‘True Detective’ Season 3 Episode 4 Recap: “The Hour And The Day”

True Detective Season 3 Episode 4 (“The Hour And The Day”) is the kind of episode in a crime series where every single thing feels important. And in this excellent season of True Detective, it seems we can finally rest assured (or rather, rest fitfully for the next four weeks until we finally know the truth of the Purcell case) that no detail is being wasted by Nic Pizzolatto. The clues that will ultimately matter to solving the case are right in front of us, but the details that distract us from sniffing out the real killer right away—those matter to this story just as much.

The last four episodes have built an entire recognizable world out of these seemingly small details. In Sunday’s hour-plus runtime, we witness Detective Wayne Hays be told by a little old lady witness that she defines a black man solely by his blackness; we see him condescended to by the Attorney General of Arkansas for his “stunted career” in 1990 which was, presumably, stunted by that very Attorney General; we watch as Wayne is eyed with disdain in West Finger’s segregated black neighborhood for how he could possibly “wear that badge.” (That last one does at least allow for some rare, but pitch –perfect humor from Detective Hays: “S’got a little clip on it.”)

Because understanding the way that Wayne is rejected by every corner of his 20th century Arkansas cage is important to understanding why the Purcell case has continued to slip through his fingers, and his increasingly addled mind all these years; why he sees himself as someone who things “happen to,” an defense that his wife Amelia spits at in 1990. Even there, in his romantic relationship with Amelia, born from the Purcell case, Wayne doesn’t seem to quite fit. As Sunday’s episode makes clearer than ever before: Amelia Reardon has the capacity to run circles around Detective Hays.

Wayne is a talented detective, an exceptional investigator, and as a tracker, he is unparalleled. But how’s an investigator to see clearly when he’s blinded by love? What’s a tracker to do in the face of the Attorney General of Arkansas? With racial prejudices playing their biggest, blatant-ist role yet this episode, it often feels like the best Wayne can hope for is simply to keep up. Of course, Wayne makes a few large strides toward finding truth in the Purcell case in the early timelines, but our perception of those findings is colored by Wayne’s own growing dementia in 2015: it trickles down through every timeline, creating a fresh lens through which to view the exhilarating bewilderment that already colored True Detective Season 1.

With Wayne as our main entry point into this story, season 3 is turning out to be all about what we don’t know, rather than what we do.

We don’t know who went to prison for the Purcell case in 1980; we don’t know if they got out in 1990 or why that haunts Wayne more than anything else; we don’t know why Lucy Purcell feels so guilty; we don’t know what happened to Amelia, or what she got up to in California, or why she evades personal questions with sexual suggestion, or what her spectral presence accused Wayne of leaving in the woods. We don’t know what happened to Julie Purcell in 1980…

Or 1990…

Or 2015…

But if the end of this episode marking the halfway point in this season tells us one thing—it’s that everything we don’t know is about to get blown wide open.

Detectives Hays and West arrive at St. Michaels Church of the Ozarks, where Will received his First Communion, to find the priest teaching some mashup of Matthew 16:25 and John 10:28 to a youth group. It is the first of many, many religious allusions in this episode.

The priest’s his office is filled with photos of children during their First Communion, including Will’s, all taken by him. The prayerful repose in the photo “signifies their innocence and rebirth in Christ.” As for why Will’s eyes are closed: “I suppose he blinked.” We’re told he has a credible alibi, so for now he’s off the suspect list, telling the detectives that last he saw Julie, she was “excited about seeing an aunt” (an aunt that she doesn’t have, notes Roland), and his main observance of the Purcell kids was that “they were sweet children, and they looked out for each other.” Oh, and those corn husk dolls found with Will’s body and seen in Julie’s Halloween bag? Those are made by church patron Patty Faybur, “a dear good woman.”

Wayne isn’t so sure about that, but when they arrive at Patty’s house, she turns out to be a sweet-seeming elderly woman who makes the cornhusk dolls for the church’s Fall Festival. She last sold them in October, when a black man with one dead eye bought ten off of her, saying they were for his nieces and nephews. When Wayne asks if he had any other defining features—”Handsome? Ugly?”—Patty looks at him like he’s crazy. “Well, like I said—he was black,” she helpfully reiterates.

When Wayne asks if the man mentioned where he lived, Patty averts her eyes to Roland and says, “I just assumed that would have been with the rest of them, over at the tracks in Davis Junction.” I truly can’t believe it took us this long to get to our first old white lady with a cross around her neck who seems sweet at first, then immediately reveals herself to be a blatant, unapologetic racist. On their way out, as the camera pulls away from a cross stitch reading “For the joy of the Lord is my strength,” as Wayne stares Patty down, and she returns a niiiiice long, innocent “I’m not racist” old lady blink.

