True Detective “After You’ve Gone” 

Rust says his life has been a circle of violence and degradation and he’s ready to tie it off. But he’s got one more thing to do before he goes. He and Marty owe a debt to Dora Lange and every other woman or child who went missing and died because of the Yellow King. They owe them some peace. They owe it to all those victims to discover the identity of this man.

I don’t know what Marty’s feeling – maybe nerves, maybe apprehension, maybe something else – but he’s armed when he goes for that drink with Rust. Marty wants to know what Rust has been up to for the last decade. Even though he hates the cold, Rust says he was in Alaska for eight years working on a fishing boat. He came back to Louisiana in 2010 and has been working this case for the last two years. He doesn’t have the access he once did and he’s burned every single bridge he had as a cop, so it’s been slow going. He needs Marty’s help.

Marty isn’t so easy to convince though. They haven’t talked since the incident and Marty tells Rust he’d throw him a bar bell if he was drowning. But Marty knows there are loose ends on this case and that his execution-style killing of Reggie Ledoux didn’t allow them to question him or Dewall the way they should have back in 2005. So he agrees to take a trip to Rust’s storage unit.

Rust has been able to put a lot of the pieces together on this case and doing so has made him look like a suspect to Gilbough and Papania. He was focused on Billy Lee Tuttle at first. We already know about the Wellspring Initiative and the child molestation accusations. Missing person Rianne Olivier was a student at Light of the Way Academy after it was renamed and reopened. Rust tracks down a man named Toby, who went to the school and remembers having dreams about men with animal faces. They took pictures of the children and sometimes did other things. He only ever saw one face. It was a man with scars around his mouth. The only other person who ever talked about it was a girl named Marie Fontenot. After Rust staked out Tuttle’s homes and broke into two of them he found disturbing pictures as well as a videotape. Marie Fontenot was the girl in the video. We don’t see what was recorded, but whatever it is convinces Marty to help Rust. And Rust makes it clear that he did not kill Tuttle.

Marty goes to see his old friend Bobby at the station. Since he’s a PI now, he’s in contact with all of his old colleagues and, unlike Rust, has maintained his relationships. His cover story is that he’s writing a true crime book and need access to some of his old case files. A little bit of booze helps convince his old friend and Marty gets unlimited access to everything. But nothing is on the computer, so Marty has to go through the old files.

They’re able to track down a Jimmy Ledoux. He thought Reggie and Dewall were nuts and remembers being creeped out by a man with scars around his mouth. He doesn’t think he was a Ledoux, but he doesn’t know. They also track down a woman named Dolores, who worked for Sam Tuttle for almost two decades. She confirms that Sam had a lot of children outside of his marriage. She thinks the man with the scars around his mouth was his grandchild and that his father gave him those scars. She also mentions Carcosa, which relates back to the Yellow King. They have to pay off the woman’s niece when she realizes they lied about why they wanted to talk to Dolores.

They also discover that one of their old colleagues, Steve Geraci, filed the report when Marie Fontenot went missing. That report has gone missing from the files and as luck would have it Steve is now the sheriff of Iberia parish. The only person who can arrest a sheriff is the governor, but Rust reminds Marty that they’re after information. He’s got his car battery and jumper cables at the ready, but Marty tries talking to him first. After Steve lies about Marie Fontenot, they decide to go with Rust’s plan.

Other developments

I love that Marty goes to see Maggie. He wants to know what she told Gilbough and Papania and can’t help but to ask if she’s seen Rust since the incident. Marty’s a different person now, but he’s still insecure about that. So interesting. But Maggie hasn’t seen Rust and she’s smart enough to know something’s up. It seems like Marty is saying goodbye. So Maggie goes to see Rust. She wants him to promise that Marty will be ok, but Rust has never been good with lies. He tells her she’s classing the joint up too much and that she should leave.

Rust is still very much the same man he’s always been, but he’s different as well. He actually asks Marty about his personal life, which gives him pause. Marty can’t remember Rust ever giving a sh*t about his life outside work before. Are they actually starting up a true friendship? I hope so.

Random question: Is the guy Gilbough and Papania talk to at the end of the episode the same guy Rust talked to at the closed down Wellspring school? If he is, that would be very interesting.

The season finale of True Detective airs Sunday, March 9th at 9/8c on HBO.