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"Just as we were starting to reach the &amp;quot;acceptance&amp;quot; portion of our grief over the fact that we&amp;#039;re never going to see Detectives Cohle and Hart on screen again, Matthew McConaughey went and got our hopes up by admitting he&amp;#039;d consider appearing in another season of True Detective.  But with season one now available on DVD and Blu-ray (on flat circle, if you will), and season two well underway, there&amp;#039;s a definite sense of closure on the best new show of 2014.  Tough though it was to pick out highlights from a near-flawless run of eight episodes, below we&amp;#039;ve gathered together the season&amp;#039;s five defining moments.  Rust&amp;#039;s first passenger seat monologue  The chalk-and-cheese dynamic between edgy loner Rust and easygoing everyman Marty was at the core of True Detective, and made for some very funny and very telling exchanges early on. This scene from the first episode became emblematic of the show as a whole: Rust blithely outlining why all human life is meaningless while Marty looks on with the human equivalent of an o_O emoticon, regretting the impulse to try and get to know his mysterious new partner better.  It&amp;#039;s a laugh-out-loud moment, with Harrelson doing some great understated jaw-clenching work as McConaughey drops one nihilistic bombshell after another: &amp;quot;The honourable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand-in-hand into extinction.&amp;quot; But it&amp;#039;s also the first real insight we get into Rust, and the intricately-built philosophical walls behind which he lives his life.  &amp;quot;And like a lot of dreams, there&amp;#039;s a monster at the end of it.&amp;quot;  The fact that our first two picks are Rust Cohle monologues emphasises just how much the early episodes were defined by his philosophy. Here, it&amp;#039;s the grizzled Rust of 2012 telling Gilbough and Papania what he&amp;#039;s learned about the moment of death by looking into the eyes of murder victims. Conveniently, what he sees in them just happens to reinforce his bleak view of human existence.  &amp;quot;They welcomed it,&amp;quot; he explains. &amp;quot;In that last nano-second they saw what they were, that you, yourself, this whole big drama, it was never anything but a jerry-rig of presumption and dumb will, and you could just let go.&amp;quot; The entire speech is some of Pizzolatto&amp;#039;s most haunting, switchblade-sharp dialogue, but what really makes this moment stand out in retrospect is how it ultimately pays off when Rust gets his own near-death experience, which comes just a few days later in the 2012 timeline. Spoiler: he&amp;#039;s wrong.  The six-minute tracking shot  No series before has blurred the line between cinema and television more completely than True Detective. With a single writer (Pizzolatto), a single director (Cary Fukanaga) and a unified approach to production (cast and crew were given all eight scripts upfront), it&amp;#039;s closer to an eight-hour movie than a serialised story. And the climax of episode four, marking the season&amp;#039;s midpoint, is pure bravura cinema.  Rust, undercover with a gang of methhead bikers, gets dragged into a robbery that goes rapidly south. The dangers of his mission are clear even before this point \u2013 his past years in undercover narcotics have taken a permanent, hallucinatory toll on his psyche \u2013 and here the unbroken tracking shot and the pounding, ambient score combine to create a sense of pure chaos, as Rust descends into literal and psychological hell.  Showdown at Reggie Ledoux&amp;#039;s compound  There&amp;#039;s a lot of buildup to the moment when Rust and Marty finally catch their man in 1995, with both men referencing it frequently in their 2012 interviews, and by the time it comes we know it&amp;#039;s a false victory. The pair track down meth cook Reggie Ledoux at his creepy rural compound, Marty executes Ledoux in a fit of impulsive rage after discovering the children he&amp;#039;s abducted, and the case is closed. But years later, the murders go on, and it turns out Ledoux was just a footsoldier in something much larger.  Nevertheless, the showdown is a masterfully-executed action sequence that shows how effectively this yin-yang duo work as a team, with Rust calmly picking up the pieces after Marty&amp;#039;s vigilante explosion. The way it unfolds \u2013 with Rust and Marty in 2012 describing their shared version of events while the reality plays out in contrast \u2013 embodies what worked so well about the dual timeline structure, in a show that&amp;#039;s so much about storytelling and the lies people tell themselves.  The final scene  Hard though it was to leave out Rust and Marty&amp;#039;s breathlessly tense confrontation with Erroll in Carcosa, series finale &amp;#039;Form and Void&amp;#039; is defined most by its achingly poignant final ten minutes. Miraculously alive after being stabbed by the real Yellow King, a tearful Rust tells Marty what he experienced when he was &amp;quot;under, in the dark&amp;quot;, where he felt the loving presence of his dead daughter. &amp;quot;And then I woke up,&amp;quot; he says, brokenly, and Marty does what he can to comfort him. The entire show has been not about the mystery, but about these two men and their edgy, ever-shifting bond. At the end of everything they&amp;#039;re left physically and mentally scarred, changed beyond recognition and isolated from the world around them, but not alone.  And the twist is that as beautifully written as Rust&amp;#039;s early monologues were, he&amp;#039;s been wrong about the universe, and now he knows it. He&amp;#039;s wrong about what happens at the moment of death. There isn&amp;#039;t a monster at the end of the story \u2013 there&amp;#039;s love.  True Detective: DS goes on location with the HBO drama True Detective finale review: The problem with online fan theories Watch a behind-the-scenes clip from True Detective below:  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/true-detective/feature/a577359/true-detective-season-1-the-5-best-moments/>