True Detective

[domino harvey]

Did anyone notice that the old woman the detectives talk to about the paint job was played by none other than Terry Moore? Pretty neat. I don't think for a second that the ending is a cop-out or unearned-- that such a pessimistic show ends with something approaching optimism is unexpected but not inappropriate. I mean, did anyone think both detectives would escape with their lives from this whole ordeal? I found the ending quite moving and appropriate to the whole endeavor's literary parallels. This was a great novel and we all can't wait for the author(s)' next work

[mfunk9786]

Funny you say that, Domino, I called it a "great novel" while discussing with LQ right after it ended. Great minds, or something. But is the ending really all that optimistic? People keep saying today that a man speaking in front of a nearly entirely black sky about how the white is winning, and realizing as the viewer that so many loose ends with regards to the extent of this conspiracy and the other people in the video, etc have not been tied up is hardly optimistic in my view. I was pretty shaken by the idea that the victory that was achieved by Marty and Rust was [possibly, as we'll never see what they do after this] as far as they could get in eliminating the menace that is ultimately their life's work.

[warren oates]

For me the art of crafting authentic change in longer character arcs is all about putting the characters on a path that leads them to a personal revelation that they could not have had otherwise. Marty's completion of his duty, reunion with his family (however fraught and tentative) and mended friendship with Cohle (ditto the fraught and tentative) wasn't as surprising to me but it was more believable -- especially as the necessary result of all that had come before. I think that part of the reason that Cohle's change of tune feels so deus ex machina arbitrary to me is because it sort of is. If all that was required to alter Cohle's worldview was being near death and having that extremely common subjective experience of reunion, it could just as easily have happened to him getting in a car accident or falling off his Alaskan fishing boat. Whereas the ever so slightly different Marty we meet in the show's final moment could not have been so without all of the experiences that lead him to it.

[DarkImbecile]

I think it's being a little disingenuous to describe Cohle's ending as a "slight acknowledge of the possibility of optimism." He's just had a transcendent experience that reversed his prior conviction that this life means nothing and that there is no next one. And he surely is intended to mean what he says in that night sky debate (not a problem that he borrowed it from Moore, more of a problem that it doesn't feel authentically earned in this story).

Funny you say that, Domino, I called it a "great novel" while discussing with LQ right after it ended. Great minds, or something. But is the ending really all that optimistic? People keep saying today that a man speaking in front of a nearly entirely black sky about how the white is winning, and realizing as the viewer that so many loose ends with regards to the extent of this conspiracy and the other people in the video, etc have not been tied up is hardly optimistic in my view. I was pretty shaken by the idea that the victory that was achieved by Marty and Rust was [possibly, as we'll never see what they do after this] as far as they could get in eliminating the menace that is ultimately their life's work.

The show is all about stories: the way they're told, why we tell them, who we tell them to, and why we believe them. These range from the lies Hart tells himself to the deranged sickness of the Carcosa believers to the way Cohle tries to process all the shit life has thrown at him. The shift in his character doesn't look to me like one from complete pessimism to complete optimism, but like someone who has decided to interpret one more tiny star winking into existence in a vast pool of blackness not as a futile and pointless waste but as a hard-won step of progress. He might be even more painfully aware of the world's indifferent cruelty after the events in the last episode, but he's chosen to look at them a little differently, to tell himself a different story for a change.

That's how I read it, anyway, and it struck the right balance for me between moving the character forward in a potentially hopeful direction while keeping him believably grounded by his experiences.

[domino harvey]

A peek ahead at Season Two:

Can you tell me anything at all about season 2?

Nic Pizzolatto: Okay. This is really early, but I'll tell you (it's about) hard women, bad men and the secret occult history of the United States transportation system.

[feihong]

Both detectives seemed way too cute and sympathetic at the end of the show, I think. And after spending all of the last episode menaced by horrific inbred giants, it made me happy to see them make it out of the malevolent murder maze.

The show was only just this side of cliche from the very start, but the stylistic bravura of the middle portion made it seem more involved and interesting than standard detective-vs.-serial killer stories. When the whole thing ends up as a standard detective-vs.-serial killer story, it isn't really that surprising. But it is disappointing, in that the show seemed to be building into something more than just the detectives doing good work, getting the band back together again, and stopping the monstrous serial killer in his creepy, oversized tracks. The morals and viewpoints of the people of the region seemed to matter. The bureaucracy of the police and politicians and religious groups seemed important. The gloom of life in the region seemed to matter. But this last episode strips all of that away, and I wish it hadn't done so. The detectives really do seem to reach the "truth" at the end--solving the mystery, getting validation from the people in their pasts, and getting over all the freakiness of this last episode. It doesn't quite seem fair, when we had been conditioned so to think of the entire world around them as unpredictable and unknowable. And the story pushed us so far into believing that Rust was very unbalanced--probably insane--that to see him as sensible and emotionally connected at the end of the story seemed insincere.

