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" Season 1, Episode 7: &amp;quot;After You&amp;#039;ve Gone&amp;quot; For most of True Detective&amp;#039;s first season, there&amp;#039;s been a significant gap in our knowledge of the sprawling, 17-year story of Rust Cohle, Martin Hart, and the Yellow King. As the events of 1995 and 2002 slowly took shape by way of a pair of lengthy Louisiana State PD interrogations, the mystery of how it all ties into 2012 loomed large. On Sunday, in &amp;quot;After You&amp;#039;ve Gone,&amp;quot; the aged incarnations of Cohle and Hart that had previously only served as narrators finally came to life. It was kind of bizarre. Hart has his own private investigation firm? He&amp;#039;s on Match.com, lamenting the Filipino girl that got away? Hearing about Cohle&amp;#039;s life of boozy solitude wasn&amp;#039;t as jarring or unexpected, but it was still revelatory to learn how even the smallest of the puzzle pieces we&amp;#039;d been fumbling with for six episodes ended up falling into their places in the present day.  And, of course, the most surprising development of all happens to be the driving force of True Detective&amp;#039;s final act: Despite their history, Cohle and Hart have teamed up buddy cop-style to get to the bottom the Yellow King, Carcosa, and the real culprits behind the Dora Lange case, once and for all. &amp;quot;You have a debt,&amp;quot; Cohle calls out to Hart just as he&amp;#039;s about to leave the dive bar the episode opens in. Hart had just finished claiming that he&amp;#039;d throw Cohle a barbell if he saw him drowning, but he can&amp;#039;t deny that what they&amp;#039;ve left undone is more important than any personal issue. &amp;quot;What have you got to show me?&amp;quot; Hart says. It&amp;#039;s on. Some more of what we heard in &amp;quot;After You&amp;#039;ve Gone&amp;quot;: If you couldn&amp;#039;t already tell from the Gilbough and Papinia questioning, Cohle isn&amp;#039;t exactly the same clean-shaven, close-cropped detective he was in 1995 or 2002. He&amp;#039;s hit the bottle hard, and after eight years working fishing boats and bars in Alaska, he&amp;#039;s back in Louisiana to finish what he started and pay his aforementioned debt to the case... whether he looks the part or not. As Hart puts it: &amp;quot;Father Time has his way with us all... Looks like you must have pissed him off.&amp;quot;  Go on...  IS THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENING?!?! Cohle: &amp;quot;I was aware that I might have lost my mind.&amp;quot;  In 2012 Cohle has taken strides in shedding some of his profound indifference to things like human &amp;quot;feelings&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;emotions.&amp;quot; Although his own personal life still has a ways to go \u2014 he&amp;#039;s living alone and tending bar at a patron-less hole in the wall \u2014 he seems to have softened a bit as far as his former partner is concerned. Once upon a time they shared something, which is more than Cohle can say for anyone else in his life. Most depressing about Hart&amp;#039;s own sad 2012 state of affairs, though, is how he&amp;#039;s come to accept it. &amp;quot;I just stay busy,&amp;quot; he says before we&amp;#039;re given a darkened montage full of online dating and lonely TV dinners. It&amp;#039;s put into even greater context when he visits Maggie in her living room full of flowers, pastels, and natural light, where we learn that he&amp;#039;s also completely estranged from his daughters.  Now that the rules and regulations attached to a badge are out of sight and out of mind, Cohle is willing to employ whatever means necessary to get to the bottom of the case. He doesn&amp;#039;t even need more than a second to suggest torturing the &amp;quot;cocksucker&amp;quot; Geraci into talking. So cat burgling Tuttle&amp;#039;s mansion and now DIY electro-torture? Could this be any more awesome? It&amp;#039;s too bad we only get to see Cohle&amp;#039;s unencumbered, laser-focused brand of vigilante justice for two episodes.  Some things never change...  There aren&amp;#039;t going to be any two-way mirrors in the room where Cohle decides to get real with Geraci. Bring out the jumper cables! In &amp;quot;After You&amp;#039;ve Gone,&amp;quot; True Detective resumed operating like the typical crime drama we saw in the season&amp;#039;s first three episodes, albeit now a more perverted version colored with the multitudes we learned in the season&amp;#039;s post-procedural second act. As we move into the finale, everything seems to be unfolding rather conveniently relative to what we expected when all of the supernatural Yellow King speculation was at its height. It isn&amp;#039;t difficult to imagine a conclusion that sees Cohle and Hart getting the info they need from Geraci, making their way to Carcosa, and apprehending Errol the lawn mower or whomever else is guilty. But it can&amp;#039;t go down that easily, can it? This is one of the darkest, most fatalistic TV shows we&amp;#039;ve ever seen. It&amp;#039;s really going to end with the case getting solved and Hart returning to his empty house to scroll through the online dating matches he piled up while nabbing the Yellow King with Cohle? In a recent interview with The Daily Beast, Michelle Monaghan said &amp;quot;staggering&amp;quot; when asked for a single word to describe how the season will end. She also implied that Maggie and Marty&amp;#039;s daughters and Maggie&amp;#039;s parents would be &amp;quot;part of the plot going forward.&amp;quot; What role could Maggie&amp;#039;s parents, particularly her father, possibly play in the season finale? Is it that big of a leap to assume he could be a part of the Rich White Men Child Rape Illuminati of Southern Louisiana? Taking it a step \u2014 or maybe another leap \u2014 further, could this lead to an explanation of Audrey&amp;#039;s sexual explicit drawings at school, the childlike sketch of the Carcosa spiral taped to the Harts&amp;#039; kitchen wall, or the tableau of toys arranged in the girls&amp;#039; room? You know, the one depicting a scene nearly identical to what we saw in the grainy Marie Fontenot video. Could Martin Hart&amp;#039;s father-in-law have molested or in some way brought Audrey into the fold at Carcosa? What if this is the case and Marty figures it all out, say, through a video similar to the one of Fontenot that made him recoil with such intensity? We know he&amp;#039;s prone to reacting rashly and impulsively when he finds something objectionable. We also know that his (Chekovian?) gun has seen plenty of camera time since the story picked back up in 2012. It was even discussed: &amp;quot;That should do it,&amp;quot; Cohle said of the .38 as he led Hart into the storage locker. Could the end of Martin Hart&amp;#039;s story be akin to that of a similarly hot-headed Brad Pitt once he found out what was &amp;quot;in the box&amp;quot; at the end of Se7en? We have no idea, of course, and this particular speculation train is now well off the rails, but it&amp;#039;s probably safe to say that whatever &amp;quot;staggering&amp;quot; conclusion True Detective&amp;#039;s first season comes to, it&amp;#039;s not going to leave us feeling warm and fuzzy.* *And couldn&amp;#039;t you see it all ending with the eternal, Cormac McCarthian Rustin Cohle staring out over some sun-flecked lake, contemplating the cosmic implications of the latest tragedy he just bore witness to?  All will be answered next Sunday. Cue Townes Van Zandt. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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