“True Detective” thoughts, Season Three, Episode Seven: “The Final Country”

But there’s one more revelation to discuss … and it’s a doozy. Elsa Montgomery, the documentarian interviewing Wayne in 2015, directly connects his case to the one pursued by — you guessed it — Rust Cohle and Marty Hart, who we even get to see in a newspaper clipping. Isn’t it possible, she wonders, that both crimes were part of a massive conspiracy between rich and powerful child molesters? One in which key witnesses were repeatedly killed or mysteriously disappeared to keep the cops from getting to the truth?

How much hay should we make of the now 100-percent confirmed links Seasons One and Three? Not much, most likely. Note that Elsa claims the “crooked spiral” iconography associated with the Rust and Marty case served as a calling card for the elite pedophile ring. But that particular symbol was spread by Errol Childress — an impoverished, illegitimate, extremely mentally ill offspring of the powerful Tuttle family that really ran the show. Presenting the fancy true-crime director as well-intentioned but incorrect gets right down to the notion of: Can even the most educated investigators, whether they’re detectives or writers or filmmakers, ever really know what happened?

I reviewed the penultimate episode of True Detective Season Three for Rolling Stone.

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