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“My strong suspicion is… we get the world we deserve.” - Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell)

That’s the tagline HBO used on True Detective’s posters and trailer as promotion for its second season. It’s also a hugely powerful theme for the season two narrative, and refers to the way each major protagonist ends the season having lived (and for many, died) by their own values and beliefs.

Most of the series’ major protagonists expire before the conclusion of the finale episode, “Omega Station,” due to their inabilities to become anything other than who and what they are. Each character had parts of themselves they disliked, elements they knew gave them weaknesses, but were unable to give them up. Each character designed their own fates, as it were, and got the worlds they deserved.

Paul (Taylor Kitsch) was a closeted homosexual who couldn’t reconcile his desires with the image he felt he needed to project as a war veteran, as a police officer, and as a man. Though his peers likely wouldn’t have cared one way or another, his insecurities gave those wishing to manipulate him a form of leverage, and his homosexuality was eventually what led to his blackmail and murder. As someone unable to accept himself, actively working in opposition to his own nature, he enabled the situation that caused his death to take place in the series’ penultimate episode.

Early in the season, Frank (Vince Vaughn) tells a macabre childhood story about smashing a rat to death with his fist after his father locked him in the basement for days. He thought he was going to die there, and when he didn’t, used the experience as fuel for his own ambitions. The entire arc of Frank’s character, which arguably ends up being one of the more artfully drawn-out of the series, ends with Frank staying true to his personal mission. When he realizes his empire has been stolen out from under him, he burns everything to the ground - literally and figuratively - and proceeds to take out everyone who has wronged him. There’s no halfway with Frank, and if he can’t reap the benefits of his labor, nobody can. He would see it all destroyed sooner than end up in the hands of someone else.

Though his devoted wife Jordan (Kelly Reilly) offers to remain by his side no matter what, Frank sends her away to safety, says he’ll meet her in Venezela in two weeks wearing a white rose, actually knowing that he’s unlikely to survive what he plans to do. When the Mexicans he’d stiffed out of business kidnap and transport him to the salt flats, they take his money, then ask for his suit (and by metaphor, his achievements). Frank can’t back down. After a squabble, he does end up dressed in white as he promised Jordan; his red rose symbolically replaced with a knife wound. Frank’s fate falls completely upon his own actions. He lived and died by his own terms, and that’s what was important to him above all else.

Paternity is Ray’s (Colin Farrell) Achilles heel, and the thing he’s unable to let go of in his life. He’s a terrible man and father, but undoubtedly loves his son. Though he’s been legally separated from the kid, he continues to record voice messages throughout the series, which he hopes to send him as a means of connecting. Through his final moments, Ray is attempting to upload a voice message to his son’s email while gunmen hunt him in a redwood forest. The scene was prophesied by Ray’s own father five episodes earlier, in a Conway Twitty-accompanied hallucination following Ray’s beanbag-round gunshot state of unconsciousness.

Ray had a way out - he had an appointment to board a boat with Ani (Rachel McAdams) and ride away safely to Venezuela with millions of dollars in cash - but his personal obsession with seeing his son is what led the gunmen to him, and Ray to his fate. As with the other dead protagonists, Ray designed his own ending.

Ani is the series’ exception. She survives, fleeing to Venezuela and taking all the evidence about the Vinci conspiracy with her. Her life has been colored by a childhood sexual assault, an event that caused her to be vigilant, protective of herself, and interested in justice. Those characteristics ring true when she gets herself to safety in the finale, knowing that she’s being hunted by the city’s conspirators and knowing Ray won’t live to join her. She turns over the corruption evidence to a partner, washes herself of the investigation, and starts over yet again (with Ray’s child in tow).

“We deserve a better world,” she says, contrasting the season’s theme.

As the second season wraps up, we’re left not knowing whether or not Ani’s evidence was made public, whether or not those involved in the corruption and crime are brought to justice, or if things will change in Vinci. What we’re left with is the notion that the crime keeps cycling, we see new people replacing the old, and get the impression the corruption can’t be stopped. We’re left with several dead protagonists and one in hiding, while the same old Vinci wheels of malfeasance keep turning. Evidence from the series leads to the assumption that information is going to disappear or otherwise be quieted one way or another.

So as the audience, what’s the world we deserve?

Clearly, the male protagonists in True Detective’s second season lived and died by the tagline. They designed their own fates and expired beneath them. But on a larger scale, the takeaway from the season is as nihilistic as the story it told - and it seems Nic Pizzolatto doesn’t think we, the audience, deserve anything more.