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| Photo: HBO |
"Stop. Let go. This is our job. It ain't here to make you right. And it's not the place you work out your shit."
Roland snarls this hard truth to Wayne in 1990, after the two detectives find Tom Purcell's body at Devil's Den, the teen hangout/gay cruising spot where his two children were last seen ten years ago. If the previous six episodes have shown anything though, it's that Wayne never took that advice to heart, charging ahead despite the danger until, as the final moments of "The Final Country" make chillingly clear, it threatened to destroy him and his family.
Season three's penultimate hour answers several lingering questions while letting others twist in the wind. The mystery of James Harris' disappearance is solved--he's killed by Roland during he and Wayne's brutal interrogation--but it also means whatever knowledge he had about Julie and who took her went to the grave with him. Amelia learns Lucy's cousin Dan O'Brien was seen talking to a one-eyed black man who could have kidnapped Julie. Whether Dan met his end at the hands of Tom or someone else, however, is still unknown. As for Tom Purcell, while how and when he died, a typed suicide note doesn't fit the who he was, leaving Wayne with more than a little suspicious. But it's enough for the attorney general, who overturns Brett Woodard's conviction and pins the murders on Tom.
"A sudden act of violence, a dead man and the case is closed," Elisa says to Wayne in 2015, noting the similarities between the 1980 and 1990 investigations. When pressed, she puts her cards on the table; Elisa believes the Purcell case is connected to season one's serial killer investigation in Louisiana, and that Will and Julie were sold off by either Tom, Lucy or both, with help from Dan. Also, Watts, the one-eyed man, may be a possible procurer for a pedophile ring. Wayne brushes it all aside in her presence, spouting off platitudes about the uncertainty of police work, but he and Roland take the new information and interview the Hoyt family's former housekeeper, who seemingly corroborates Elisa's story with her description of "Mr. June," a one-eyed black man who was the caretaker of the Edward Hoyt's troubled daughter Isabel.
Later, Wayne again spies a black car parked outside his house. What was once easy to dismiss as a fractured mind slipping into paranoia is now a potentially terrifying reality. It turns out Ed Hoyt himself paid a visit to the Hays home in 1990, parking outside in a black Cadillac DeVille and blithely reeling off personal details about Wayne like he was reading items off a grocery list. Presumably, that scare--along with Amelia being spooked thinking Henry and Becca had been kidnapped while she talked to Lucy's old boss--is what led to them agreeing to put the Purcell case behind them. Amelia never wrote a sequel to her book and Wayne quit the force. Now that he's once again taken up the case, it's possible the same powerful forces who silenced Lucy, Tom and Dan are out to keep him and Roland quiet too.
Other Thoughts:
- Wayne's encouraging of Amelia's writing aspirations in 1980, but it's likely as much about wanting to solve the case as being a supportive boyfriend. When Amelia brings up the potential trouble her writing an expose could bring to Wayne, his response is "Fuck 'em. They don't wanna do it right it's not a job worth havin'."
- Roland stops short of calling Wayne a nigger, while they bury Harris James. But angrily telling him he's thinking it but not saying it is still some capital B bullshit.
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