Nic Pizzolatto created Rust Cohle for the first season of True Detective and produced a character who solves murders while delivering lectures on the meaninglessness of human existence. Cohle is a homicide detective in rural Louisiana, tracking a ritualistic killer across bayous and abandoned churches, and between crime scenes he explains to his partner Marty Hart that human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution, that time is a flat circle, and that the honorable thing for the species to do is deny its programming and walk hand in hand into extinction.

Pizzolatto drew heavily from Thomas Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, a work of philosophical pessimism that argues consciousness is a parasitic condition inflicted on matter that would be better off without it. Cohle has absorbed this philosophy and made it operational, which means he goes to work every day believing that nothing matters and then works a murder case with obsessive precision, because the contradiction between his philosophy and his behavior is the most interesting thing about him.

The Flat Circle and the Beer Can

Cohle makes tiny human figures out of beer cans during interrogations. He shapes aluminum into people while questioning suspects about death. This detail, which Pizzolatto planted without explanation, reveals everything about Cohle that his monologues hide: he is a man who builds things. His philosophy says creation is pointless. His hands keep creating anyway. The gap between what Rust Cohle believes and what Rust Cohle does is the engine of the entire first season.

His partnership with Marty Hart works because Hart is everything Cohle is not: conventional, emotional, unfaithful in ways that are boringly human rather than cosmically troubled. Hart does not understand Cohle's philosophy. He does not need to. He understands that Cohle is a good detective, and in the bayou, that is enough.

The Light in the Darkness

The final scene of season one should not work. Cohle, the philosopher of cosmic despair, looks at the stars and tells Hart that the light is winning. It contradicts everything he has said for eight episodes. It is sentimental in a show that has been ruthlessly unsentimental. And it works because it is honest. Cohle went into the darkness, literally and philosophically, and he came back carrying something he did not expect to find: the stubborn, irrational sense that existence is worth the trouble.