True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto tried to warn you. Without spoiling the plot for you, he said weeks ago via Twitter hints and vague allusions, that it was unwise to focus on the identity of The Yellow King. That cracking the esoteric mythological code of True Detective wasn’t the point. So for those of you who refused to listen, for those who (understandably) got swept up in trying to chase down theories and outsmart the showrunners, last night’s straightforward finale might have been a frustrating anti-climax. Barring the Carcosa reveal, we didn’t learn anything new about the case in the finale. Errol, The Lawnmower Man, makes for an unsettling but, ultimately, unimpressive monster. Either Reggie Ledoux or the horror you, the viewer, dreamt up in your head would have been far creepier. I’m sure, ever since the True Detective audience went full Rust Cohle with their conspiracy theories and obsessive analysis, Nic Pizzolatto has been dreading this finale. (He jokingly said he was planning to leave the country if the reaction was poor.) But it’s not his fault that, like Rust and Marty, the audience has been chasing the wrong demon. The terror and the darkness isn’t external, it’s internal. When you view it that way, the finale delivers an entirely satisfying conclusion.

Taking Off The Mask: During the final confrontation at the center of Carcosa, Errol tells Rust to “take off your mask.” On the one hand, this is fairly standard Carcosian gobbledygook, but, on the other hand, it leads to the most satisfying part of this episode. We finally get to see the cracks in Rust Cohle’s carefully constructed facade. We’ve seen him vulnerable before (needing to get drunk before meeting Marty’s family or angrily throwing Maggie out), but we’ve never really seen all the way inside Cohle. But after Carcosa, he’s an entirely different man.

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Rust finally comes to terms with the pain of losing his child. He’s been chasing down bad guys, self-medicating, and doing just about everything he could to avoid connection to other human beings since we met him. But connection was always what he desperately wanted. Maggie saw that and exploited it. Finally, here, after the inner darkness is defeated, Rust can drop the mask and confront the void.