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As it goes on, though, the show also questions whether Cohle's pessimistic naturalism has left him rudderless, easily broken. Visiting a tent revival with Hart, he argues that any person who needs God to stay moral "is a piece of sh-t." But what, if anything, keeps Cohle moral? Only his will--a will that, as we see in 2012, has its limits. The investigators grilling him, it soon becomes clear, have their suspicions about his honesty and how he's changed over the years.
The investigation that makes True Detective special is not criminal but philosophical. It's asking not just whodunit but also why people do what they do. What makes monsters, what makes decent people--and which is the natural state of humanity? True Detective's story is bleak but cosmically earnest. In its fevered Louisiana swamp, the devil is hiding. The mystery is: Who's he hiding in?