As is so often the case on crime shows, the two partners in “True Detective” followed a hunch and went straight into the killer’s lair on their own, without backup. They had each other’s backs.

The HBO series “True Detective” ended its first season Sunday with at least one mystery cleared up: This moody, self-consciously wordy and obscurantist thriller was at heart a buddy act, somewhere between “The French Connection” and “Lethal Weapon 4.”

Behind all the Spanish moss, devil worship and ontological mystique that the show’s creator, Nic Pizzolatto, brought to the script, the eight-part series focused on the on-again, off-again bromance of Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey).

And that’s what made the series so polarizing. Many loved the lavish, tender attention to the clashing sensibilities — and declamations — of two drawling Southern archetypes. (It helped that the actors were so good.) Others were preoccupied by what went missing on “True Detective.”

The final episode found time for one last cosmic — and comic — miscommunication between partners. As they drove through a bleak, rundown Louisiana landscape, Cohle cryptically referred to “sentient meat” and once again lectured his partner on the meaninglessness of life. “However illusory our identities are, we craft those identities by making value judgments. Everybody judges, all the time. Now, you got a problem with that, you’re living wrong.”

Hart has only one question: “What’s scented meat?”

Women were peripheral; even Hart’s wife, Maggie, so touchingly played by Michelle Monaghan, was a sad-eyed plot device to drive a wedge between the two men.