Connecting the Dots Between Season 1 and Season 3 of ‘True Detective’
We now know the seasons exist in the same universe—but what if the ties go even deeper than that?
A familiar refrain from critics praising the third season of True Detective is that the show has returned to its roots and maintained a “back to the basics” ethos that’s been, well, a lot easier to digest. In other words, Season 3 has emulated everything people loved about the first season—multiple timelines, vague intimations at some kind of overarching conspiracy, occult-like undertones, missing children, etc.—without being overly complicated for the sake of being overly complicated. It’s all brought together with a commanding lead performance by Mahershala Ali, whose character Wayne Hays, thankfully, isn’t as prone to booze-aided philosophizing as Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle. (Not that we disliked Rust Cohle; it’s just that nobody could reach Peak Lincoln Commercial Era McConaughey without bordering on parody.)
It makes sense that writer-creator Nic Pizzolatto has decided to embrace the things that made his series into a phenomenon in the first place. It’s possible, however, that Pizzolatto is doing more this season than replaying some of Season 1’s greatest hits. These two seasons could be connected in a much more meaningful way.
In the teaser that HBO dropped Sunday night, we get a brief glimpse of journalist Elisa Montgomery (Sarah Gadon) showing Old Man Hays (Ali) her laptop in the 2015 timeline, and later asking him whether he’d thought there was a “larger conspiracy” tied to the Purcell case. It’s very brief, but in that first shot her laptop shows a newspaper clipping that reads “Former State Police Officers Stop Alleged Serial Killer” with photos of—yep, you guessed it—our old pals Rust Cohle and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson).
Well, shit. Looks like it’s time to overthink every little detail about Season 3.
Seriously though, this a fascinating revelation, which could end up being anything from a cheeky Easter egg to something that holds bigger implications and legitimately bridges the brutal crimes of Seasons 1 and 3. Either way, this much is true: The crimes of Season 1 and Season 3 definitely exist in the same fictional universe. (I think this also means Chad Velcoro of Season 2 exists in the same world by association, which doesn’t really pertain to the case, or anything really. Still, I think Pizzolatto should give the people what they want, which is a Chad Velcoro cameo, or at least an update on how the kid’s doing after the death of his cocaine-loving biological father.)
Obviously this needs to be explored further, so crack open some Lone Star tall boys—we’re gonna be here for a while—and let’s try to parse through what a Season 1–Season 3 connection could reveal, how the timelines add up, and what it all could mean for the ongoing, still-unsolved Purcell mystery.
The Timelines
Between the two seasons, we have six different timelines: 1980, 1990, 1995, 2002, 2012, and 2015. So before we go any further, let’s just do a quick recap of what’s going on in each of the timelines between the Purcell case and the Yellow King craze. If you think I’ve forgotten something innocuous, look, man: We’re talking about 16 hours of television spread across six timelines; we can’t get stuck in all the Carcosa weeds.
1980: Steve McQueen is dead, and Will and Julie Purcell—two kids living in a small town in northwest Arkansas—leave their home to go play at a friend’s house and never return. Will’s body is found by Detective Hays, but it’s still unclear what happened to Julie—or whether she’s still alive. We later learn the kids were lying about visiting a friend and were playing Dungeons & Dragons, along with some other toys, in the woods. As of the fourth episode, it’s unclear who they might’ve been playing with, but we’ve got some persons of interest. Some of the primary suspects include Freddy Burns—a teenager whose fingerprints were found on Will’s bike in the woods—and Bret Woodard, a local Native American and Vietnam veteran who collects trash. There’s much talk—but little actual evidence—of a black man with a scar and a white woman driving a nice car near the crime scenes.
