How True Detective Stayed Weird Till The End

I’ve been following along with True Detective since I read io9’s explanation of the tie between the series and Robert W. Chambers’ 1895 supernatural short story collection, The King in Yellow. At that point, we didn’t have a lot to go on—a few clear references to the collection, and one or two hints that things might not be entirely as they seem.



As the series continued, it became obvious that the supernatural elements were secondary to the real-life horror the show portrayed. Still, they never faded completely out of view. Now that ‘Form and Void’ has aired and the mystery is as solved as it’s likely to get, we can look back at the series and see what still can’t be explained.



Let’s take a look at Audrey Hart and Rust Cohle, and head deep into the realm of spoilers.





Audrey Hart has been the center of a lot of the wilder (and more upsetting) True Detective fan theories. Before episode 8 aired, those theories centred on her victimization, either past or future. Would it be revealed that she once suffered abuse, or would the series end with premonitions of her suffering coming true?



As it turns out, neither of these things is borne out in the series. Audrey survives True Detective largely untouched, only appearing in the finale to visit her father. The theory that she was a survivor of sexual abuse that began before the show also doesn’t really hold up.



But something is definitely up with Audrey, and the evidence is all over the Hart home. In episode 2, we see her dolls arranged in a disturbing diorama - five male dolls positioned around, and between the legs of, a nude Barbie. In episode 3, her parents scold her for crude sexual drawings she showed off at school—these two things kicked off most of the abuse theories.



And if that were it, then some past abuse might remain as a disturbing possibility to linger in our minds. But sexualized drawings aside, the imagery that Audrey surrounds her family with is torn directly from the crime Rust Cohle and Martin Hart are investigating.



The first is this spiral. It’s viewed (just barely) in the scene where Rust comes to dinner—the first time the girls meet him, and again when Rust and Maggie talk in the kitchen in episode 3. It’s similar to the spiral found on Dora Lange, the murder victim that kicks off the whole series, and then seen again and again as evidence that ties a series of crimes and individuals together.



Then there are the flowers. Hanging in the bedroom of Marty and Maggie Hart is a children’s painting of bright, colorful flowers — seen long before episode 6, when Rust Cohle passes the exact same painting on the wall of the hospital ward where he speaks to Kelly Rita, one of the Ledouxs’ young victims.





Those dolls? They’re part of another repeated bit of imagery. Earlier in episode 2, we see a photo of Dora Lange surrounded by five hooded men on horseback. In episode 7, we see the beginning of a horrific video of young Marie Fontenot surrounded by five men in animal masks. And in episode 5, 2012’s Rust Cohle finally finishes cutting five little tin men out of his beer cans, either baring his subconscious or testing the detectives who are questioning him.





There’s one more, too, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene in episode 7: a photo of an older Audrey standing next to one of her paintings, which appears to be of a woman with black stars on her face. Black stars are used as a symbol of Carcosa, one of the show’s most mysterious references, and are brought up by Reggie Ladoux, seen in the window of the abandoned charter school, and found in Dora Lang’s journal.





Some of these things could point to Audrey having been put through a similar ordeal to Marie Fontenot, but with the series now over, that seems like a stretch. If she was a student at the Tuttle charter schools, Marty—an extremely protective father—probably would have said something. If the show had intended some past abuse to be relevant to the plot, it probably would have come up by the end of the story. There’s not much left to support this theory now that ‘Form and Void’ has aired.



But that might not mean these were simply thematic nods to the show’s mythos. In episode 7, Maggie Hart tells her ex-husband that Audrey is doing fine, but that she “sometimes decides she doesn’t need her meds.” She has a boyfriend that looks out for her. She’s a successful artist. Mental illness and artistic tendencies are often used as shorthand for a sort of supernatural sensitivity—they’re the hallmarks of people who see things others don’t. And Carcosa and the Yellow King seem to want to be seen.



Audrey’s art might be a red herring, but in a show that’s otherwise very deliberate, it doesn’t have a mundane explanation. If she’s not tapped into the supernatural, where is she getting this imagery from? The actress that plays Audrey in the modern era, Erin Moriarty, speculates that Audrey had access to her father’s case files, but only the spiral is likely to have been a part of those files by the point most of the art is shown in the Hart house.



Then there’s Rust Cohle, another sensitive soul.