The weirdest part of the ending episode for me was when the camera lingered over the sites of the murders, the places the kidnapped children were held, the places from which they were taken. What was that part all about? Was it some gloomy valedictory, with the detectives having spoken for the dead and righted this wrong? It almost seemed like a family album--remembering all the "good times" of the show. "Oh, remember where we found that body? Under that beautiful tree?" Did they just have some pretty shots and an extra minute to fill?

I guess ultimately what bothered me the most was that this show really didn't seem to be about a serial killer, and then this last episode was almost exclusively about a serial killer--to the extent that the detectives ultimately act like the detectives in a serial killer movie, weeping at the terrible humanity of it all. It did seem a subtle assassination of the way these characters had been built up. These detectives weren't supposed to have resolutions and epiphanies that justified their wayward sense of themselves. They were on destructive character arcs, like existential heroes of the darkest noir pictures--so driven that they move past the conventions of their society. So at the end, when the detectives are welcomed back into their society with open arms, it seems weird that their values become suddenly so conventional.

[mistakaninja]

So, A Decommissioned Streetcar Named Jake Gittes.

[warren oates]

The weirdest part of the ending episode for me was when the camera lingered over the sites of the murders, the places the kidnapped children were held, the places from which they were taken. What was that part all about? Was it some gloomy valedictory, with the detectives having spoken for the dead and righted this wrong? It almost seemed like a family album--remembering all the "good times" of the show. "Oh, remember where we found that body? Under that beautiful tree?" Did they just have some pretty shots and an extra minute to fill?

For me this was a failed attempt to create some kind of generally tragic feeling about all that had come to pass in these places. It reminded me of the visuals at the end of Antonioni's L'eclisse or the riff on that in Linklater's Before Sunrise. I appreciate the idea and its appearance in a different context, but it didn't work for me either.

I guess ultimately what bothered me the most was that this show really didn't seem to be about a serial killer, and then this last episode was almost exclusively about a serial killer--to the extent that the detectives ultimately act like the detectives in a serial killer movie, weeping at the terrible humanity of it all. It did seem a subtle assassination of the way these characters had been built up. These detectives weren't supposed to have resolutions and epiphanies that justified their wayward sense of themselves. They were on destructive character arcs, like existential heroes of the darkest noir pictures--so driven that they move past the conventions of their society. So at the end, when the detectives are welcomed back into their society with open arms, it seems weird that their values become suddenly so conventional.

This is where I feel like having a few more writers to kick around the story with might have helped. Without downgrading any of the achievement of those first five episodes or denying how much I enjoyed them, I will say that it's much easier to hook an audience when you're setting up your story and asking so many questions. Easier also in a genre like this one, which by its very nature permits if not demands more mystery for longer than many other story types. Once the answers come due, though, that's what really separates the good from the great. It does seem like there were other ways things could have gone. I keep thinking of the end of Breaking Bad, how it seemed impossible to resolve both Walt's and Hank's arcs without denying for at least one of them the most honest and satisfying outcome. How Gilligan and his writers found a no b.s. way to both allow

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Hank to legitimately arrest Walt, to cuff him and read him his rights, while at the same time, only moments later, making Walt responsible for Hank's murder.

[Mr Sausage]

The weirdest part of the ending episode for me was when the camera lingered over the sites of the murders, the places the kidnapped children were held, the places from which they were taken. What was that part all about? Was it some gloomy valedictory, with the detectives having spoken for the dead and righted this wrong? It almost seemed like a family album--remembering all the "good times" of the show. "Oh, remember where we found that body? Under that beautiful tree?" Did they just have some pretty shots and an extra minute to fill?

It's not the lingering that's the point but how the camera moves between them, connecting each part and creating a summary of the webs that link the landscape together (and not too different from the effect in the beginning of the episode when the movement of the camera connects the killer's house with the detectives on the boat). Also, considering the music and the lighting I don't see how you could take this as a "good times." It seemed more like a haunting: these events connecting what seem like random pieces of landscape and giving them a subterranean significance.