1990: Someone, though we don’t yet know who, has been convicted for Will’s murder—but Hays maintains they got the wrong person. Julie is confirmed to be alive after her fingerprints show up after a robbery at a Walgreens in Oklahoma. In the fourth episode of Season 3, Hays sees whom he believes to be Julie in the store’s surveillance footage. Hays and his ex-partner Roland West (Stephen Dorff) lead a task force reexamining the case to figure out what the heck happened to Julie in the last decade and also try and relocate her. We also learn Lucy Purcell (Mamie Gummer), Julie’s mother, died in 1988 of a drug overdose in Las Vegas.
1995: Rust Cohle and Marty Hart investigate the grisly murder of prostitute Dora Lange in Vermillion Parish, Louisiana. Lange’s death eventually leads them to a ranch used as a base for sex trafficking, which could be part of a larger conspiracy of kidnapping girls in the greater Louisiana area that’s masterminded by elite, high-powered individuals. Rust and Marty later discover a meth lab run by Reggie Ledoux, who was cellmates with Dora Lange’s ex-husband in prison, and Marty kills Reggie after he discovers two abused children in the home. Reggie is the presumed culprit of Lange’s murder.
2002: A prisoner asking for a plea bargain tells Rust he has information on “the Yellow King,” the moniker for the person who could be responsible for killing Dora Lange—thereby leading Rust to believe he and Marty might’ve captured and killed the wrong person seven years ago. While investigating a link between the Yellow King and the Tuttle family—a family with deep ties to Louisiana, politics, and huge religious organizations, but also maybe wild cult rituals?!—Rust quits the force. He and Marty trade blows. (TL;DR: Marty cheated on his wife again, and also she and Rust had very quick, very awkward sex.)
2012: Rust—who at this point looks like he exclusively watches Twitch streams in a basement—and Marty are interviewed by two detectives reinvestigating the Yellow King case. Marty and Rust eventually team up and find the real culprit behind Lange’s murder and several other disappearances in the area—a man named Errol Childress (Glenn Fleshler). Marty and Rust are both wounded but ultimately kill Errol in a creepy maze of trees and tunnels he calls “Carcosa.”
2015: Hays, who retired sometime in 1990 during the reopening of the Purcell case—and who is likely suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s—is interviewed by a true-crime documentary series about the case. Hays has trouble remembering some of the details of the Purcell case but has a feeling that the new investigation must’ve uncovered something crucial about Julie’s current whereabouts and who might’ve been responsible for Will’s murder. Hays asks his son Henry (Ray Fisher), who’s now an officer, to try and find Roland so they can revisit the case together. At some point in Season 3, it appears Elisa will bring up Rust and Marty’s exploits in 2012—and likely the idea of a wide-ranging conspiracy perpetrated by an elite class of people based in the South—to Hays, putting this whole thing together.
Thematic Connections
Other than the fact that the Ozarks region of Arkansas and Louisiana have some geographical proximity to one another, the key murders bear some haunting resemblances. (Warning: There’s some graphic imagery ahead.)
First, let’s look at Will’s body when Hays discovers him in a cave after following a series of creepy straw dolls. His hands are folded together as if in prayer, exactly how he posed for his communion photo at the local church. This leads us to believe that whoever killed Will and kidnapped Julie knew the kids personally, possibly through the same congregation.
Now let’s look at Dora Lange. Her body is in arguably worse shape—for one, she’s completely naked and has a freaky-ass antler crown tied to her head—but notice how her hands are also clasped together, as if she’s praying.
This could be as simple as Pizzolatto coming to the (correct) conclusion that corpses are objectively more terrifying when there are religious and/or occult-like undertones, but it’s also possible we’re dealing with a pattern by an actual cult that is repeating, and even evolving, the nature of some horrific ritual. Will’s body is notably less mangled—and it’s possible Julie was the perpetrator’s main target, and the poor kid was killed simply to get out of the way—but some serial killers have been known to modify their M.O. the longer they remain active. And if we’re dealing with the same culprit(s), the person(s) responsible could’ve changed the method of the cult-like murder rituals between 1980 and 1995.
