The Nature of Things

So, we're coming to the inevitable end of the HBO series "True Detective." The final episode of the eight-part story airs next Sunday night and the internet is ablaze with theories about just how it will end. Throughout the run of the enigmatic series about serial abductions and murders of women and children in the bayous of Louisiana, we've been given clues and red herrings galore. There has even been the hint at times that one of the detectives investigating the cases - either Marty Hart or Rust Cohle - may be the murderer or may be involved. Certainly the detectives reinvestigating the cases in 2012 have a theory that Cohle is involved. So the question is, will these two turn out to be "true detectives" or is one of them a bad guy? In the broadest sense, they are both bad guys. Hart is a philanderer who threw away his family, his wife and kids, in pursuit of "something wild" to spice up his sex life. We know that he can be a violent man. He bea...

HBO's Louisiana bayou noir series "True Detective" has kept me looking forward to Sunday nights during this late winter period which has proved mostly barren for TV watching. The show features detective partners Rust Cohle (played by Matthew McConaughey), a metaphysical philosophy spouting loner, and Marty Hart (played by Woody Harrelson), the ultimate macho bearer of the sexual double standard who is a philanderer in his own right but who can't abide the thought that his daughters or wife or women in general might do the same thing. Were any two television detective partners ever more ill-matched? If you are unfamiliar with the show,  it's a bit difficult to describe the attraction - and the action. The events of the story take place over a period of about twenty years. Cohle and Hart had investigated the disappearances and murders of women and children in the 1990s and had ultimately supposedly solved the case and taken out the bad guys, for which they had recei...