b) The central villain/Yellow King won’t be either of the show’s principal characters, Detectives Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) or Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson).

c) The ending will be something for which the seeds have been carefully sown, not some out-of-left-field twist. (Sorry, fans of the Vietnamese Restaurant Owner Theory.) As such, the murders will indeed be part of a religiously inflected ceremony drawing on the tradition of the Courir de Mardi Gras, and the ceremony will involve rape and/or torture, probably perpetrated by five men. (More on this in a moment.) The killers will be members of some cabal of well-connected men that includes the late Billy Lee Tuttle and other members of his family and the related Childress clan. Also involved (and probably a Childress) will be the Scarred Giant / Green-Eared Spaghetti Monster, who I think we can safely assume is Errol the Lawnmower Man, first seen in episode three and featured more prominently at the close of episode seven.

Within these general guidelines, there are, I think, several things to look for. The clearest of these is the involvement, at some point in unfolding narrative, of the Hart family—and specifically of elder daughter Audrey, who appears to have been victimized in some way in the past. Yes, this is the moment for commenters to our True Detective roundtable to take a victory lap: I used to be a skeptic of this theory, but now that I’ve been won over I possess the zeal of the converted. I count at least eight reasons to believe that something awful happened to Audrey as a young girl:

1) The five men. Viewers will inevitably recall the foreboding moment in episode two when Audrey and her sister are called to dinner and Dad gets a view of their obscene doll diorama:

It’s an image that’s echoed multiple times throughout the series, specifically, in the photograph of victim Dora Lange surrounded by five horsemen:

…the videotape of victim Marie Fontenot being held down as five animal-masked men approach her:

…and Rust Cohle’s own tableaux of Lone Star tin men, each of whom has a five-pointed star for a face:

2) The black stars. “Strange is the night where black stars rise” reads a line in The King in Yellow, the imaginary play that is central to the eponymous 1895 story collection by Robert W. Chambers. True Detective draws a great deal of its iconography from Chambers’s work, including the Yellow King, the land of Carcosa, and the recurring black stars. We first see all three in Dora Lange’s notebook:

In episode five, we see that Reggie Ledoux has a black star tattooed on his shoulder; among his last words are “the black stars rise”:

At the end of the same episode, as Rust is searching the hurricane-ravaged ruin of the Tuttle-sponsored Light of the Way school, he finds another in a series of diabolical twig sculptures. As he examines it, the camera pulls back to show two black stars on the school’s shattered window:

The black stars are finally connected to Audrey when Marty visits his long-since-divorced wife Maggie in episode seven, and the camera pans across the mantle to glimpse, side by side in a single frame, a photo of their daughter and one of her works of art:

(Stars feature in a couple of other scenes from the show as well, though their meaning—if any—is tougher to discern. Dora Lange’s friend, Carla, had black star tattoos on her neck, though there’s been no sign that she was involved in the conspiracy. Also, the Harts’ younger daughter, Maisie, has two stars briefly visible on the door of her bedroom as her sister is being punished for her sexual involvement with two older boys.)