(Spoilers for True Detective season one below.)
Rust: We didn't get 'em all.
Marty: And we ain't never gonna get 'em all. That ain't what kind of world it is. But we got ours.
—True Detective, "Form and Void"
It seems to me that this is the key line in the finale of the first season of Nic Pizzolatto's True Detective. It feels, in a way, a bit defensive, a preemptive admission that there will be some who will be frustrated by the refusal to tie everything up in a neat little bow. Judging from the reaction on Twitter—half of which was extremely positive, half of which was some variation of "that's it?"—it was apparently a necessary line.
I get the sense that a great many people expected some huge twist—someone unexpected to be the killer, someone who we never saw coming, someone close to the families of our two true detectives—but that wasn't really the story being told here. True Detective has always been more character study than murder mystery: We were transfixed by the performances and the characters and their messed up lives far more than we were interested in the plot's twists and turns.
That being said, the murder mystery seems like it was more or less straightforwardly resolved over these last two episodes. Turns out the Louisiana power brokers—the Tuttle Family—had been involved in a series of cultish sex crimes and murders. We know this because of the disturbing videotape that Rust found in Billy Lee Tuttle's home. We know this because of the stonewalling the Tuttle family organized throughout the investigation. We know this because the actual killer—the spaghetti monster, the man with the scars, the creep with the creepy accents in last night's finale—was the Tuttle family groundskeeper and a friend of the family.
We know this because of the bodies on his property and the detritus of the dead littering his labyrinth.
Indeed, it turns out that the big reveal was that we had seen this groundskeeper earlier in the season. Marty and Rust had interviewed him at one of the charter schools run by the local church that served as a pool to recruit victims. This, obviously, was not satisfying for some people. They were desperate for one of the good guys to actually be bad, or for their children to suffer horribly, or for some other misfortune to befall them beyond being gutted like a fish and hatcheted half to death.
But True Detective's Tuttles are kind of like Sin City's Roarks. They have too much power, too much influence over politics and business and religion to be taken down by a couple of flatfoots. We've seen their influence exerted throughout the show; we heard it exerted last night, when a news reporter casually dismisses the idea that the Tuttles were involved, citing senior police officials. In an insular locale like Louisiana or Basin City, you're never going to take down a family like that.
As Marty said: "That ain't what kind of world it is."
Instead, True Detective closed as it opened: as a character study. The mystery unraveled and Dora Lange's killer was brought to justice, but that was just a side show. Far more interesting was the Revelation of Rust Cohle. He began the show as a committed nihilist, the sort of person who is convinced that there is no reason for being here, that humanity would be better off being wiped from the face of the planet. He ended the show on a hopeful note, his near death experience having given him a new perspective on this crazy little thing we call life and a belief that there is something beyond this existence binding us all together.
Rust, recovering from his wounds, says that after years of looking up at the stars and making up stories about them, he's realized there is only one true story in the world: light versus dark. Marty tells him he needs to keep on fighting, that dark has a lot more territory.
"You're looking at it wrong, this sky thing," Rust says.
"How's that?" Marty replies.
"Well, once there was only dark. You ask me, the light's winning."