What happens in True Detective: Season 1, Episode 1 – ‘The Long Bright Dark’?
Warning: Major spoilers ahead
The episode begins with Martin Hart and Rustin Cohle being interrogated in present day about the investigation that brought them together as partners. Present-day Hart is a clean-cut individual, with Cohle coming across standoffish and unkempt.
The investigation in question took place in 1995, when a murdered woman was found in a burned field outside of Erath. Her body was positioned against a tree, wearing deer antlers on her head and sculptural stick lattices surrounding her body. Cohle believes that this is not the killer’s first victim, as the kill is too specific – a theory he shares with Hart.
The tension between the pair is immediately apparent, despite them having been partnered for three months. A disagreement in the car following Cohle’s revelation that “human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution” leads Hart, a religious family man, to declare their squad car now a place for silent reflection.
Cohle, determined to distract himself with work, takes off to a trucker bar where he finds sex workers who knew the victim. The victim is later identified as Dora Lange, a 28-year-old sex worker, with the autopsy revealing she had LSD and crystal meth in her system.
Marty and Rust continue investigating, discovering a potential connection to an old case which saw a young girl – Marie Fontenot – go missing five years earlier. After following up with the local sheriff, they discover that Marie’s case was never investigated and uncover a separate complaint around the same time when a young girl claimed she was chased through the woods by a “green-eared spaghetti monster”.
Later, when investigating Marie’s disappearance, Monty and Rust discover twig latticework in the backyard where she used to play.
Back in 2012, Rust reflects on Marty inviting him over for dinner with his wife and two children back when they were first partnered together. Marty recounts how Rust arrived at dinner drunk. The 2012 interrogators, Detective Gilbough and Detective Papania, are suspicious of Rust because he’s been off the grid for a number of years. Rust reveals that he knows there’s a new victim who shares similar circumstances to the murder of Dora Lange.
But with Marty and Rust having caught Dora’s killer years ago, could they have got the wrong person and is the real killer still at large?