These detectives weren't supposed to have resolutions and epiphanies that justified their wayward sense of themselves.

According to whom? According to the writer, he had their emotional resolution planned from the beginning.

The morals and viewpoints of the people of the region seemed to matter. The bureaucracy of the police and politicians and religious groups seemed important. The gloom of life in the region seemed to matter. But this last episode strips all of that away, and I wish it hadn't done so. The detectives really do seem to reach the "truth" at the end--solving the mystery, getting validation from the people in their pasts, and getting over all the freakiness of this last episode. It doesn't quite seem fair, when we had been conditioned so to think of the entire world around them as unpredictable and unknowable.

They solve it definitively in a local sense (get the main killer); they confirm, but do not solve it in the wider sense (cultish killings, coverups, ect.). The 'gloom of life' continues to matter in that the perversion in the region that produced the killer is made manifest in him (having the father who scarred him tied to the bed, the weird stuff with the sister, the buried catacombs under the landscape). The bureaucracy continues to assert itself when the television declares that this or that government group (I forget which) confirms there is no link between the Tuttle family and the Childress family, which we know is untrue and which causes Rust to turn off the tv and stare bitterly out the window. But this recedes as the episode ends since it was always about our two detectives, the wider references having an effect on them but not being the point.

We'll have to disagree on being conditioned to find the world unpredictable and unknowable, considering how often circularity and repetition come up, and considering that any work about a conspiracy always has two options present: it is made comprehensible, it is not made comprehensible; and that any conspiracy movie/show that knows what it's doing rides an ambiguous line between the two before falling on one side or the other.

The show's approach to narrative is not: the presence of different potential narratives makes meaning impossible (negation), but that the presence of different potential narratives makes the choice between them important, some narratives having a greater personal value than others. It's not a deconstructionist work; it finds value in narrative as narrative (rather than in the constant deferral of meaning implied by narratives)

And the story pushed us so far into believing that Rust was very unbalanced--probably insane--that to see him as sensible and emotionally connected at the end of the story seemed insincere.

Rust's line in ep. 7, that he needs to finish this in order to start on a new path ought to have prepared you for his change. Indeed, looking back, quite a lot of the ending was prepared for. Evidently it was not the resolution people wanted, but like domino I appreciated the unexpectedness of the ending. I did not think it would find an optimism in everything that happens, but I see completely how it was building there. The series is not a rise and fall like we expected from the tone: it was a fall and rise, a descent through hell and out the other end. Just like the archetypal stories the series always references. These are true detectives rather than false. So they get resolution rather than dissolution, as stories about heroes tend to.

But it is disappointing, in that the show seemed to be building into something more than just the detectives doing good work, getting the band back together again, and stopping the monstrous serial killer in his creepy, oversized tracks.

It is. Just structurally you can see how little it was about finding serial killers: they save all of it for the first half of the last episode. That's a small space of time. The reverberations of it continue to be the real issue even in the last episode, with so much time given over to its aftermath. Finding and killing the serial killer is not the structural close of the episode but a catalyst for the important final moments of and between the two men.

[mfunk9786]

Plus, the killer they caught was the son [and grandson] of the ringleader(s) of this thing, presumably abused his entire life along with his sister (the dialogue during the 'sex' scene pretty much cemented that). He was more beaten down and brainwashed and mentally disturbed than evil, and far too much a victim of his circumstances and diminished facilities to be the solo, or 'main' serial killer here. More of an errand boy for more powerful people who involved themselves in these ritualistic killings in one way or another and then used their positions to cover them up.

[warren oates]

You know, in my scramble to process a reaction to the episode and the series, I flat out forgot the biggest laugh of the night for me. Cohle says, "We're really all just sentient meat..." He finishes his thought. There's a pause as Marty pulls the car into park. Then Marty asks: "What's scented meat?" And never does get his answer.

[Anhedionisiac]

Did anyone notice that the old woman the detectives talk to about the paint job was played by none other than Terry Moore?

I did! That was indeed neat. But, to be honest, the casting that floored me was Ann Dowd as Errol's half-sister/lover. She was completely unrecognizable to my eyes and when the credits came and I realized it was the same lady from Compliance, my mind was blown.

[flyonthewall2983]

You know, in my scramble to process a reaction to the episode and the series, I flat out forgot the biggest laugh of the night for me. Cohle says, "We're really all just sentient meat..." He finishes his thought. There's a pause as Marty pulls the car into park. Then Marty asks: "What's scented meat?" And never does get his answer.

