'True Detective' Season 2 Is Halfway Over And It's Still Unclear What Is HappeningThere is worthwhile, cinematic television happening on the margins of True Detective – stunning aerial shots of tangled Los Angeles freeways, a California Split-esque low-stakes poker room, musical homages to Twin Peaks. But the closer you get to the show’s center, where a cohesive narrative should be decipherable, you’re drowning a murky puddle of obtuse yet self-important storytelling.
True Detective is coy in all the wrong places. “I just don’t know how to be out in the world, man,” says a man in episode four who’s made it crystal clear since his first on-screen appearance that he doesn’t know how to be out in the world, man. Yet, we still don’t know what’s behind the repeated, ominous references to Paul Woodrugh’s involvement in something called “Black Mountain,” or why he is so tortured by his sexuality. Presumably, one or both has to do with the time he spent serving overseas (Afghanistan? Iraq? Unclear!)
We know far less about the myriad characters tied up in show’s oblique central plot points: A murder mystery, corruption, drug trafficking, gambling – Nic Pizzolatto is hitting all the crime procedural tropes, but halfway through the season, he hasn’t created enough meaningful connections between them all. Beyond the four main characters – Ray, Frank, Ani and Paul – it’s still not clear who we are supposed to care about or even pay attention to (maybe the mayor of Vinci, who we were needlessly reminded in episode 4 is a “bad guy.”) I can’t remember the last time I had to pause and rewind so frequently just to make basic sense of a scene or identify the function of a character. (That said, I really want to know more about Frank’s wife Jordan, who often seems like she’s from another world, or at least a different show.)
True Detective episode four, “Down Will Come,” while a slight improvement on the season’s preceding episodes, was another installment of season two in which basic coherence fell victim to bravado and possible red herrings, in the service of… what exactly? Those of us who were let down by True Detective‘s season one finale (and was anyone not?) have good reason to be skeptical that season two will lead us to much more than a dead end. Even episode four’s spectacular shootout finale fell flat, because there wasn’t nearly enough genuine tension leading up to it. We only learned of the raid’s target, Ledo Armarilla, earlier in the same episode, and the victims of the showy violence were primarily nameless, faceless characters (except for the cop with the “barroom sunburn,” RIP). Pizzolatto’s stingy rationing of the story made it feel like it all happened too fast. The freeze-frame at the end of the episode felt like a metaphor for his icing out of the viewers who allow the show to exist.
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