And after their trip to Davis Junction, Patty’s lead is likely not one Hays and West are happy to receive. On the way in, the church marquee displays Matthew 25:13, from which the episode gets its name: “For you do not know the day, nor the hour.” It also happens to be a very rude nod toward 2015 Wayne! Inside the liquor store, one of the town’s three functioning businesses, the manager reluctantly tells them there’s a man named Sam Whitehead who lives over in trailer park that fits their “milky eye” description.

Things go south quickly from there. When the detectives ask Whitehead about his churchgoing and doll-buying habits, he quickly realizes they’re suspicious of him for something. Wayne tells him he might have seen the story of a dead boy and missing girl in the papers. “White children,” Whitehead says: “If it’s in the paper, it’s white children.” And he’s not about to let them pin it on him, a black man. When Roland asks Whitehead where he was the night of November 7th, he hollers out, “Y’all come over here, come watch these nefarious men, what they’re trying to do to me!” Roland starts to get angry, the crowd starts to get angry, and when someone throws dirt at Roland and he draws his gun, Wayne pushes Whitehead and Roland both inside the trailer. I say again: protect Wayne Hays.

Sam says he’s never been to Devil’s Den, he was in his home the night of the 7th, and he’s not the only black man with one dead eye. He notes that with all the farm work and the killing line at the chicken plant, here are lots of people missing fingers and toes around these parts. When Hays and West leave, their windshield has been busted, which Roland is none too happy about, but Wayne asks if they can say it was anonymous vandals. “Oh, we’re not going with irate negroes?” Roland says, earning a rare smile out of Wayne. I love their love!

The only good to come out of this, is that the detectives have suddenly become sure of two things: Will likely died trying to defend his sister, and his killer is almost certainly connected to St. Michaels.

And then there’s the secret silver lining that, through this case, Wayne has met Amelia, who he finally takes on a real date in this episode. It is as odd and disconcerting as any of their interactions ever are—maybe more! The way it undulates between awkward and electric, sour and sweet, is perhaps not a first date experience unique to this couple, but the topical content certainly is. Amelia immediately brings up the Purcell case, and then immediately apologizes: “My whole life—I speak, I regret.” Wayne asks about her time in California, and she makes vague allusions to “a lot of confusion,” then leans forward seductively and says she used to be a bit of a mess.

Then Wayne brings up the Purcell case, offering a very chill anecdote that people who hurt children often think of themselves as having affection for those children “even up to the fucking ’em and murdering ‘ em part,” juuuuust as the waitress walks up. After Wayne tells Amelia about his family, and asks about hers in return, she says he’s her first ever police date: “You gonna rough me up?”

If you’re noticing that Amelia seems to use sexual suggestion to distract from the personal topic at hand, I’m sorry to break it to you—that is not your acute observational instincts. Where there’s been a slight suggestion before, it is entirely is glaring in this episode, and now colors many of her previous interactions with Wayne in a different light. Her repeated suggestion of sex in the Walgreens parking lot where Julie’s prints were found, for example. What was she trying to distract from then? What is she trying to distract from now? And if she was still using this tactic well into the 90s, what was hiding from Wayne for so long?

Wayne’s new position on Roland’s Purcell investigation team in 1990 leads to one hell of an argument between Amelia and Wayne after she won’t get excited about it, claiming he showed no such excitement for the intel she got from the Oklahoma policeman. There, she is right; the rest…seems a little excessive.

Amelia says Wayne complains that everything happens to him: “You’re this grown man with no agency of his own.” Wayne argues that he’s not the one who’s had his head in the clouds for the last five years: “Oh, I’m gonna be a great writer, let me use this awful tragedy to take me on to better things!” Amelia responds that she doesn’t even know what drives him anymoreleast she has drive: “I think you stand upright out of habit.” This episode was co-written by David Milch of Deadwood fame, and the dialogue throughout, but especially here, is…overwhelmingly potent. The reaction to this argument as it moves through topics and rooms and accusations chosen specifically to harm is painful, and not just to the pair onscreen. Finally, at a loss, Wayne exclaims to his wife, “Stop talking shit about me!”

“Or what?” Amelia spits. “Or Imma start crying,” Wayne whimpers.

Reader, I did start. Amelia is a little less sympathetic to Wayne’s sorrow, but he says he’ll of course do whatever she orders because things always seem to be on her schedule: “Be happy when you say, fight when you say, talk when you say, fuck every so often.” And, if you can believe this, Amelia says, “How about right now,” and slips off her underwear; things have gotten far enough away from her and it is, indeed, time to fuck. Wayne complies.

It is extremely hot and incredibly concerning.

