Like many fans of True Detective, I've spent the better part of the last month poring over allusions and Easter eggs embedded in the show in order to better understand, or at least convince myself that I'm any closer to understanding, its central mystery. And, like many of you, I've also done so from a remove, never fully allowing myself to be completely carried away in the process. Having been down this road before, on a much grander scale, with Lost, and seeing how that turned out, I've learned my lesson that sometimes a bundle of sticks is just a bundle of sticks, sometimes an allusion is just an allusion.

Marty Hart can relate to this skepticism. In one of the many metafictional moments throughout the series to this point, Hart has represented the surface-level fan of the show who's merely seeking the definitive answers to the mystery: Who did it?

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Why he did it, or why anyone does anything, well, those are the province of Rust Cohle. And, as many reviewers have pointed out, that hunger for deeper meaning ripples outward on multiple levels from the texts mentioned in the show — the play within the story of The King in Yellow driving the people who read it mad, just as Cohle is driven mad in pursuit of his own Yellow King, just as we the viewers drive ourselves mad trying to make sense of the unfolding layers of symbolism.

There's a moment in Sunday night's episode, before Rust has completely won over Marty in his attempts to get the band back together, where the latter describes this succinctly. "All this sprawl, as you call it, is what I would call conjecture," he says, having been confronted with the evidence Rust has been accumulating in his absence. "Do you know how fucking crazy that sounds? It's like you've been alone too long."

That, too, could be another layer of metafictional commentary threaded throughout by Nic Pizzolatto. So it's with a grain of salt that I mention another text that this most recent episode called to mind, knowing full well that it could just be another example of me having been alone with my thoughts about True Detective for far too long.

Mother Night

But let's do it anyway.

Consider one of the more memorable Cohleisms in an episode relatively short on them. "Life's barely long enough to get good at one thing. So be careful what you get good at," he says, as the two men, now reunited, much older, and reconsidering the choices they've made with their lives, share a rare moment of honesty. Cohle might have been a painter, or a historian, he says. Hart a baseball player or a bull rider. (We've become accustomed to thinking of the duo in precisely that sort of characterization throughout: the brawn and the brain.)

That quote, while perhaps not a direct echo, brought to mind instantly a similar quote, one that should be well-known to readers of Kurt Vonnegut. As he writes in the introduction to Mother Night: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

"You end up becoming something you never intended," Marty agrees.

Mother Night, like True Detective, is essentially about a man pretending to be something that he's not, and becoming much better at it than he ever expected, or wanted to be.

The story, for a quick refresher, is about Howard W. Campbell Jr., an American playwright living in Germany who stays behind even as the Nazi party comes to power and war seems inevitable. Campbell becomes a reluctant tool of the United States as a spy, transmitting clandestine codes over the radio once he ascends the ranks of the party to become the voice of a propaganda program under Goebbels. He doesn't ever understand the clues that he's seeing right under his own nose.

The book, like the show, takes a metafictional framing structure, with Campbell relaying the events of his life from a later date, and Vonnegut, characteristically, popping in to explicate from time to time. Campbell, by the end of his life, has pretended to be many things. He no longer knows which of them is real anymore.

So what, if anything, does this have to do with True Detective, besides the presence of unthinkable evil and the deciphering of clues and narrative devices? There are a number of other moments throughout the book that are worth considering, if only just for the trap we've all ensnared ourselves in here despite our best instincts, in chasing down the real meaning behind True Detective's mystery, so let's spin the jukebox and pick a few at random.

The sudden reappearance of a wife figure, Resi, in fact Campbell's sister-in-law, who returns after many years wearing a mask with a secret of her own, reverberates through Maggie's story in True Detective. Is she also pretending to be someone she is not? And what of the role of the religious? "Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side," from the book, brings a certain reverend to mind.

Sounds like all I've got here is conjecture, as Hart might say. But just hear me out, Marty, this goes deep.

About that jukebox. Consider the song that ends up playing as the episode starts, "Angel of the Morning" as performed by Juice Newton. "Just call me angel of the morning," the song goes. In a song that also references sin, it's easy to make the jump to the angel of light, the "morning star," aka Lucifer. Mother Night took its name from a passage from one of the most famous works of fiction about Mephistopheles, Goethe's Faust.

