s heartening to see that these bad men truly are attempting to spend their final hour keeping those other bad men from the door.
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