If the Purcell children are the central mystery of this season, Amelia is firmly occupying the secondary spot, and those two things come crashing together when 1980 Amelia brings a box of the children’s artwork from school to the Purcell’s house where she finds Lucy, utterly tanked.

Amelia told Wayne early on that she likes to take on different characters, and watching Carmen Ejogo bounce from serpent to saint, seductress to schoolmarm, all seemingly as a cover-up for her truest nature—detective—is as thrilling as it is disconcerting. With Lucy Purcell, she’s in full caring-teacher mode, which results in a more vulnerable Lucy than we’ve ever seen. “Can I tell you something, Amelia?” Lucy asks, not waiting for an answer. “I’ve got the soul of a whore.”

That’s sure to be one of the most-remember lines from season 3 of True Detective, but Lucy doesn’t say it for the lyrical flair—she feels it deeply. She tells Amelia that she never knew her mama, and she hoped her children might have a better time of it. But she was never able to give them a happy home. “Children should laugh…right?” Lucy asks, basically quoting the not-ransom note (“THE CHILDREN SHUD LAUGH“) that was allegedly sent to the Purcell house by Julie’s abductor.

Lucy breaks down with guilt, in a rollercoaster reading from Mamie Gummer (simultaneously doing a stellar “blackout drunk but still talking”), telling Amelia that she has always run around on Tom: “Sometimes I couldn’t breathe in this house, and I didn’t even argue with that part of me. But what kind of woman hate the only things that ever showed her love?”

Wracked with guilt, Lucy sobs, “I have done such a terrible thing.” And while Amelia has been simultaneously comforting her, and urging her to divulge more all this time, she finally tells the despondent Lucy that if there’s anything she hasn’t shared yet, she can trust Detective Hays: “He’s a good man.” That…does not go well. Lucy says of course when she opens up, Amelia is just trying to work her. “Who are you taking this to, huh? Get a load of the white trash whore you’re trying to work, to get good with your cop boyfriend!” Then Lucy yells a series of words that cannot be printed here, and boots Amelia from her home…

But we really don’t know what Amelia was doing there; we can be almost certain it wasn’t purely out of the goodness, but again: it’s the things we don’t know that are defining this season.

Similarly, we have no idea what exactly Wayne is trying to remember in the 2015 timeline, though he seems to have learned a thing or two from his late wife about using what he’s got to get what he wants. With both his son Henry, and the director Elisa, we see Wayne playing up his status as a “confused old man,” something he is not otherwise happy to accept. But if it means getting Henry to use his status as a **NEW INFORMATION ALERT** detective for the State Police Department to research some of the old files Wayne is looking through, then it’s worth it. That includes finding Roland West: “I need his memory, son” Wayne tells Henry. “This right now is my way of staying alive.”

Wayne also asks Henry if he’s seen Elisa ever so innocently, and Henry says not since she started speaking negatively about the 1980 investigation during the last interview. But when Wayne shows up at her hotel room, the two wine glasses, rumpled bed sheets, and unnecessary denial that she had company more or less confirm they have a relationship. But Wayne simply blinks at the clear evidence they’re lying to him, telling Elisa that she’s surely noticed by now he “gets confused.”

Wayne tells Elisa that he’s willing to keep sharing what he knows with her, but now, he wants her to do the same in return. “I wanna know the whole story,” he tells her. “A lot of this is my life. There are some pieces missing; I need them.” Elisa isn’t willing to put all her cards on the table just yet, but she gives him one new thing: photos of some remains identified as Dan O’Brien—Lucy’s cousin who lived in the Purcell home in 1980, and resurfaced in 1990 before disappearing again.

Given all this wheeling and dealing, you could almost forget that Wayne isn’t operating on all cylinders. But when the sun sets, we see him once again with his recorder, trying to sort out his warped memories. He’s hopping from thought to thought; speaking to himself, then his daughter Rebecca, then Roland; losing track of what decade he’s in, contemplating suicide when he thinks about living without Amelia. And then…

There’s the soldiers. The whole time Wayne is rifling through his haunted thoughts, there are phantoms of Viet Cong soldiers congregating behind him. They don’t speak; they don’t threaten; they just stand there—present. In this scene, Wayne’s past, both forgotten and remembered, seems to be haunting him. The assumption would be then, that these are apparitions of the many Viet Cong soldiers he killed in the Vietnam War. That makes the presence of a man with long, dark hair and a bullet hole in his forehead, and a young man in a suit and tie that Wayne briefly reaches out and says “I’m sorry” to, all the more confusing.

But…Wayne also asks the Viet Cong apparitions if “they still make Mercuries” when he spots a car idling outside his home, so we can’t trust that everything Wayne says here is to be taken as a clue. But it does all mean something.

