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" After eight intense episodes and endless collective Internet sleuthing, we&amp;#039;ve finally got an answer to the real mystery of True Detective: Was there any mystery to be solved at all in the first place? Not by the characters that is, but by we the viewers. We know that Marty and Rust got their man, the evil of a generation. Or, at least, an evil of a generation, as True Detective&amp;#039;s Sunday night HBO partner in crime might put it. But, I mean, was all of this piecing through clues and allusions a waste of our time?   Maybe so, if we consider one last parting allusion. There were plenty of examples of the types of mysterious symbols and pictographs and ominous sculptures that we&amp;#039;ve become accustomed to littered throughout the episode. Take a closer look at the wall where Errol is keeping the mummified remains of his father again if you didn&amp;#039;t pause it. It reads, among other things, &amp;quot;The Yellow King gives... black stars.&amp;quot; Consider also the black stars on his shed, or the swirl brand on his back. But sadly, we never did really find out who the Yellow King was, although the pile of skeletons and skulls in the haunted tunnel of enlightenment is looking like a pretty good suspect. Certainly Errol William Childress, whose full three names are used on the broadcast news segment toward the end, which is how you know he&amp;#039;s a real-deal serial killer, was an acolyte of the mysterious all-encompassing evil figure, but something tells me that he wasn&amp;#039;t the big bad. Rust knows it, too, and he&amp;#039;s as disappointed as the rest of the fans complaining right now online that not every circle was closed off. &amp;quot;The Tuttles,&amp;quot; Rust says. &amp;quot;We didn&amp;#039;t get them all.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;We ain&amp;#039;t gonna get them all,&amp;quot; Marty reassured him. &amp;quot;That ain&amp;#039;t the kind of world it is. But we got ours.&amp;quot; All well and good, but what about us? We didn&amp;#039;t get an answer about Maggie and her father&amp;#039;s potential involvement, nor a resolution to what happened to Audrey at the hands of the cult, if anything in fact did. Nor did we find anything else out about the horsemen and the ritualistic rape and murders. Errol and his sister, as best as we can assume, were simply the deranged offspring of institutional evil. Philip Larkin summed that one up pretty succinctly in his verse about parents. &amp;quot;But they were fucked up in their turn/By fools in old-style hats and coats...&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s an understatement when it comes to Errol, as we see in the first scene in his home. What&amp;#039;s with that affected British accent? Besides the fact that all good villains are Brits? He&amp;#039;s watching Hitchcock&amp;#039;s North by Northwest and doing his best James Mason. It&amp;#039;s a film about assumed identities, and wearing masks so to speak. Here&amp;#039;s the scene he walks in on:  ROGER THORNHILL: And what the devil is all this about? Why was I brought here? PHILLIP VANDAMM: Games? Must we? ROGER THORNHILL: Not that I mind a slight case of abduction now and then, but I have tickets for the theater this evening, to a show I was looking forward to and I get, well, kind of unreasonable about things like that. PHILLIP VANDAMM: With such expert playacting, you make this very room a theater. The room is a theater. Or, to put it another way, all the world&amp;#039;s a stage, a line you may remember from another fella who knew his way around an allusion or two, William Shakespeare. The most famous instance of that metaphor comes from As You Like It, in which the dour, philosophizing Jacques outlines the seven stages of a man&amp;#039;s life, from infancy to second childishness, including stops along the way to the schoolboy (with a blue ball?), the lover, the soldier, the wise justice, and old age, all of which we&amp;#039;ve seen embodied in True Detective&amp;#039;s sprawling time span. The line also shows up earlier in The Merchant of Venice, in which the world is described as &amp;quot;A stage where every man must play a part.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Take off your mask,&amp;quot; Errol tells Rust as he has him in his grip toward the end, after the whorling expanse of the cosmic darkness has unfolded before his eyes. That reference in Hitchcock&amp;#039;s film wasn&amp;#039;t an accident. The film itself takes its name from another work of Shakespeare&amp;#039;s, one whose titular character bears something of an existentialist resemblance to our man Rust. &amp;quot;I am but mad north-north-west,&amp;quot; Hamlet says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. &amp;quot;When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.