The Boys, with Ginger's help, are able to find Reginald Ledoux's meth-cooking compound and arrest him, but then when Marty finds a couple of young kids on his property (one dead), he loses control and shoots Reggie, merrily spouting "Yellow King" nonsense at Rust until the very end. Rust helps him cover it up -- with a story they're still telling 17 years later -- and they soak in the appreciation for having closed the Dora Lange case, even though clearly Reggie was still just a middleman. I am sad that Reggie's dead, I liked Reggie for the few seconds he was around.

Fast-forward to 2002 (ten years ago), and everybody's acting pretty normal: Rust is in a stable long-term relationship with the vampire mom from Twilight, Marty's back in Maggie's good graces, and the girls are growing up. While the younger one seems to be fairly conventional, the older one is going through that trashy emo phase where you wear eye makeup, have threesomes in cars with older boys, and eventually get slapped around and called a slut by your dad. The usual Marty Hart bullshit. Which, problematic as it is, is still less punishing an experience than a lecture from Professor Crash about parallel dimensions and Nietzsche and whatever horrible fucking things he's always talking about despite not having a firm grasp on them.

Then a random murder confession turns into something deeper, when the guy tries to cop a plea in exchange for information about the Yellow King, explaining that our Boys never really solved that case, just drove him deeper underground. Rust flips out on the guy, but before he get Marty to help him yell at him, the guy -- having received a mysterious phone call -- commits suicide in a fairly horrible way. Marty is like, so not interested in the Yellow King -- which: you said it, sister -- but he does admit this is all very suspicious. I did not know that it was possible for either of them to give less of a shit about this serial killer, but this episode is here to tell you that, they are more than capable of finding new ways to be blasé about the satanic cult operating all around them.

The 2012 detectives, stymied by both guys' shitty attitudes, eventually come clean to Marty: Rust has been lurking around the scene of this latest murder, possibly killed one or more Tuttles on his return to Louisiana, and is very dedicated to hiding something in a shed. What that probably is, is a bunch of those twig sculptures, after he found a stash of them inside that school the guy was mowing that time. But really it could be anything, because the only thing Rust Cohle likes more than pretentious speeches about things he doesn't actually understand very well is, of course, hiding weird things in weird places.

The theory is that Rust has been manipulating Marty the entire time, using Dora's murder and its solution to clear the decks on his own serial killer activities, and possibly never left Louisiana in the first place, after this mysterious falling-out the Boys had that we still don't know about. Rust's only response is a bunch of half-understood physics lectures and more beer can arts and crafts, but the shed thing eventually touches enough of a nerve that he takes off out the interview. Which is nice because it means the format of the show, kind of claustrophobic due to being mostly pointless, is getting shaken up. But also not that nice because we are now 62.5% of the way through this show and nothing has happened yet and now people are straight up deserting, meaning less chance for anything to happen ever.

Next week: Maggie's up, shedding light on the breakdown between Rust and Hart, and Rust and the CID. Marty finds new ways to be an absolute piece of crap who is somehow still less obnoxious than his smarty-pants junkie-logic hideous leather-baggage garbage-person partner. And then in 2002, probably Marty does something awful to a woman and then they spend the whole episode finding a suspect who is a red herring and it turns out the princess is in another castle, so they just wasted days of their time and nearly an hour of ours. But I'm merely guessing when I say that, based solely on the fact that this has been true of 100% of the episodes of the show so far.