And finally, the episode draws toward an end with something to hold onto in both of the earlier timelines. In 1990, after pouring over the Walgreen’s surveillance footage, Wayne spots 21-year-old Julie Purcell hurrying down the cosmetics aisle with a jacket bundled in her arms. And in 1980: Freddy Burns’ finger prints have been found on Will Purcell’s bike.

Hays and West march Freddy past both of his friends in separate interrogations rooms, later telling him that they revealed Freddy has 30 minutes unaccounted for on the night of the 17th: “Just an observation—I don’t think you’re very well liked,” Wayne says, on an absolute comic roll this episode. That is, until he starts in with the prison rape threats again, telling Freddie that he better train (gulp) his ass (gulp) to be an entrance (double gulp_. Goodness, Wayne. Even Roland is like, What’s with all the rape stuff toward this kid??? seeming a lot like Pizzolatto trying to absolve himself from using all the prison rape stuff all the time. (If you have to absolve yourself from it—just stop doing it!)

But Freddy actually isn’t a kid anymore. He just turned 18, and the detectives gleefully tell him they pitched in to get him a life sentence to imprisonment. Freddy swears up and down he didn’t kill Will though. He says Will was a nerd, and he just shoved him off his bike that night by the Ranger Tower while he was looking for his sister, then chased him into the woods. That’s when Freddy’s friends told the detectives he disappeared for 30 minutes. Freddy says that he was drunk, and got a little turned around in the roods, but that’s it.

“And you’re gonna risk 20 years in prison saying the only thing you did was throw a kid off his bike, which by the way, makes you a dirt bag,” Wayne says. Cue prison threats; cue Freddy sobbing; cue Wayne telling the others detectives that the kid will be in jail by the time he’s 25, but he didn’t kill Will Purcell. But there’s no time to interrogate Freddy further, because the police station gets a call that something is going down at Brett Woodard’s house.

Last week, a bunch of gun-totin’ country men threatened Woodard to stay away from their children with a number of blows and kicks to the face. Then, it seems, he went home, pulled out his bag-o-guns that could also pass for the size and shape of a child’s body [[link episode 3 recap here]], and prepared his house for battle. Then, he went out and spoke to the head hillbilly’s children right in clear view of the house window, so the head hillbilly immediately picks up his phone to round up the troops.

We don’t know a lot about Woodard, but from what we do know about the welcome that awaited him after serving his country in the Vietnam War, could we really blame him if he was looking for a fight? But whether he was looking for it or not isn’t important; what’s important, is that when they come—he’s ready. Woodard sees a herd of trucks racing down a farm road toward him, and he goes into full combat mode, tossing his bag of scrap metal, hauling out of his heavy boots, and sprinting down the street barefoot. Right when they start gaining on him, he darts off diagonally into a fenced-in field, and runs straight to his home, where his guns are waiting for him.

But not just guns: there are grenades attached to trip wires in the yard…

And a Claymore mine that reads “FRONT TOWARD ENEMY” Woodard sets up right in front of his door.

Seconds after the men roll up yelling for Woodard to come out, Hays and West squeal into the driveway, yelling at the men to stand down. But the man who’s been leading the affront on Woodard marches up to his door, and kicks it in, then—BOOM!

Credits.

THIS IS A RECAP, NOT A REDDIT THREAD, BUUUUT:

• Did Lucy write the note? Was she quoting the note? Or is she familiar enough with the person who made the note that they hold a similar belief: Children should laugh. Either way—she’s clearly connected to Julie’s abduction in some way, right?
• I have to assume it’s purposeful that all of the Bible verses used in the episode are just a little bit off. For example, the priest quotes Matthew and John together as if they’re one passage, but in the middle, he drops in “I will never leave the gathered regiment, nor flee from any battle,” which is, I believe, a Roman soldier’s oath. Also, Patty’s cross stitch that misquotes Nehemiah 8:10, which technically ends with: “For the joy of the lord is YOUR strength.”
• The out-of-focus photo on 1990 Roland’s desk suggest that Laurie, the woman he meets at St. Michaels, becomes more than just “some serious ass” to him. Hopefully, Tom Purcell is off his couch by then…
• For all you Amelia truthers out there: surely I couldn’t be the only one who thought she was about to reference the way Will’s body was found with his hands folded into prayer—then suddenly redirected to the toys being what showed affection from the killer…because she realized Wayne hadn’t ever told her about the hands.
• And finally, all together now: WHO IS THE AUNT?!?!!?

Jodi Walker writes about TV for Entertainment Weekly, Vulture, Texas Monthly, and in her pop culture newsletter These Are The Best Things. She vacillates between New York, North Carolina, and every TJ Maxx in between.

Stream True Detective Season 3 Episode 4 ("The Hour And The Day") on HBO Go