Concerning Disappointment With True Detective

 

DO NOT READ THE FOLLOWING if you haven't already watched True Detective Season One right through.

**SERIOUS SPOILERS**

I really enjoyed this this show. If you make it to the end of this post you may not think so, but I really did. For the first 3 episodes I thought True Detective was the best thing since sliced bread. I was willing to excuse the poor female characterisation and problems with the treatment of the rape, paedophilia and murder tropes as a matter of course – this was never going to be a deconstructionism or a revisionist exercise. Then Rust's skill set starts to become a little too broad, a little too convenient to fit the demands of the plotting, taking the dramatic edge of the character. Due to the acting and craftpersonship, however, we’re still basically walking on water. 

Then episode 6. This was always going to be a tough one. There can be no help from “The What?” here as the two time lines converge and all the basic plot points for this episode have been clearly telegraphed. All that remains is “The How”. Which the creators largely pull off, because the unfolding is edgy without slipping too far into melodrama. There is a nice take on the "Detective sleeps with his partner's wife" trope. A bit more multiplicity in “The Wife”^TM motives may have breathed more life into her character. But see above.

Then episode 7. It’s weak. O.K., fair enough. We are in the present now, the fun and games of juxtaposing unreliable narrators with "reality" are over. There has to be a certain amount of setup necessary to carry us to the conclusion. And it's satisfying seeing Rust and Marty reuniting. But for the first time, I’m feeling concerned and surprised at my concern. What can the creators do at this stage to wrap up this so far transcendent T.V experience in a satisfying way? Hmmm. Perhaps nothing.  Are the procedural components all the show has left to offer? These were never the show's strong points for me. And if so, by the end of the episode they haven’t left themselves a lot to play with. But the show has excelled at making the tried and true feel fresh, and cramming content into episodes without seeming too forced, so perhaps….  Hey, if the finale is great, episode 7 will be wholly redeemed.  A pause to draw breath, a calm before the storm, etc. etc.

Then episode 8.  Drawn out, disjointed, stuffed full of a succession of bottom of the barrel tropes that the show has thus far to its credit avoided, capped with the most undeserved melodramatic payoff since Seven. In this context episode 7 is dragged down even further and the pair seem like a tuxedo-clad version of the two part finale from Season 10 of CSI, original flavour. What the fuck just happened?

Some tropes are weak because they’ve been overused. With care you can put the shine back on them. Some are weak because the behaviours involved are contextually nonsensical outside of severe intellectual impairment. Great care must be taken with these tropes – polishing such shit with pretty camera shots and great acting only succeeds in, well, getting your fingers covered in shit. To get mileage out of them you have subvert them, perhaps by artfully flinging them at the wall. True Detective takes itself too seriously for that to work, even had it tried. If character interaction is (deservedly) the crux of your tale and you have no desire to come up with innovative procedural elements, then why not take the next step and have the courage to jettison them completely?

Others have systematically broken down the disappointing plot and story elements, so most of own issues have already been canvased. Never fear, it won’t hold me back from generating my own list of fuck ups in the way things were concluded. I’ll furnish it at the end as a kind of appendix. But first I have a few other things to note:

I wasn’t demanding twists or the tying of loose ends. After two and half decades of romance with audio-visual narratives, (chiefly movies to begin) the twists would have to be pretty fucking impossibly spectacular to wow me anyway. And loose ends are marvellous.  I prefer it when some things are left understated and ill-formed. It’s what my imagination is for. It facilitates my elevation from a simple consumer of spectacle to a participant, a co-creating viewer, and hence increases my investment.

I wasn’t demanding dark.  Personal redemption doesn’t have to be saccharine and I could see one way or another it was on the cards. Hell I even loved the Xmas special ending of the original The Office, and that was really, really fluffy.

I wasn’t demanding anything particularly novel thematically. Here I invoke another fine procedural, The Wire. The show, in its 5^th and final season, became fat and more than a little silly.  A large portion of its parting moment is a rumination on the old chestnut “...the more things change, the more they stay the same”  but it was done in such a way that this dead horse stretched its legs and galloped stylishly. The experience was both affirming and involved conformational change.

And for me this was what True Detective had going for it in the first place… So, why didn’t  its own reductionist synthesis, perhaps: “…any gain in the war against darkness is a victory”, fly? I mean it could have. As of episode 6 I had assumed it would. For some of you it probably did. But for me? Not so much. Even if it were possible to excuse the abrupt nosedive into lazy storytelling (which it isn’t), all the acting chops and cinematographic brilliance in the world couldn’t save the show from its apparent emotional bankruptcy. I never felt like the characters earned their personal redemption in spite of a 17 year journey through the heart of darkness because while I could see it on paper, I never felt like these transformations were particularly coupled to the characters’ ordeal.

A final, tenuously connected aside: In some shows (you know the ones?) especially late in their runs when they are dependent on current issue of the week episodes, there are those uncomfortable moments when some unconventional point of view on a socio-political topic is raised, usually in an incredibly forced way, for the sole reason of another character, aligned to our gaze and the socio-politics of the show creators, to summarily slap it down from a perceived position of authority. Well I enjoyed greatly that Rust’s nihilism was presented as an alternative, coherent, albeit bleak world view worthy of consideration. At the end to find its purpose was to allow for character development through an overly melodramatic reversal was … disappointing, to say the least. Any content therin was devalued and dismissed in the revelation it was all a rogue grief–coping mechanism. That the world view was a coherent philosophical position ends up being neither here nor there. Any vaguely intelligible psychobabble along the lines of Hannibal’s (frequent) weaker moments [mostly season 1] would have sufficed.

