When the first season of True Detective debuted on HBO in 2014, it stunned audiences and gave HBO one of its highest season premiere ratings of all time. The anthology series, created by Nic Pizzolatto, stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as a pair of Louisiana State Police officers named Cohle and Hart who investigate the murder of a sex worker named Dora Lange.
Spanning decades and incorporating both occult and Southern gothic themes, the entire season was directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. While an instant classic, this first season’s reliance on a nonlinear structure that jumps between 1995, 2002, and 2012, as well as hallucinatory plot lines and disguised visual clues, left viewers with many unanswered questions. Upon multiple viewings, however, some of these hidden details are exposed. This list compiles ten such Easter eggs.
Dora Lange’s Journal Entry
References to the elusive Yellow King abound in the series. In the second episode, Cohle and Hart find their victim’s journal, which includes multiple allusions to the Yellow King and a place called Carcosa.
The show begins when Cohle and Hart find Dora Lange’s body posed under a tree. She’s naked, bound, and kneeling. There are horns on her head and a black spiral tattooed on her back. This iconography, matched with Dora Lange’s journal entries, points toward the occult.
The Spiraling Blackbirds
The first season of True Detective does a good job of blurring the distinction between reality and fantasy. It achieves this by visualizing the different characters’ hallucinations and visions in the real world they inhabit.
Cohle, played by McConaughey, seems to have an almost extrasensory ability when it comes to solving crimes, and he sees a flock of blackbirds form a crooked spiral in the sky right before he and Hart arrive at Dora Lange’s childhood church, which has been burnt down. On a wall amongst the ruins, the detectives find a crude drawing of a figure with deer antlers.
Audrey’s Barbie Dolls
Hart, played by Harrelson, has a tense relationship with his wife and two daughters that dissolves as the show progresses. In one episode, he walks into his older daughter Audrey’s room, where she’s playing with dolls. The scene she creates, though, shocks him: positioned around a naked female Barbie are five male Barbies.
While some fans think the scene is supposed to mirror a sexual assault, others believe it depicts a crime scene investigation. Either way, it keeps the lines of visual continuity going in the series, and it shows how Hart’s career bleeds over into his personal life.
Carla’s Neck Tattoo
Carla is one of Dora Lange’s childhood friends, and when the detectives interview her, they find out about Dora’s involvement in a strange local church, which they come to believe was once the base of operations for members of the elusive cult they’re tracking. This lead finds the detectives butting heads with a powerful local preacher, Reverend Tuttle, who once ran the Light of the Way Academy.
What’s interesting about Carla’s appearance is that she has a neck tattoo: a series of black stars that mimick the loose spirals all over the show and reference the series’ source material. One of Nic Pizzolatto’s influences when writing True Detective was Robert Chambers’ novella The King in Yellow, and it includes numerous references to black stars. Carla’s tattoo is a creepy reminder of the world of horror that thrives below the surface.
The Childhood Photo Of Dora Lange
Rust and Cohle visit Dora Lange’s mother after the murder, and when looking around the house, spot a childhood photo of Dora Lange. In the photo, the girl stands while five figures in Mardi Gras costuming flank her. Each figure sits atop a horse.
What ritual is she part of here? Who are the people in the photo? Why would her mother display this? While these answers aren’t ever given clear answers, the photo indicates Dora was exposed to strange customs, likely against her will, from a young age.
Matching Forehead Scars On Charmaine And Reggie
In episode six, Hart and Cohle get a confession out of a woman known as the “Marshland Medea,” who brutally slaughtered her three young children. A strange scar on her forehead matches the scar on the monstrous meth-head Rust and Cohle pursue, Reggie Ledoux.
Reggie, a gas-mask donning mad man, is killed by Hart after he and Cohle raid his drug-making compound that also includes a giant shipping container where Ledoux harbors kidnapped children. Why do Ledoux and Charmaine have the same scar? Some fans believe they were both involved in the Light of the Way Academy established by the Tuttle family.
The Drawing In Marty’s House
The spiral imagery runs rampant throughout True Detective, and what seems like an innocent child’s drawing on display in Hart’s house is really an ominous foreshadowing of the disintegration of his family unit. While the spiral has larger implications in the show, in this context, it represents the evil that seeps into Hart’s household due to his personal and professional choices.
Eventually, in 2012, Hart reunites with Cohle to rectify his mistakes, and they descend together into the spiral - also known as Carcosa - in order to find the killer they’re after.
Errol Childress’s Mowed Spiral
Cohle and Hart’s investigation leads them to Errol: the Tall Man, the green-eared spaghetti monster. He is the monster haunting Dora Lange’s case from the beginning, and based on testimony from an old maid for the Tuttles, he’s the illegitimate son of Ted Tuttle.
At the end of the penultimate episode for the season, Cohle and Hart encounter a groundskeeper for the Light of the Way Academy in 1995 as they seek directions for the burnt-down church Dora Lange attended. Little do they know they are face-to-face with the man they seek. After giving them directions, Errol continues to mow, but the scene ends with him cutting the grass in a spiral formation.
Reggie’s Back Scar
When Cohle and Hart capture Reggie, the camera focuses on a massive scar on his back, a crooked, sharp spiral that again aligns him with the strange cult that seems to be targeting vulnerable children all over the area. While the exact nature of what’s going on is never revealed, the truth is implied.
After Cohle and Hart track down and kill Errol, the Tuttle family’s name becomes forever tarnished in the media. However, none of them were ever officially indicted for Dora Lange’s death, nor were they legally implicated in the disappearances of dozens and dozens of children Cohle and Hart uncover as they dig deeper into the case.
That Six-Minute Single-Take Camera Shot
One of the most breathtaking, heart-stopping sequences in the first season of True Detective occurs in the fourth episode. In order to track down the whereabouts of Reggie Ledoux, Cohle infiltrates the biker gang he was a member of as an undercover officer in Texas, the Iron Crusaders.
The Crusaders ask him to participate in a robbery targeting a rival gang of drug dealers, and the six-minute, single-take shot shows how the robbery goes horribly wrong. This detail attests to Fukunaga’s brilliant directing and cinematography, which helped to secure True Detective’s status as a truly innovative television show.
