True Detective

For the past couple of months I have been rather enthralled with the HBO series True Detective, the story of two detectives pursuing a serial killer in rural Louisiana.  Fair warning: just because I think the show is one of the best things to come through the idiot box in years, don't think it's for everyone.  It's decidedly R-rated, and it's unrelentingly dark and tense, it will probably make your blood pressure go up and it may just give you Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or trigger episodes if you already have PTSD.
So why, you might ask, do I think it's so great?
Well first off, it's extremely well written and superbly acted.  It has a "feel" that grips you, and an atmosphere that makes you forget you're watching flickering images on the screen.  It's a story filled with grace: both main characters are deeply flawed and ultimately not very likable men, however, for some reason, you end up identifying with them because they are on the right side, almost despite themselves.
Rust Cohle is a man who has lost almost everything that matters: his four year old daughter was run over by a car as she played in the front yard and in the wake of her death his marriage fell apart.  He is the ultimate nihilist for most of the show.  He staunchly believes that the universe amounts to nothing and human consciousness is a tragic evolutionary mistake.  He dwells in the darkness and drinks heavily to kill the pain.
Marty Harte, is Cohle's partner and foil.  Marty is a good old boy, who likes to have affairs with women who are younger and somewhat unbalanced versions of his wife. Marty doesn't get Cohle's nihilism, because for at least half of the show's episodes he is managing to have his cake and eat it too, but ultimately the two men have to overcome their differences in order to stop the "Yellow King" who we find out is a hulking psychopath who abducts and kills people in the underground ruins of what seems to be a civil war era stone fortress, which he calls Carcosa, a name that is ominously repeated throughout the show as if it were a territory in the very infernos of Hell.
The darkness of the show is consuming, the visuals are dark, the subject matter is dark, the characters themselves are dark.  Through eight episodes, that span almost 20 years, it seems that everything is falling apart.  Marty's fantasy world finally bites him in the rear, Cohle becomes more dysfunctional and nihilistic.  Halfway through they kill the wrong bad guy (who still deserved it mind you, but not the Yellow King), which consequently allows the Yellow King to go on killing, for over a decade.
In the end they get him, at great personal cost to both men, but they don't manage to crumple the corrupt system that covered up for him and made his reign of terror possible, but they got the one they both felt responsible for.
The final scene of the show is the two men, outside of the hospital where they have been recovering.  They are talking about what has happened, and how it fits into the big picture.  Cohle has been in a coma for some time and has had an experience of sinking, literally into death and eternity.  His nihilism evaporated as he touched the mysterium tremendum, and here's where we see the turn:

Marty: “Didn’t you tell me one time, dinner once, maybe, about how you used to ... you used to make up stories about the stars?”
Rust: “Yeah, that was in Alaska, under the night skies.”
Marty: “Yeah, you used to lay there and look up, at the stars?”
Rust: “Yeah, I think you remember how I never watched the TV until I was 17, so there wasn’t much to do up there but walk around, explore, and...”
Marty: “And look up at the stars and make up stories. Like what?”
Rust: “I tell you Marty I been up in that room looking out those windows every night here just thinking, it’s just one story. The oldest.”
Marty: “What’s that?”
Rust: “Light versus dark.”
Marty: “Well, I know we ain’t in Alaska, but it appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory.”
Rust: “Yeah, you’re right about that.”
Rust insists that Marty help him leave the hospital, and Marty agrees. As they head to the car, Rust makes one final point to his former partner.
Rust: “You’re looking at it wrong, the sky thing.”
Marty: “How’s that?”

Rust: "Well, once there was only dark, seems to me the light's winning.”

That's good theology right there. That's Christianity at it's best: the light shining in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it. It doesn't mean the darkness goes away, it's just the light shines, like stars.
Believe me, I really didn't expect any good news at the end of that show, in fact, I fully expected that Rust would be dead and maybe Marty too, but there it was: light.
But it wasn't happy, triumphal light, it was just enough light to give you hope and keep  you going through the dark.  It was just enough to help you walk away from it without a grim feeling of doom.  The power and beauty of the light, in fact, was actually accented by the darkness.  The hope that Rust had finally found, may seem small, but it was really huge compared to his earlier desperation and emptiness.