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While I felt I needed to rewatch “After You’ve Gone” one
more time to give it a proper write-up, I went ahead tonight and finished up
the first season—an incredible season deserved of multiple Emmys but 2013-2014
was such a rich year of television it missed out which speaks volumes—with “Form
and Void”, concluding Cohle and Hart’s quest to find the serial killer under the
spell of Carcosa, a type of voodoo featuring stick-and-twine “symbols” with
wicked ritualistic torture, missing children and young woman used in sexual,
sadistic ceremonies conducted by a variety of Louisiana creeps (previous
episode includes a reverend who had fame, fortune, prestige, popularity, and
power across the state, whose domicile had a twisted tape recording Marie
Fontenot’s rape and murder), mainly tied to the Tuttles and Childresses,
seemingly having familial ties to one specific Tuttle who planted his seed
quite a bit. The serial killer with a scarred face is shown in this episode
once again painting a school while little girls and boys have recess, the
teacher even offering him some food. Earlier in the episode you see Errol
Childress (Glenn Fleshler, the kind of backwoods pedophile sicko who speaks in
a language all his own, living with perhaps a half-sister, indicating that
their family experienced incest regularly as if normal and ordinary,
masturbating her while fondling her breasts as she moans in appreciation)
visiting his dead father’s corpse set up in a different, decaying house not far
from his own cluttered, disheveled, ramshackle home. Errol’s domicile is off
the beaten track, lost within the woods, a dirt road surrounded by trees on
both sides leading to it. Leading away from the domicile is Errol’s decorated
Carcosa compound, dressed in the same sort of twisting sticks and twine effigies,
intertwining within a labyrinth of tunnels settle within a green overgrowth that
envelope them from all sides. You do not want to wind up here. I could only
think, as Cohle followed after Errol, that Rust was entering the belly of the
beast and in order to make it out alive, Marty had to be almost exactly behind
him. It would take both of them to defeat this abhorrent development of
Tuttle/Childress disease, a product of a fucked-up upbringing. Just brief
visits to Errol’s home, including time spent with Betty (Ann Dowd), is like
being given access to a dark place that requires the use of sandpaper and
brillo pads in order to scrub the filth and sickness off. They even talk about
when their father caught Betty in a garden to molest her, the memory getting
them both off…just the kind of brief visit into a different world few want to
remain very long at all.
In “After You’ve Gone”, both Hart and Cohle were
interrogating Steve Geraci about Sheriff Ted Childress’ cover-up of Fontenot’s
disappearance on a boat, a fishing trip ruse which gave them the chance to get
him alone. Having to watch the tape secured by Cohle from Reverend Tuttle’s
mansion (well, one of them) leaves Geraci a wreck (as it would many of us), as
he assures them that he didn’t know about all of this Carcosa activity. All
angry and bitter for being held at gunpoint by Cohle, treated like a criminal,
Geraci warns Rust and Marty about retaliation but a carefully placed sniper
makes sure he realizes that with all his bluster, both parties have their
allies. Cohle and Hart also gather all of their implicating evidence towards
the Tuttles and Childresses, plus the Fontenot tape, making copies for
different agencies—Marty meets with Papania at a diner, wanting to know if he
would be interested in first dibs, trying to make the FBI realize that Cohle is
not the right person of interest—before their trip to Errol’s. A green painted
house once belonging to an elderly woman now in a rest home, the lawnmower
upkeep painter Cohle met at an old Christian school back in ’95, and the
picture of a “green-eared spaghetti monster” set in motion the scent towards
Errol. Investigating old records which document a Childress landscaping service
that often was employed by churches, cemeteries, and schools, among other
establishments, eventually points them to Errol.
After both Cohle and Hart are nearly killed by Errol within
a tunnel (Cohle sees the hallucinatory spiral before he’s attacked from behind
by Errol who impales him in the stomach, lifting him off his feet, using
carefully positioned head butts to the face in order to get release, as Hart is
pummeled to the floor and kicked across the face into near unconsciousness),
they spend time in the hospital. Hart is visited by his ex-wife and daughters,
welcoming the overflow of emotion that comes with their care for him. Cohle,
recalling the near-death experience where he felt his father and daughter,
compelling him to follow, doesn’t feel he should still be alive as Hart
encourages him to recognize that there is light (having him remember their
conversation about stars in the sky in Alaska) in the darkness. That it isn’t
all dark. And because of them, not all but some of those who represent the
darkness were taken down by them. Cohle is bothered that in ’95 he had met the
killer, but even if they didn’t catch him back then, Errol Childress will no
longer hurt anyone else. McConaughey’s breakdown in the wheelchair outside the
Lafayette Hospital and Cohle and Hart’s conversation about Maggie in the car
trip to Errol’s are my favorite scenes in the episode. I like that Cohle and
Hart, working side by side, having gathered all the evidence, pooled their
resources, put aside their differences, came together and took down the serial
killer. The grounds and home of Errol also yielded plenty of evidence for law
enforcement to collect. But finally discussing Maggie, the “judgmental nature”
that existed when Hart was cheating on her and Maggie’s retaliation with Cohle,
they could finally put it all to rest before working together to eventually
discover the killer’s lair deep in the backwoods and eventually stop his reign
of terror for good.
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