It was in many ways a peaceful denouement — the first of the series where the conclusion of the case did not involve a life-or-death battle with the season’s antagonist. Whether or not detective Wayne Hays finally confirmed for himself the truth about Julie Purcell is left ambiguous, but in any case, the closure for his character was found more in his personal relationships. He reconnects with West, his daughter returns, he makes peace with his wife and the memory of her. As described by the AV Club, the finale “is a parade of hugs and hand-holding.”

But then, when we get to the last shot, we’re left with a final image that’s dark and disconcerting.

Here is the shot. Or rather, a frame from the shot, wherein Hays walks alone, scouting the jungles of Vietnam. He stops, looks back, and continues on.

Kevin Wong describes its significance as, “Wayne’s mind will continue to degrade, until he’s forever lost in the figurative forest in the season’s final shot.” A nihilistic twist on an otherwise happy ending would be fitting of the show. However, a seemingly minor detail might hint at a deeper truth to the brief scene’s significance—the fact that Wayne turns around.

Throughout the season there are moments when the show cuts seamlessly from a scene in one timeline to a scene in another. In a number of instances, this is more than just an impressive transition but actually places an older Hays at the same time and place as a younger version of himself.

On one level it can be seen as a visual representation of memory and dementia, but whenever it happens the younger Hays inevitably looks over at where the older him would be, aware of some presence or something amiss. Perhaps the reason he turns around in this final shot is a similar sense of his older self looking over him.

Maybe, on some metaphysical plane, Hays is actually drifting through the fabric of time, interacting with his past self in the subtlest of ways. It wouldn’t be the first time True Detective ruminated on the nature of spacetime and its existential implications, after all.

“Time is a flat circle.”

Talking to detectives in 2012, Rust explains that, “Everything we have done or will do we will do over and over and over again — forever.” That sentiment certainly rings true in season three as we follow Wayne and Roland as they pick up the same investigation again and again over the course of more than thirty years.

There are hints of a deeper connection to time though, beyond its impermanence and the ravages of memory loss. In the final episode when Amelia appears to Hays and helps him piece together what really happened to Julie, she says:

“What if something went unbroken? All this life, all this loss, what if it was really one long story that just kept going and going until it healed itself? Wouldn’t that be a story worth telling?”

Wayne does not respond to these questions, but they’re shown in a sense to be true over the rest of the show. Julie has escaped her tormented life and is a mother to a young daughter who will never know the horrors she went through. The present timeline ends the same way as the earliest timeline begins, with a little boy and a little girl riding bikes into the distance, only now we know implicitly that they’ll be alright.

All of that is a metaphorical sort “healing” though. What does it mean if these flashes where different instance time and space collide are in fact real?

If we take Rust’s wisdom literally, that we are stuck in this flat circle of time, predetermined to do the same things for all eternity, then Hays ability to reach into the past and have an impact on it is breaking the loop. It means that the repetition of time isn’t just a Sisyphean nightmare. It keeps going and going only until it heals itself.

Wayne revisits this moment of his past, when he’s wandering alone in the jungle, just as he finds acceptance, family, and friendship in his present reality. It’s possible that somehow he’s sending a message to his younger self, telling him it’s okay to be vulnerable, or, as he tells his son, not to be withholding, that he, “can’t shrink from it, can’t be stingy…the people you love — you can’t hold it back.”

The last shot signifies that we’re going back to the beginning again, back to the beginning of Hays’ story, because everything we have done or will do we will do over and over and over again — forever, but it also signifies that maybe we are not doomed to repeat our stories to the same conclusions. Maybe there is some hope of change after all.