True Detective - Form and Void

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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.