Some things you just can’t escape.

I think what I was expecting from the season finale of True Detective was the same as what most viewers were expecting, and what Rust himself was expecting: To get the killer, piece together all the clues, get everything out in the open, and have Rust die in the process. While they did get the killer, they only pieced together some of the clues, only got some stuff out in the open, and Rust didn’t die. In short, I see that as the reason that the finale was unsatisfying to many of us.

Here are my thoughts on why the fact that it was unsatisfying is fantastic.

If Rust had died, as he alluded to in Episode 7, it would have neatly tied off the circle of violence and degradation that was his life. Rust’s death would have been right in line with his view of life that was described most poignantly in what I found to be his most memorable monologue of the series, the one at the end of Episode 3, as he described what he sees in the eyes of the dead: “They saw, in that last nanosecond, they saw… what they were. You, yourself, this whole big drama, it was never more than a jerry rig of presumption and dumb will, and you could just let go. To finally know that you didn’t have to hold on so tight.”

And when Rust felt his time had come, when he killed the monster at the end of his nightmare, he expected to finally be able to “just let go.” He even tells Marty, in the show’s final scene, that he wanted to do just that. As he felt himself slipping deeper into his coma, he says that he felt like he was a part of everything he ever loved, a feeling he clearly hadn’t experienced in something like 20 years, and he was ready to welcome the darkness. So why didn’t he? Did he survive through willpower, or just (bad?) luck? For me, it doesn’t matter. We all wake up time and time again without all too much certainty as to why we’re alive. That’s the challenge we all face- the challenge of being a person. And, ultimately, Rust didn’t get to escape it. He had lived for a long time under the guise of certainty that his nihilistic worldview pretty much had all the answers. He held onto that worldview tightly. But in his near-death experience, he let go of all that. He let go of his own presumption and dumb will about what kind of person he was, and the light- the love he had experienced much earlier in his life- returned. And in the shows final moments he comes to terms with the idea that, in a universe that was once only darkness, even a small amount of light is a pretty amazing thing.

Now to take a step back from my own metaphorical philosophizing and whimsy and elaborate on what this all meant to me. I’ve only covered my not unpopular opinion on why Rust’s character arc worked, but the dissatisfaction of the case not being neatly wrapped up remains. Well, that’s life for Rust, and that’s life for us. And that’s life. It was our hope that True Detective, which exists largely as a form of escapism, as it is a TV show after all, would be fully satisfying. We think, “life is filled with enough ambiguity, can’t our escapist entertainment, AT LEAST, wrap itself up nicely?”

“Sorry not sorry,” say the creative forces behind True Detective. If the case was fully resolved, and all the scenes on the show were fully explained as to what their purpose was, that might have made us feel good. We would have had all the answers, everything would have made sense, and even though it was a dark world that the show created, we could at least feel like we understood it. In essence, we could feel like Rust did throughout the entire show, right up until the end. But True Detective did not take the easy way out, it didn’t let Rust take the easy way out, and it doesn’t allow the viewer to either.

At the end of this story, Rust wakes up from his dream and is forced to face reality, and so must we. And that reality is that life lacks meaning in a lot of ways, that the universe we live in is mostly darkness, and that although we hope that all the loose ends in our lives will be tied up in the end, they won’t. However, the light that we do have in our lives- the connections we form with others and the love that we feel- does seem to make it all worthwhile. It doesn’t make it easy, but it makes it worthwhile. That’s really all the information we have, and like Marty and Rust, we are left to decide for ourselves what to do with it.