As for the rest of you, come take a journey with me...
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| Courtesy of HBO |
Season 2 of True Detective was one of the most highly anticipated television shows in recent memory. There was so much speculation about who the cast would be as they would have a lot to live up to; McConaughey and Harrelson played the lead role so very well in Season 1. The cast was announced: Vince Vaughn, Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams on the marquee with Taylor Kitsch rounding out the main quartet (four detectives?). Nope, three with Vaughn playing the role of a gangster.
The people who argued initially that the series diverted too much from the first season as their reason for complaints early on failed to understand what creator and lead writer Nic Pizzolatto was going for and had said from the beginning: season 2 was not season 1. And you wouldn't want it to be. The premise wasn't that this entire series would take place in the Bayou with crazed hillbilly madmen killing people; that would get boring.
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| Courtesy of HBO |
But there is a reality to the fact that this season was much more like a procedural cop show (Law & Order, NCIS, et al) than the inventive and catch you off guard show we'd seen before.
Southern California was a much more traditional setting - big-city life has its standard tropes, many of which were here. There was definitely an interesting mystery involved. In the first episode a major player within the seedy government of Vinci, CA is murdered by an unknown assailant. His body is found by an off-duty highway patrolman (Taylor Kitsch) who happened to have been recently suspended pending allegations of propositioning a woman he had pulled over. The state wants a special investigator appointed (McAdams) and the local cops want to make sure they're involved (since the town is as crooked as an Allan Wrench) and they assign their own detective (Farrell). Vaughn is involved on two fronts: he had business dealings with the deceased wherein about five million dollars of his goes missing (embezzled most likely) and he has his hooks in Farrell due to a prior dealing years back.
So that's the set-up: three cops from different divisions all looking to solve a murder of a city employee from some tiny little town in California...so tiny that their only residents are businesses - there's no real population.
Along the way there's a number of twists and turns. Kitsch has homosexual undertones within his military history. McAdams has a fucked up past where she was lured away from the hippie colony she was raised in by a creep who held her and molested her for four days before returning her. Farrell's young wife was raped and through Vaughn he's given the name of the attacker, whom he murders. And Vaughn is a self-made gangster who rose through the ranks to be the top of the food chain...but as is so common in that world the guy at the top of the hill is just the easiest to knock off because he has the least amount of ground to stand on.
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| Courtesy of HBO |
There are definitely interesting parts of the story along the way. But in a lot of ways there's too much. There's side-stories that either never pay off or when they do payoff it feels like a letdown. By the final episode the characters who tie everything together, the ones who actually killed the city worker which set all the other cogs in motion, were people who had been randomly mentioned a couple of times a few episodes back so instead of tying the story together it just left you thinking: wait, why did they kill this guy instead of any of the other people who were involved in what had happened to them? It's akin to a scooby doo episode when all along you think the lighthouse keeper is the guy doing all the weird stuff and it turns out to be old Mr. Olsen who owns the hardware store in a rubber mask.
Then there's the dialogue...it's like watching a David Lynch movie. People say things, they talk and I literally had no idea what was happening. Several times, EACH EPISODE, I had a distinct and specific thought of, "who actually talks this way, is this a way people talk and I just don't know it?".
There's a part of me that thinks Pizzolatto felt the pressure of living up to Season 1 and didn't really know how to make it happen. And there's another part of me that thinks that this is just what Pizzolatto was going for. He wanted to move in a dramatically different direction but stay within the same general world of law enforcement.
Though the ratings definitely took a hit from the prior season it seems that Season 3 is most likely to occur. I will be curious if HBO requires Pizzolatto to give up some of his writing power and let others take the reins for some or all of the episodes with him fading back into more of a Producer role.
In the end I had several major problems with how the season ended as the last two episodes played out. First, Kitsch's character is murdered in a way that makes NO SENSE. He's ushered into an underground tunnel and manages to escape from the five guys with guns but as he surfaces through a totally random doorway (not the door he went in) a Vinci officer is waiting and kills him as he walks away. There is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY this makes sense. First, it presumes that the guy knew he was going to escape from the other group AND it presumes that he knew exactly which of the dozens of doors Kitsch could have come out of. This is one of those epic fail moments for the series. It's like: we need this guy to die but we want him to have that hero moment and make you think he's going to make it only to kill him in the most annoying way possible.
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| Courtesy of HBO |
Second, Vaughn's death in the desert...he probably would have made it, not easily and definitely could have died from exposure but at least he'd have had a chance...but he makes a really dumb fucking move and attacks one of the guys in the crew that dragged him out there after they'd decided to let him live. And why does he attack? Because the guy wants his suit. WHAT? Do they think that anything they've shown us of this character before would justify this act of idiocy? It doesn't. Not even close.
Third, Farrell's death. He decides it's important that he see his son one more time before making the run to Venezuela...ok, I'm willing to admit that my thoughts here are a bit skewed by the fact that I fail to comprehend the desire and want of children who, in reality, are nothing but a parasite and then a leech on the existence of a family unit but the fact that he takes a side-trip to the one place they could actually spot him, the ONLY place that would be as stupid to go to as his own home...and he goes there. DUDE YOU JUST STOLE MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS just send him a fucking plane ticket to come visit for fuck's sake.
If Season 3 happens I will watch it with cautious optimism but put away and true hope or expectation of quality. For now, I sit in wait of Season 6 of Game of Thrones...
Tb
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