I Disagree With Ashley

Published January 15, 2019 · Updated July 6, 2022

Hey Guys,

Loved listening to the first podcast, you guys had a lot of good points, and this i’m sure will be a good show for what shat nation is all about. I’m a little late for giving my opinion on the initial first and second episodes of the show, but I had to write in and respectfully disagree with fellow shatter, ashley.

The 2 detective’s in this season of the show, are so vastly different to the Russ and Marty we were seeing in the first season. I am confident, as the season progresses, that the differences will be even greater. Already, (in episodes 1 & 2) we see a much more reserved Detective Hays, as he wrestles with his memory (whether he is suffering from early stages of Alzheimer’s, or dimensia). One thing is for sure, he’s no Russ Kohle, Russ would expand and offer multiple takes on how he felt or what he believed in. Hays isn’t going to wow you with deep and thoughtful one liners, he’s not going give you access to his thought process with endless dialogue, but he will give you access to his feelings, through his body language. Notice how the interactions between the two detectives is more to the point, less dialogue is needed to convey frustrations, or thoughts, its very much like a real life dialogue between 2 people who know each other. You sometimes already understand each other without vast conversation. That is our season 3 detectives.

Which leads me to what I personally love about this season already, and what gives me excitement about what will come. To me, it was the sequence where Detective Hays goes off on his own tracking, and we are given the brief background by Roland West that Hays was essentially a “pathfinder in the Nam”. Camera follows Hays into the woods. You hear his heart beat, and as he goes farther on the trail his heart pounds harder and louder. Because of his background in the nam, we can already conclude that he knows exactly how this trail ends, and it ends up he finds the body of William Purcell. It was a great display of exactly who Hays is,. Throughout episode 1 and 2, he speaks to people, but he’s not going into long explanations, he’s not elaborating very much, he’s short and to the point. You almost get the sense that he’d rather be alone by himself tracking in a jungle, than around any people whatsoever. That’s about the only similarity between russ and hays, they share the ability to make everything else around them irrelevant and just focus on the case.

There’s a second and really important factor in discussing Hays, his Alzheimer’s, or dimensia. We know he’s having issues with his memory, we don’t know how bad it is, but in episode 2 we start to get a real sense of the level of memory loss he’s having. At the dinner table with his son, he asks about his daughter, the same question twice in about 5 minutes. So I’d go out on a limb and say whatever he has is effecting his memory is pretty bad. So with that in mind, it’s possible that hays is forgetting things like the case and his wife being deceased, or his daughter not being around. It adds a really unique and interesting dynamic to everything, and hopefully it’s explored more. If Hays, is having to grieve for his wife all over again. Or forgetting that he discovered that child deceased, it would add an enormous amount of stress to his character. It is a really intriguing aspect of the show.

I’m not sure if he’s a reliable narrator or not, hopefully when we start getting West’s account we can know for sure what we are seeing. But I just wanted to say that I am loving the character of Hays. I hope that we are not being set up just for a swerve with his memory loss, and that we can take most of what we have seen for fact, otherwise I think it would take away what seems to be a well thought out show.

Kenny Ducommun

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