There is also an overarching connection to the seasons thanks to Robert W. Chambers and H.P. Lovecraft—two authors Pizzolatto, as the kids say, clearly stans. Chambers’s 1895 short story collection The King in Yellow was an overt inspiration for Season 1’s Yellow King, and made reference to a mythical, cursed city called Carcosa—and was itself an inspiration for Lovecraft’s own Cthulhu mythos, which was established in the late ’20s and early ’30s. (Publications previously outlined the Lovecraftian undertones of Season 1, which had some viewers believing True Detective was going to take a turn toward the metaphysical. It didn’t, of course, but that Carcosa maze Childress built around his house was still scary as shit.) As The Ringer’s own Chris Ryan and Jason Concepcion pointed out on The Flat Circle, their True Detective aftershow, there’s also a reference to H.P. Lovecraft hidden in the first episode of Season 3: “Leng,” found in the title of The Forest of Leng, the Dungeons and Dragons book Hays and West discover in Will’s room, is the name Lovecraft gave to the Yellow King’s dwelling. Season 3 hasn’t embraced the metaphysical in the same way as Season 1, and aside from the straw dolls adorning the forest near Will’s body, there hasn’t been nearly as much intimations towards the occult. (As we also learned in the fourth episode, those straw dolls were purchased at a church fair from Patty Faber.)
But here’s where the show’s suggestive hints toward the real-life Satanic Panic of the ’80s come into play. In the ’70s and ’80s, the American public was concerned that things like heavy metal—which primary suspect Freddy Burns and his buddies listen to—and role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons—the Purcell kids played D&D in the woods!—were gateways to the occult. (The Dungeons & Dragons mythos was inspired by Lovecraft, by the way.) Heavy metal and D&D are probably red herrings in the Purcell case, but they suggest that True Detective is still drawing a through line between the horrific murders the detectives are investigating and how some of American fiction’s most horrifying creations might’ve inspired these crimes. In real life, the collective American fear toward things like Satanic pedophile rings has been historically overblown—but in the world of True Detective, do such fears correspond with a horrifying reality?
What Does This Mean?
Honestly? Who knows. One screengrab and a passing mention to the Yellow King case might just be a clever Easter egg confirming this anthology series exists in an interconnected universe. Executive producer Scott Stephens previously downplayed any Season 1–Season 3 connections after the two-episode premiere earlier this month. Of course [washed Rust Cohle voice] this is precisely what the purveyors of our entertainment would like us to believe, and we must escape this groupthink in order to free our collective minds.
At best, the Purcell case probably won’t deal with the Yellow King directly—but Season 1 implied that the murders committed by Childress were a small part of a larger conspiracy involving the Tuttle family, who could be behind generations of cult-like murders in the South. Reminder: The Tuttles had a Joel Osteen–like megachurch called Tuttle Ministries, and also created the Wellsprings Foundation—an alternative to secular education provided by the Tuttles to rural, low-income families. (Which is also where kids could be snatched up and/or abused.)
It’s possible the Tuttles’ influence could’ve somehow affected the Purcells and the northwest Arkansas area, or that the Tuttles were connected to another upper-echelon family: the Hoyts, who run the chicken factory where Lucy Purcell once worked. This could be what Elisa Montgomery is piecing together and disclosing to Hays in 2015. In the second episode of Season 3, Elisa told Hays about how people on the internet have been compiling analogous cases together in a database and that the straw dolls left near Will’s body could be a “sign of pedophile groups like the Crooked Spiral.”
Crooked Spiral, huh? Let’s go back to Dora Lange’s crime scene, from a different angle.
Again, Elisa could be speculating just as much as I am. It could all be hogwash; a passing mention to a creepy series of murders in the South; an example of our innate desire to explain away basic, grotesque horrors in life by inventing grand conspiracies; True Detective’s version of going full American Horror Story and confirming this is all taking place in the same universe, and nothing more. If it isn’t, though, and if True Detective Season 3 has a lot more in common with Season 1 then we previously thought, things just got even more interesting.
Disclosure: HBO is an initial investor in The Ringer.
