The third season of “True Detective” is officially in the books, and it was a very solid run.
WARNING: THERE ARE GOING TO BE SERIOUS SPOILERS BELOW. DO NOT KEEP READING IF YOU AREN’T CAUGHT UP. CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED.
The finale episode Sunday night answered the biggest question that we were all waiting for, but not in the way we might have been expecting.
The whole season revolved around what happened to the Purcell children. We’ve known from the jump that the son was dead, but we never knew what happened to Julie.
Finding out her fate is what Hays (Mahershala Ali) and West (Stephen Dorff) have been up to all season over three different time periods.
It turns out that she’s been alive the whole time, and was taken by Hoyt’s daughter to be raised as her own. That in and of itself wasn’t too surprising. I think we all figured she hadn’t been killed at the same time as her brother, but instead had been abducted for an unknown fate.
However, it wasn’t as simple as you might think. The one-eyed man we’ve been wondering about all season turned out to be an employee for Hoyt who helped Julie escape her captivity after many years of being drugged and with little memory of her real life. (RELATED: ‘True Detec
You need to watch #TrueDetective Season 3 pic.twitter.com/MkL56ha7jb
— Marc B (@107round) February 25, 2019
Eventually, she winds up at a convent, and that was when things just got downright bizarre. She is seen by her former childhood crush years later. Seems like a stretch, right?
Oh, it only gets crazier. The nuns at the convent stage her death so that she can marry her childhood crush under a fake name. Yes, she escaped captivity, was drugged for years, had no real memory of her life, joins a convent, stages her death and then marries her childhood friend who just happened to be the son of the man responsible for doing the grounds work at the convent. It’s some next level craziness.
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Yet, it only gets even wilder! Hays visits her in the final timeline after finally breaking the case. Yet, he either faked forgetting who she was because of his Alzheimer’s or he truly forgot right at the pinnacle moment.
Personally, I think he chose not to say anything after seeing that she was living a happy life and had a child. The writers leave this open to interpretation, which I’m sure wasn’t an accident. Was the whole segment about Julie’s fate a little over-the-top and outrageous? Sure, but I still found it entertaining.
Finally, the show ends with Hays in a bar with Amelia in what could best be described as the ironing out of their issues. It then cuts to his days in Vietnam. Honestly, I have no idea why the show didn’t just end the moment Hays visited Julie Purcell.
The final moments were so unnecessary, and frankly, made little-to-no sense.
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Yet, I really enjoyed the season. It was better than the second, but still not close to the first. Let me know in the comments what you thought!
P.S. I guess my prediction about Matthew McConaughey appearing was totally wrong.