My List:

1.  Artful hicksploitation is still hicksploitaion. 
2. The decaying heart of ruling class? For this to work you need more coupling of the body and its decay within the diegesis, otherwise: well crafted window dressing (see also: the use of nihilistic philosophy). Instead we actually get the opposite – marginalisation and partitioning of these two elements, which is good for heightening... the hicksploitation aesthetic. 
3. If the Evil Rich Dudes were willing to kill a high profile public figure for something that someone may connect them to via a theft they made sure nobody knew about, why not just do away with a degenerate fuck who is seriously threatening your shit with publicly staged ritualised sex crimes? Remove a suspect mole, but leave the obviously cancerous tumour be? Huh? 
4. Open your final procedural components by employing a dead end narrative stall drowning in overwrought self-importance and mild Deus ex machina which calls to mind the finale of a recent beloved series where the moment was sillier, less plausible but still far better crafted. 
5. Green ears = green house paint from 17 years ago. O.K. I didn’t mind this too much, it had to be something after all. But it could have been a bit more interesting. Or plausible. 
6. Oh great, Papania is back - to emphatically restate a sceptical position we’ve already heard him say, more than once, which no longer has any associated mystery element to make it dramatic, serving to pad out and dramatically justify a scene that’s required purely for plot mechanics. 
7.  O.K here we go, they start to come thick and fast. Detectives who have travelled and worked in remote Louisiana for over a decade succumb to “no cell reception”.  As a plot mechanic its particularly egregious because it’s so unnecessary – they are right out the back of beyond it would still take long enough for backup to arrive that shit could go down. And in addition it creates the need for the show’s mother of all handwaving moments (see: 15). For. No. Reason.
8. Detectives split up and charge off alone into extremely threatening environments. Hence rendering them more vulnerable. For no particularly good reason due to either plot or character psychology. 
9. 7&8… again… because they are distracting from the incredibly creepy atmosphere of Carcosa.
10. Wasting  the psycho’s creepy taunting by using it as exposition … forced exposition that’s so completely fucking obvious its pointless: “…this is Carcosa”, “..those two assholes were my acolytes”, etc.
11. Cohle finds his way to the heart of the *enormous* maze-like Carcosa maze pretty much without pausing by following a disembodied voice which doesn’t give directions that are *that* clear
12. Hart finds Cohle in giant maze-like psycho lair by following disembodied sounds 
13. Two trained detectives, and quite smart people at that, *pull the knife* from a brutal stab wound. A big deal is made of this and it would certainly have killed Rust. Oh... this was probably what he was aiming for, right? But then why wouldn’t Marty try and stop him? And sure, for Rust to live and have to find purpose afterwards is a much more challenging ending with lots more dramatic possibility –but then why have him succeed in pulling the fucking knife out? He’d have almost certainly died in minutes due to basic human physiology. 
14. While we’re at it Marty’s wound was pretty suspect right? Oh fuck it, I’ll let it slide. 
15. So, no cell phone and we don’t move from the “centre” of Carcosa. The crazy sister-wife is handcuffed to the banister and there is no phone there anyways. Who calls in the cavalry? 
16. So, say it’s due to all the packages that get mailed out – we know this happened thanks to the news broadcast (see: 17). But that is supposed to be 24 hrs later. It's night when Marty and Rust are rescued – thanks for that beautiful shot of the flare BTW, so that would mean they would have had to be there an *additional full day*. Rust would certainly be dead, and Marty too for that matter. 
17. The expository news broadcast. After it was clear there would be an epilogue I was like Christ, please don’t do an expository news broadcast, because at this stage you can’t carry it. And there it was. At least the presenter had that “authentic” X-factor that so many fake broadcasts lack. Small mercies at this stage… 
18. Awkward, failed lampshaping of the finer details of hickslpoitation. Too much, too little. Confounded with more of the redundant cops who I don’t care about and don’t serve any purpose. Except that they were important earlier so I guess they have to be here now too.
19. Marty’s family-forgiveness walk-on. As has been said, the creators may as well have had a Ring girl walk in front of the camera with a placard reading “forgiveness”. All this well-crafted, subtle writing is beginning to wear me out.
20. The beautiful shots trawling over the landscape, going backwards past all the iconic locations of our journey until we come back to the solitary tree, where it all began. That means... absolutely fucking nothing because all the procedural particulars and thematic iconography are ultimately irrelevant, remember. 
21. …and back to the hospital, again. I’m beginning to get an uneasy ROTK vibe here. Oh, but wait, there’s more, so perhaps the last shots are actually a visual motif that functions as an important repositioning for this scene ... and no. It’s about something completely different. And here, have some Rust-as-Jesus iconography. Amen.
22. The pay-off. Which should work. But doesn’t. In terms of pacing we’ve been distracted by a news broadcast, some badly written, hospital-based emotional shoehorning to wrap up a season long character arc, more pointless exposition and pretty shots of the Louisiana landscape. At the very least this shit should have gone down in Carcosa, under the night sky. Hey, I know, why not use a flare, briefly lighting up the darkness then fading gently, to provide punctuation? And then give us the pointless tracking shots.

In a way having such an awesome show spectacularly squander its promise in the final episodes is kind of interesting. It makes True Detective the Anti-Christ of Twin Peaks, whose season long degeneration was given a violent 180 fuck-you with its masterful finale.