True Detective (here be SPOILERS)

[RainDog]

36. Paraphilic Love Map of True Detective online

via Vulture (we're along for the vigilante ride...)

A sect of prehistoric Plains tribes traveling through North America sometimes wore wood-fashioned, antlered masks that lacked eye and mouth holes. Experts believe the disguise may have accessorized some kind of cultish deer worship. Not to say those natives were offering up innocents to voodoo deities, but the men who mutilated Dora Kelly Lange and Rianne Olivier — and most likely took Marie Fontenot, Stacy Gerhart, catatonic Kelly, Terry Guidry’s son, and maybe even Robert Doumain’s boy in 1985 (among others) — definitely relish what Rust deems a “rural sense of Mardi Gras.”

With one final hour in waiting, it’s not premature to say that Nic Pizzolatto and Cary Fukunaga have succeeded in that diligence. True Detective has taken us on an arc that lesser shows might resolve in a single episode, or, as we’ve witnessed more commonly, forcibly protract to the point of viewer disconsolation. It has instead used a finite narrative to introduce an incredible interconnected population of characters, none of whom are mere red herrings, while allowing us to stumble toward convictions alongside the show’s leads. Not to mention all that philosophy for thought, whether inconsequential or essential. The one sure thing is that, as Rust and Marty come up upon the Tuttles’ patch of land outside Erath, shit’s about to get real.

And another about Courir de Mardi Gras from Vulture.]

Grantland's Molly Lambert wonders:

Will there be one final twist? Or is the finale going to play the situation as it lays now, with Rust and Marty overpowering crooked Sheriff Steve Geraci on the boat and then saving the day somehow, possibly rescuing Gilbough and Papania from the scarred man and exposing the Tuttle school’s secret pagan cult and their history of abuse to the public? I’m not ready to turn in my overly high expectations just yet, and I wouldn’t be shocked if this show had a couple more tricks up its sleeve. The stakes are high, and anyone can die, since there’s no imperative to preserve Rust or Marty for a second season. Will Rust sacrifice himself to save the day, fulfilling the prophecy of Reggie Ledoux’s chest tattoo? Will they shut down the cult, or will it be a ’70s movie–type downer ending where the Tuttle family gets away with it forever, time being a flat circle and all? Or maybe an otherworldly tentacle monster will swoop down in the last three minutes of the show and spray an unearthly gas through the screen at every True Detective viewer, infecting them with tiny yellow octopus bugs that burrow into your brain, make you unable to do anything but talk about True Detective until you alienate all of your friends, and then cut off the oxygen to your brain so you die? Even if that’s the case, spoiler alert: Death is not the end.

(And provides a Dylan-penned "Murder Ballad" from Nick Cave, P J Harvey, with video from a 70s zombie flick)