I’ve been thinking about the gap between the Hank we hear about before Cole’s death (a highly respected, decorated detective) and the Hank we meet in 2038.
I don’t think those three years necessarily have to be imagined as one uninterrupted period in which he was completely incapable of doing his job. People can remain very competent in one part of their life while everything else is falling apart. In fact, work may have been one of the things that kept Hank functioning for a while.
The game doesn't tell us exactly what happened during those three years, so this is only one possible trajectory that seems plausible to me.
So, the first year may actually have been the period when Hank still functioned best professionally. He could have taken some leave immediately after Cole’s death, but I can also imagine him returning to work relatively early. Going home would mean being surrounded by memories, while at work, he could still be Lieutenant Anderson: someone with a role, a routine, and problems he knew how to solve. Work would not have meant that he was healing. It may simply have given his grief somewhere to hide. Solving other people’s tragedies is also very different from facing the one tragedy he could neither solve nor undo.
He could have stayed late, volunteered for difficult cases, thrown himself into investigations, or become more reckless about his own safety... So yeah, work could simply have been another way of avoiding everything waiting for him outside the precinct. The drinking may already have been getting worse during this period, but that doesn't necessarily mean his investigative ability disappeared at the same speed.
For a while, grief and competence could have existed side by side.
By the second year, the gap between Hank and everyone around him may have become much more visible. For other people, Cole’s death would increasingly belong to the past. For Hank, it would not. The things that helped him function during the first year might stop working as well. Work would no longer be enough to numb him. Drinking could become more habitual. He might isolate himself more, stop caring about office politics, become less patient with authority, and lose more of the discipline he once had.
That still wouldn't make him professionally useless. He could miss a meeting and notice something everyone else missed at a crime scene. Neglect paperwork yet remain excellent at reading suspects. His decline may have been uneven rather than absolute. Coworkers may sometimes have covered a call, moved a meeting, or finished some routine task for him. That is plausible in almost any workplace.
By the final year, work may no longer have been saving Hank at all.
It may simply have been the last structure left in his life, the thing that still forced him to get out of bed, show up somewhere, and remain connected to other people whether he wanted to or not.
This is the Hank we begin to recognize from 2038: resistant to orders, drinking heavily, exhausted, and increasingly indifferent to what happens to him. But his professional instincts are still there. Fowler doesn't coddle him or shield him from responsibility. He argues with him, shouts at him, orders him back to work, and gives him a difficult investigation. That suggests serious frustration with Hank, but also continued belief that Hank can still do the job.
Also, the game never confirms whether Hank moved after Cole’s death, so this is purely a headcanon. But I can easily imagine that he did. The house we see in 2038 feels like a place someone has retreated into rather than a home built around a family life. Maybe staying in the old house became unbearable. Maybe moving was one of the few concrete things he could control after everything else had already happened. Again, nothing in canon confirms this. I just find it plausible.
And then there's a question... Why wasn’t he fired? We don't know his personnel history. There may have been warnings, reduced duties, treatment attempts, or repeated last chances. He also had years of experience and may still have produced results despite becoming unreliable in other ways. Hank also has not become universally hated or completely isolated at work. Ben is still his friend. Hank hasn't lost every relationship at the precinct, and the game doesn't present him as someone universally hated by his coworkers. Whatever happened during those three years, it clearly was not one simple, total collapse.
But this is another area where canon leaves the details open.
So to me, the most plausible version is not that Hank either worked perfectly or did nothing for three years. It is that he remained a talented investigator while gradually losing his discipline, self-preservation, and belief that his own life had a future.
Some parts of him could have broken much faster than others. And that makes the Hank we meet in 2038 more interesting to me: not a man whose professional ability simply vanished the moment tragedy happened, but someone who kept functioning for a long time in increasingly damaged ways until even the things that once kept him moving were no longer enough.
So, I find that possibility far more human than imagining that grief simply erased every part of his professional ability all at once.
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