&amp;quot; What does that mean? Well, in one sense it means to be able to distinguish fancy from reality, to be able to truly perceive the world as it really is. (Let&amp;#039;s not overlook one-eyed Rust staring at his reflection in the hospital mirror, echoing back to his practice with the tiny, consciousness-expanding wall mirror.) For both Rust and Hamlet, being able to see things as they are is both their chief heroic attribute and their fatal flaw. Rust never had the stomach for suicide, he tells us, which, as you probably remember, is a little problem the prince of Denmark wrestled with himself. Rust nearly had his quietus made with a bare bodkin by Errol, so to speak. Rust, unlike Hamlet, got a glimpse of what dreams may come in that sleep. He knows that there is something there waiting for him \u2014 the love of his daughter and his father. Another line, if I may: &amp;quot;This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o&amp;#039;erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.&amp;quot; Hamlet&amp;#039;s reading there would be the pessimistic one. That pestilence of darkness overpowering the light.  There&amp;#039;s another reading of that northwest line. Some believe it&amp;#039;s a mistranslation, and what he was actually saying was &amp;quot;I know a hawk from a heronshaw,&amp;quot; or, in other words, a hawk from its prey. Or maybe not! There&amp;#039;s been endless debate over what that line actually means for centuries. And we think we&amp;#039;ve had it bad for a couple of months watching True Detective. And speaking of literary genius, Errol&amp;#039;s sister&amp;#039;s metaphor for sex, &amp;quot;make flowers on me,&amp;quot; was pretty damn poetic. Sentient meat indeed. But maybe we&amp;#039;re not in on the joke here. Maybe the joke is actually on us. Nic Pizzolatto has made no secret about his disdain for tricks in fiction, or red herrings. So maybe I&amp;#039;m crazy for reading something like that passage above and thinking of Marty and Rust&amp;#039;s contemplation of the stars, and the battle of light versus dark. All of which brings us back to Hitchcock and North by Northwest. For a follow-up to Vertigo, the story goes, Hitchcock planned North by Northwest as a sort of respite from his dense oeuvre, &amp;quot;something fun, light-hearted, and generally free of the symbolism permeating his other movies,&amp;quot; as he said in an interview with Truffaut. It&amp;#039;s also a film famous for its use of the MacGuffin, the term for a technique popularized by Hitchcock, which he explained like so: &amp;quot;It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers.&amp;quot; In detective stories it is almost always the drawings on the killers&amp;#039; walls. Hitchcock explained more in the interview with Truffaut: &amp;quot;It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train. One man says, &amp;#039;What&amp;#039;s that package up there in the baggage rack?&amp;#039; And the other answers, &amp;#039;Oh, that&amp;#039;s a MacGuffin.&amp;#039; The first one asks, &amp;#039;What&amp;#039;s a MacGuffin?&amp;#039; &amp;#039;Well,&amp;#039; the other man says, &amp;#039;it&amp;#039;s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.&amp;#039; The first man says, &amp;#039;But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,&amp;#039; and the other one answers, &amp;#039;Well then, that&amp;#039;s no MacGuffin!&amp;#039; So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.&amp;quot;  The Yellow King, and all of its attendant symbolism, was nothing at all. What other purpose could the insertion of that scene in Errol&amp;#039;s home serve than as a sort of final meta-allusion to kill all of the series&amp;#039; other allusions? Who&amp;#039;s watching it, after all, but a psychopath obsessive. It&amp;#039;s Pizzolatto trolling us for letting the clues make us go crazy ourselves. In the end, True Detective was just another crook story, albeit a damn captivating one. Or, it&amp;#039;s a densely layered, nuanced text worth being torn apart for generations to come like the best literature. There will be a lot of arguments over which is its true identity in the weeks to come, but as Rust, Hamlet, and Roger Thornhill all well know, there&amp;#039;s no such thing as true identity, and we&amp;#039;re all wearing masks. Whichever mask you want to apply to the show, ultimately, is up to you. &amp;quot;Everybody&amp;#039;s got a choice,&amp;quot; Rust tells Marty. &amp;quot;Everybody judges. All the time. Now you got a problem with that, you&amp;#039;re living wrong.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a27660/true-detective-finale/>