I missed that. Some of the dialogue throughout the show comes across my ears as jumbled and unfortunately my TV doesn't have closed captioning.

[flyonthewall2983]

Plus, the killer they caught was the son [and grandson] of the ringleader(s) of this thing, presumably abused his entire life along with his sister (the dialogue during the 'sex' scene pretty much cemented that). He was more beaten down and brainwashed and mentally disturbed than evil, and far too much a victim of his circumstances and diminished facilities to be the solo, or 'main' serial killer here. More of an errand boy for more powerful people who involved themselves in these ritualistic killings in one way or another and then used their positions to cover them up.

That's what makes the ending a little more sad for me. Rust is going to likely spend the rest of his life in regret that he only really just chipped away at what was left of the iceberg while the rest had melted away. That he knew immediately that the guy was the groundskeeper he spoke to in '95 while looking for LeDoux. It's these things that will stay with him and likely not move onto something else, while becoming seen as more paranoid trying to bring the Senator down. I hope that isn't the case and that he does move onto something else.

[oh yeah]

I have the bad habit of kind of half-watching episodes (or films) the first time around, only to pick up on even fairly rudimentary details the second time around. I still can enjoy and appreciate the finer aspects of it, but I feel like I'm not getting as much out of it as the people who are already analyzing every second after one viewing. With all that said, I have been disappointed by the final two episodes of True Detective (for the record, the first three are the only ones I've re-watched so far). It felt like in the seventh episode, everything sped up and we were uncharacteristically fed a mountain of clunky exposition. Something about the finale's wrap-up feels so pat and formulaic; I feel like I've seen countless scenes like the climactic showdown/fight in the finale ep, whereas the first 5 or even 6 episodes had something fresh and intriguing to the atmosphere I couldn't quite pin down. I'll be re-watching the whole season sometime for sure, and then I'll be much better-equipped to debate or critique further, but at the moment it just feels like Pizzolatto is much better at setup than payoff.

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My biggest cringe-worthy moment was the creep unsubtly staring at schoolkids like they're fresh meat, yet somehow retaining his job and blending right into the scenery of course. The other assorted hillbillies felt third-rate and cliche'd, too: too formulaic to scare.

[flyonthewall2983]

Blu-ray hits June 10th

Two Audio Commentaries: Featuring series creator/executive producer/writer Nic Pizzolatto, composer T Bone Burnett and Executive Producer Scott Stephens
Making True Detective: A behind-the-scenes look at production on the hit series, featuring interviews with cast and crew and including never-before-seen footage from Episode 4.
A Conversation with Nic Pizzolatto and T Bone Burnett: An in-depth discussion with the series writer/creator/executive producer and the legendary composer on both the series and the pivotal role music played in the show's development.
Inside the Episode: Series creator/executive producer/writer Nic Pizzolatto and director Cary Joji Fukunaga discuss character development and offer insights into each episode of the series.
Up Close with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson: Exclusive interviews with the stars.
Deleted Scenes: Never-before-seen footage from the series

[Roger Ryan]

Very pleased to see so much attention paid to T-Bone Burnett in the extras. Given that he has tended to neglect his own compositional work in favor of producing others over the past twenty years, I found his score for TRUE DETECTIVE to be a very welcome creative return, one that perfectly complimented and enhanced the tone of the show.

[domino harvey]

In a surprising move, HBO has decided to run the show in Emmy competition for Drama rather than Miniseries, where its win was more assured

[mfunk9786]

What a dogfight this'll be with the final season of Breaking Bad. Glad to see that Orange is the New Black is in the running as a comedy, it'll have a much better chance in that field.

[Mr Sausage]

Just remembered that this is not the first time McConaughey and Harrelson have acted together. Bewildering to compare their careers past and current.

[flyonthewall2983]

I really hope this leads to a renaissance period for Woody like the past year or so has been for Matthew. He's been riding a bit of a good wave since things like A Scanner Darkly and especially No Country For Old Men but it's mostly been in memorable supporting roles.

[pzadvance]

Just remembered that this is not the first time McConaughey and Harrelson have acted together. Bewildering to compare their careers past and current.

Lest we forget this even more recent collaboration...

[domino harvey]

Jessica Chastain allegedly offered role in second season

[pzadvance]

Jessica Chastain allegedly offered role in second season

Sadly, swiftly debunked.

[flyonthewall2983]

Spoiler alert

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2nd season is going to suck