I am a part of the part that at first was all, part of the darkness that gave birth to light, that supercilious light which now disputes with Mother Night her ancient rank and space, and yet cannot succeed; no matter how it struggles, it sticks to matter and can't get free. Light flows from substance, makes it beautiful; solids can check its path, so I hope it won't be long till light and the world's stuff are destroyed together.

Sounds like Cohle bullshitting in the interview room doesn't it?

What about some of the other musical selections on the jukebox that are shown briefly? It's not hard to find a titular echo to Satan in Evanescence's Fallen, or the fallen character of Kid Rock's Rock n Roll Jesus. So, too, with Depeche Mode, who sang a tune or two about the fella at one point. But the most interesting choice is Tesla's The Great Radio Controversy, which could well be an alternate title for Mother Night.

Again, this is all just playful allusion-hunting leaps, but now that we're down the rabbit hole, things tend to get a little warped. Since we're talking about Faust, a famous play about a man with a very large debt, it's hard not to think of Cohle's chiding of Hart that sparks their return to action: "A man remembers his debts."

There's also an echo in there from the text of another HBO show, Game of Thrones. "A Lannister always pays his debts." But let's not bring too many other references in here lest we crumble under the weight.

A man does remember his debts, yes, but so does a devil. So who's the angel of the morning here and who's Jesus? Hart and Cohle are neither, rather, they are somewhere stuck in the middle.

Back to Mother Night. "It was hell for me — or not Hell, something worse than Hell," Campbell explains of a period of his life at one point in the book.

"What could be worse than Hell?" he's asked.

"Purgatory."

Just like in Lost!

Kidding, but these two detectives have clearly been living in a kind of purgatory, lost, aimless souls, with nothing to motivate them.

Another passage from Mother Night:

It was not the thought that I was so unloved that froze me. I had taught myself to do without love. It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had taught myself never to expect anything from Him. What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity. Now even that had flickered out. How long I stood frozen there, I cannot say. If I was ever going to move again, someone else was going to have to furnish the reason for moving. Somebody did. A policeman watched me for a while, and then he came over to me, and he said, "You alright?" "Yes," I said. "You've been standing here a long time," he said. "I know," I said. "You waiting for somebody?" he said. "No," I said. "Better move on, don't you think?" he said. "Yes, sir," I said. And I moved on.

A police man motivating a lost soul to move on. Make of that what you will.

While Cohle disappeared for years, he explains, until something brings him back, Hart gives up because he's seen things he never wants to see again. What brought Cohle back, Hart asks? Because he decided never to avert his eyes again. It's a promise that will be familiar to readers of Mother Night, a book largely about the Holocaust.

So what does it all mean? Campbell shows up in another Vonnegut novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, also a metafictional tale about the horrors of violence, but with a philosophy of time that would make Cohle proud. A central motivating force in the events of the novel is a group of aliens called the Tralfamadorians, who see in the fourth dimension.

There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.

Sound familiar?

While we don't get much of Cohle's rambling in this episode, he does make a few revealing suggestions. "My life's been a circle of violence and degradation as long as I can remember. I'm ready to tie it off," he says.

Is there a suggestion about Cohle's health in the song that closes out the episode, "Lungs," by Townes Van Zandt? "Well, won't you lend your lungs to me? Mine are collapsing" sounds like it could apply to our favorite captain of the drag team. It's also a song about the Devil and Jesus, and a battle to make things right through salvation. It could well serve as the ballad of Hart and Cohle:

Jesus was an only son And love his only concept Strangers cry in foreign tongues And dirty up the doorstep And I for one, and you for two Ain't got the time for outside Just keep your injured looks to you We'll tell the world we tried

At least they tried.

Now, I don't necessarily think any of this stuff is meant to be picked up on. But if we are to pull on the thread a little bit more, and talk about what it means for the final episode? Cohle, I'm going to hazard a guess, is dying of cancer. This is his last chance at achieving any sort of salvation, by righting the wrongs that he didn't in the first place. To pay his debts. He likely has no regard for his own life, and is ready to die and never come back, which is why he's so unnerved by the old Tuttle employee's admonition that "Death is not the end" to "him who eats time."

It's something the Tralfamadorians knew well:

The most important thing I learnt on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. When any Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.

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