"Form and Void" Ends the First Season of True Detective in a Deeply Satisfying Way — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch and then write about in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Every saga has an ending, with the notable exception of Grey’s Anatomy. The medical drama with the sensitive soundtrack has been on the air for twenty seasons now. How is that even possible? Did the show’s creator make some manner of deal with the devil? It just does not make sense.

The first season of True Detective concludes with its eighth episode, “Form and Void.” The previous episode ended with a viscerally unnerving look at Errol Childress (Glenn Fleshler), the madman Matthew McConaughey’s Rust, and Woody Harrelson’s Marty have been pursuing all season.

He’s a figure of infinite darkness. He’s not just a bad person; he’s a malevolent giant out of a fairy tale. He is the green-eared spaghetti monster with a face full of scars behind a string of child sacrifices.

Everything about Errol is repugnant, including his incestuous relationship with Betty, a half-sister played by Ann Dowd. True Detective features the beloved character actress as you’ve never seen her before: playing the mentally challenged lover of the worst person in the world.

Betty lives in a haunted house with genuine horrors, not the cheap simulacrum found during the Halloween season.

Errol’s monstrous outward appearance reflects his evil interior. He is the inhuman ghoul at the end of a very long, circuitous route for the show’s partners-turned-enemies-turned-partners again.

I like True Detective best when it departs from its cop show roots and explores the unfathomable mystery of existence through two unforgettable protagonists, although, to be fair, Rust is a far more memorable character than Marty.

McConaughey doesn’t just act here. He ACTS. McConaughey does more acting with the cigarrettes he inhales as if they are the only thing keeping him alive than other actors do with their entire bodies over the course of lengthy careers.

Harrelson, in contrast, is the audience surrogate in that he’s equal parts impressed and annoyed by his partner and his eccentricities. He’s a rock-solid straight man to McConaughey’s despondent detective.

Buddy cop formula calls for mismatched partners to initially despise each other because of their very different personalities and approach to life/crime-fighting but to bond slowly but surely over the course of pursuing the case of a lifetime.

True Detective goes out of its way to avoid formula. It doesn’t just have pretensions or aspirations to art; it realizes those Herculean ambitions. But that does not mean that the show is entirely immune from the cliches and conventions that have ruled cop shows for ages.

For example there is a very conventional scene where Marty has a mostly civil conversation with Steve Geraci (Michael Harney) a former colleague turned sheriff they suspect knows more than he’s telling.

Geraci senses that Marty does not trust him, but then Rust appears with a gun, forces Geraci to watch a videocassette of the most disturbing ritual in the history of the universe, and forces him to give up his phone and badge.

I was amused as well as mortified when toxic male True Detective super-fans became apoplectic because they thought Issa López, the woman behind the show’s fourth season, was ruining a cool show about heroic cops being badasses with her cooties and girl germs.

That is certainly not how I think of Rust and Marty, and I have had a lot of time to think about them over the course of this project, particularly Rust.

But in “Form and Void,” they behave the way cops generally do on television shows: they put aside their differences to solve the case of a lifetime (and a case that seemed to take a lifetime) and nail the baddest of bad guys.

Marty even refers to Rust as a friend here in a way that does not seem delusional or false.

Rust with his prized videocassette of *Eight Heads in a Duffle Bag.*

Marty and Rust track down Errol. The malevolent behemoth escapes into a labyrinth of tunnels that looks like a fairy tale forest. More than most episodes “Form and Void” is mythic.

Errol is so massive and strong that he can lift a full-grown man like Rust up like a doll. In this otherworldly realm, Rust and Errol have a life-or-death struggle in which Errol stabs Rust.

Marty then shows up to save his partner’s life, and a police department that seemed wholly disinterested in Rust and Marty’s investigation comes in to clean up the carnage and take our heroes to the hospital.

True Detective deals in moral ambiguity, but as audiences, we have an innate tendency to root for the protagonists of cop shows, particularly if they are handsome, played by movie stars, and wipe out a great evil in the end.

Errol is so evil that his capture justifies just about anything. He’s all eviscerating darkness swinging wildly in every direction.

True Detective’s revered first season ends as it must: with McConaughey acting.

The nihilistic alcoholic with the terrible ponytail is just barely alive at the same hospital as Marty after spending some time in a coma.

Rust is surprised to be alive. It’s not a pleasant surprise. Throughout the season there is a sense that the only thing keeping Rust on this miserable blue marble of a planet was the case at the center of the show.

Now that the case is solved and the bad guy is dead Rust can shuffle off this mortal coil and be reunited with the only thing he ever cared about: a daughter whose early death left a hole in her father’s soul that nothing could fill.

In his big closing monologue Rust, in tears, talks about crossing over to the other side and being reunited with his daughter and father.

Rust is the furthest thing from a true believer. All he seemed to believe in before was the innate cruelty and insanity of the universe. But in the final moments of the season’s final show he expresses an uncharacteristic belief in heaven.

The experience of getting stabbed, nearly dying, and spending time in a coma has changed Rust. It awakened something in him capable of something other than despair and anger.

Rust talks about the one story of humanity being light versus dark, but the genius of True Detective’s first season is that the central conflict is not light versus dark but rather dark versus much, much darker.

We close on a note of hope and connection that could easily come off as forced or even a violation of the show’s characters and world. Instead, it feels merited.

I’m glad a kind reader finally got me to watch the first season of True Detective. Now I’ve only got eighty to one hundred and fifty more essential television shows to finally get around to watching.

I hear good things about Mad Men and The Wire. Perhaps I’ll check them out. Of course it certainly would help if I had to watch these shows so if there is an iconic television you’d like to force me to watch I am always on the lookout for more Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 pledges, particularly if they’re for an entire season, or, preferably, a show’s entire run.