Errol Childress: Come and die with me, little priest.

Oh, SPOILER ALERT if you haven’t seen True Detective and plan to. Here’s an excellent review by Jess Jenson for EW.com on the True Detective finale, “Form and Void”, that aired Sunday night and crashed HBO GO due to the amount of people trying to watch. I was really expecting one of the characters I cared about (or worse yet, all of them) to die horribly. Instead, though the finale was dark as hell and didn’t disappoint. Aside from all the obvious, memorable nightmarish imagery–and there was plenty; Errol’s…wife? (half-sister? Sister? Like Marty, we don’t want to know the DNA results) scared the hell out of us, especially her responses to Marty’s questions when he first tries to communicate with her, as follows:

Marty (Getting nervous): Uh– hey, where is he?
Woman: All around us… before you were born… and after you die.

The line delivery by the actress was so goddamned creepy that I shivered; her intermittent screaming at what looked to be their vicious German Shepherd dog purchased specifically to scare the shit out of/attack any trespassers, then going back to her normal calm yet clearly disturbed self, creeped me the hell out too.*.

Side note: I’m not 100%–OK, to be honest, 50% clear–who the fly blown, almost naked older man was in the guest house) or whatever building housed him) tied to a bed frame. He looked like (EEK) his lips were sewn shut, and when they only showed, say, a vague shot of his feet in that first scene he appeared in where Errol talks about ‘hosin’ him down’, I figured it was A. some poor girl or woman who had been their victim for a long time that Childress did horrible, horrible things to on a regular basis or B. what would be revealed later as a horribly rotten, long-dead corpse or C. a combination of the two. Still not 100%, but I’m pretty sure he was breathing. Please chime in below in ‘Comments” if you have an answer, by the way, because now it’s bugging me.

Anyway, here was as much of an ‘upbeat’ ending as this season of True Detective can have**. Anyway, Mr. Jenson says it much better than I could (you may have noticed that I’ve been a little frazzled the last month or so–complicated workload– but I’m improving), and if you were a fan of this first season, the review/analysis is well worth checking out.

*If I’d been in Marty’s shoes at the time, I don’t care how macho/alpha-male his character is (also considering the fact they’d mentioned their cell phones couldn’t pick up a signal; we horror fans know what happens when you’re out in the middle of nowhere and someone says they can’t get a signal, so hey, must be outside of the service area) I would have just said, “Welp, think I got about all the information I need, ma’am! I won’t be bothering you no more, I’m leaving now!” as I was hastily backing away, then found Rusty (though I wouldn’t go poking around too much, given the toxic, evil and just plain WRONG vibes that swamp property and the fucked-up owners gave out) and said, “OK, I’m out. Either we come back here with a dozen cops for back-up, or just bring in the next guy who can deal with this, I’m done. You getting in the car, Rust? No? Tell you what, I’ll just wait in the car for a few minutes with the motor running and the doors locked, then after five minutes, you’re on your own.”

**Raise your hand if, upon your first watching, you were POSITIVE Rusty was going to get killed off by the end of the episode. I thought when Marty asked about him, the detectives would look glum and tell Marty they were very sorry to tell him that Rust hadn’t made it through surgery alive.