Think of what Wendell Pierce’s Bunk Moreland told McNulty, more than once: “You’re no good for people.” These are figures tortured by the fact that all the good they do - catch a bad guy, lock him up, get some drugs off the street, solve a murder - can’t undo the bad that has already been done. There are so many sad detectives, from Matthew Rhys’s Perry Mason to Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle to Olivia Colman’s Ellie Miller to Morgan Freeman’s William Somerset to Dominic West’s Jimmy McNulty. I bring up Sisyphus not just because this fourth episode of Mare of Easttown is titled “Poor Sisyphus,” but because this mythical figure, and the sort of existential inevitability he represents, comes up often in pop culture about detectives. Finding beauty in tedium might be the only way to keep oneself sane. One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” Camus wrote. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.

“Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. His god was that boulder, his existence was pushing it upward, and his purpose was chasing after it whenever it rolled down, and starting his task again. With his focus only on the task at hand, Camus theorized, Sisyphus had no time for the gods, no time for larger questions about his own existence, no theories about the purpose of life. In his 1942 essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” philosopher Albert Camus wrote of Sisyphus’s eternal, cyclical task of pushing a boulder up a mountain, watching it roll down, and then starting again, with a kind of resigned, begrudging acceptance.

Sisyphus cast