Rust is a badly damaged man—personal trauma, drug use and far too much undercover work have left him shattered. He hallucinates. As he tells Marty in episode 8, “it never stops, not really.” Only two of his hallucinations are given the spotlight. The first, in episode 2, is a flock of birds that forms into that spiral we’ve seen again and again in True Detective—a symbol of Carcosa. The second, in the late moments of episode 8, is a galaxy, a spiral opening up in the sky. It may well be Carcosa itself.





Again, these are presented as the hallucinations of a man who is barely keeping his sense of reality together (although the camera never really seems to lie, sticking with the true narrative at the Ledoux place, for instance, while Rust and Marty weave their false shooting story over the years). They aren’t necessarily evidence of the supernatural at work. But they aren’t Rust’s only ties with mythical Carcosa.



For the rest, we need to accept the words of some very unreliable characters.



In episode 5, Rust meets DeWall Ledoux, hoping to arrange a meeting with his meth cook. DeWall doesn’t bite. Instead he looks Rust in the eye and tells him off:



“I can see your soul at the edges of your eyes. It’s corrosive. Like acid. And I don’t like your face. It makes me want to do things to it…There’s a shadow on you, son.”



Which is true enough. There’s a shadow on Rust, all right—the death of his daughter, the nihilism that he’s embraced. But a corrosive soul?



Later, DeWall’s cousin Reggie meets Rust for the first time, moments before Reggie is killed by Marty. His last moments are spent ecstatically ranting to Rust:



"It’s time, isn’t it? The black star. Black stars rise. I know what happens next. I saw you in my dream. You’re in Carcosa now, with me. He sees you. You’ll do this again. Time is a flat circle.”



Rust picks up that ‘flat circle’ idea and runs with it, letting it inform much of his philosophy in the years that follow. But this is also marks two of our villains having identified him as something special. Both die before having any real chance to pass this information on, making it all the more interesting when our third villain, Errol Childress, sees the same thing in Rust.



In the finale, we learn that Errol has been intentionally baiting our detectives.



“It’s been weeks since I left my mark. Would that they had eyes to see,” he complains.



His mark, then, is the most recent murder—the one that calls back so clearly to the Dora Lange case. It draws Rust’s attention immediately, but he makes little progress before he gets Marty on board.



Errol wants them for a reason—a suitable sacrifice, perhaps? He talks of things to come.



“My ascension removes me from the disk and the loop,” he says, and “I’m near the final stage. Some mornings I can see the infernal plane.”



Errol believes in the mysticism that surrounds him, full stop. He believe’s he’s one step short of completing his transition to—something. Carcosa. The Yellow King. But he’s still missing a piece of the puzzle.



Apparently, that’s Rust, who Errol lures through the ruins he calls Carcosa. He brings him to the final room with its obscene altar, where Rust watches the heavens open above him. And then Errol stabs him in the stomach. While he holds Rust up, digging the blade in deeper, he says something odd: “Take off your mask.”



This is the clearest reference we’ve been given to The King in Yellow, a line taken almost directly from one of the few available snippets of the fictional play:



Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.

Stranger: Indeed?

Cassilda: Indeed it’s time. We have all laid aside disguise but you.

Stranger: I wear no mask.

Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!



The Stranger may be the titular King in Yellow—the text never makes this clear. But the Stranger is also Rust, apparently, and Rust fails to unmask. Errol dies at his hands.



And that’s when Rust discovers that Miss Dolores was right, and that death is not the end.



The mystical elements around Rust are easier to write off than those that surround Audrey. His hallucinations could be just that. That three child-killers individually saw him as having a connection to the supernatural is hardly proof.



More than that, the supernatural is far from the most interesting part of True Detective. If it exists at all, it exists as part of a much more fascinating story of real darkness encoded deep in our most rigid power structures.



But there’s still something tantalizing about it all. Carcosa wasn’t just a ruined labyrinth. The Yellow King wasn’t just a scarred murderer living in a hoarder’s nightmare. The show’s mythology goes deeper than that, and it is convincing. It convinces the monsters—Reggie and DeWall LaDoux, Reverend Tuttle, Errol Childress—but it also convinces the innocents. Dora Lange and Miss Dolores buy into something that they believe to be more than just killers and rapists finding excuses to harm the vulnerable.



Carcosa may be real. Time may be a flat circle. Rust’s soul might have been corrosive. And Audrey Hart might be tapping directly into the mythology of True Detective to give us a reason to believe, like those worshippers of the Yellow King, that there’s more to the universe than most of us can see—and that death is not the end.