Show constantly reminded us throughout the season that it's about community that was destroyed as much as it is about the crime itself. Unfortunately, when all is said and done we don't see much evidence of the first one and the story surrounding the crime is disappointing on multiple levels.
For a show that's called True Detective, detectives are pretty clueless - constantly on the wrong trail, and completely in the dark about what happened until everything is spelled out for them by mr. Julius. Not only that story behind the crime isn't that interesting but we get big exposition dump that explains everything in a manner of a Youtube recap video, most of which isn't even hinted at in previous episodes.
They had an opportunity to play around with unreliable narrator given the problems Hays has with remembering stuff which could be interesting in combination with the interview , but unfortunately that whole memory aspect boils down to nothing more than a backdrop for some nice editing transitions between time periods. One could argue that except last few minutes it makes no difference at all to the story. Whole interview aspect also went nowhere, and seem other to give them a reason to take one last look at the case.
This is by far the worst season as it clearly had nothing interesting to say - second one was a mess for the first half, but then found it's footing and even matched greatness of season 1 at times. At the very least it didn't try to backtrack to try to emulate what made season one so popular but was completely it's own thing.
