True Detective - 'Night Finds You' and 'Maybe Tomorrow'

"Is this inappropriate?"

Okay, we've had a bit of a break, which may indicate the degree to which this season has not grabbed me the way Season 1 did. So it goes.

"It's my strong suspicion that we get the world we deserve."

The Caspar killing is of interest to many, so our three broken cops are all assigned to it: State claims jurisdiction because Woodrough found the body, promising to disappear the IA case and make him a detective if he plays ball. County makes a deal with State for Bezzerides to head up the investigation in exchange for her collecting dirt on Velcoro and getting an in for State's probe into Vinci PD.  Vinci PD meanwhile want Velcoro to steer the investigation away from any of their embarrassing business and any connection with the Mayor of Vinci. Velcoro's criminal contact Frank Semyon, meanwhile, has trouble of his own, as Caspar died with Semyon's big 'going straight' investment money still in his bank account.

The task force - the main three plus slobby detective No-one-uses-his-name - looks into Caspar's finances and activities, finding regular large payouts and an escort habit. While Bezzerides and Velcoro make a start on talking to the obnoxious Mayor and Caspar's other contacts, Woodrough has a difficult goodbye with his clingy mother and alienated girlfriend before joining them at the other end of California. Velcoro goes to Semyon and is put onto an apartment where he finds a camera, a hard drive, and a gunman with a shotgun and a raven mask who shoots him twice in the chest, doing literally what his ex-wife did figuratively when she told him she was moving for sole custody on the grounds that he's a fucking arsehole.

"'Sup?"

Fortunately, it turns out that the gun was loaded with rubber shot, merely precipitating a vision in which he speaks to his father. It's a bit weird and Twin Peaks. While he's laid up, Bezzerides pals about with Woodrough, and sets him to talk to hookers. "Put your looks to use," she tells him, which obviously makes him uncomfortable. This is a bit hypocritical given how she reacts when the lady from state tells her to dangle sex to get Velcoro to fess up. Woodrough's reaction falls into place, as 'Maybe Tomorrow' outs him to us as a very, very closeted gay. The phone records from the sex flat lead Bezzerides and Woodrough to the Mayor's house, drawing a measured reaction from the Mayor ("I want that c*&@ fired!") and a general escalation of the State vs. Vinci conflict embodied in Bezzerides and Velcoro.

Meanwhile, Frank is concerned that someone is gunning for him when one of his men turns up dead. He gathers his people, but one of them mouths off when he demands they find out who took what was his. "What you got left?" He beats the man unconscious and pulls out his gold teeth, later tossing them into the bin in his house as his wife attempts to make up after an argument.

Bezzerides and Velcoro track down the car used for a dump, but it gets fired. They chase the masked arsonist, but he escapes. Velcoro pulls Bezzerides out of the path of a truck, earning her thanks. "You want to thank me, tell me what State's got on me?" "I don't know."

I think my biggest problem with this season is that no-one seems capable of having a conversation with their significant other without it turning almost spontaneously into an argument. It's not that they're troubled, it's that they seem incapable of employing any rationality before flying off the handle; they're like teenagers. The other problem is that Semyon's story is only tangentially connected to the others, and his philosophising less gripping than Rust Cohle's. Actually, in general the cast aren't quite Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, most tellingly with Vince Vaughn and Taylor Kitsch. I guess the latter is trying to reinvent himself, but he's much better at anguished heroes than complete wrecks. It's almost needlessly bleak.

True Detective - 'The Western Book of the Dead'

Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell), Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughan), Ani Bezzerides
(Rachael MacAdams) and Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch).

Last year, the first season of True Detective was one of the TV triumphs, so I was very happy to see a second series on the cards, and with an actual female character as well. 'The Western Book of the Dead' is almost an exercise in lowering my expectations to something that, hopefully, the rest of the series can meet.

Rust Cohle and Marty Hart were assholes, there's no denying, but Season 2 seems to be determined to top them. Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell in a 'tache) is a cop on the edge, apparently consumed with rage since his wife was raped* and then divorced him, limiting his access to their son (who might not be his.) He executes vigilante justice and consorts with the criminal Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughan), a course which began when Semyon pointed him at his wife's assailant (in the episode's only flashback, marking a sea change from Season 1.) Semyon is trying to go straight, but feels threatened by an expose of corruption in their home town of Vinci, LA County.

If these were our protagonists, that might be all right, but there's more. Ani Bezzerides (Rachael MacAdams) is a tough cop with anger management issues and a troubled relationship with her CamPorn sister and hippy father (an almost unrecognisable David Morse in Moses chic.) We know she's got issues, because in her first scene she blows off the guy she slept with the night before when he wants to pursue a relationship, despite admitting surprise that she's into 'that'. And then there's Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch), a scarred veteran who finds more release riding his bike at high speed as a highway patrolman than with his girlfriend, and who has just been suspended because an actress accused him of soliciting a sex act.

All of this adds up to 58 minutes of Woodrugh strugling to connect with the world, Bezzerides getting drunk, picking fights and hiding weapons in her boots, and Velcoro viciously beating the father of a boy who bullied his son (having terrorised the name from the boy in the first place, which pretty well undercut every effort to portray a genuinely loving and tender father-son relationship elsewhere) before we finally get a crime that isn't perpetrated by the police. Actually, the crime does come earlier; we have shots of the body being driven around in a car, and Velcoro and his partner briefly explored the apartment of a missing city planner named Caspar, with connections to Semyon, but it is only in the closing moments that Woodrugh finds Caspar dead on Bezzerides patch, and the three cops are brought together over the body.

Season 1 of True Detective embraced the darkness of the human soul, but season 2 seems intent on rolling around in it, and it doesn't make for such compelling television. It doesn't help that the only female characters are defined sexually - an as-yet unseen rape victim, a cop whose first scene is about how kinky she is, a woman who offers favours to get out of a speeding ticket, and a pornographic actress. Actually, I tell a lie. Semyon's wife is so far a dutiful support, but not defined sexually, just by her social bond to a man.

"The fuck are you looking at?"

There are some traces of the weird aspects which made True Detective's first season unique, with Caspar's apartment decorated not just with elaborate exotica, but with robed and crowned skeletons. I hope there will be more of this in future episodes, and less of Colin Farrell yelling at children while he punches their parents.

* Marks removed for rape as character background, double for a woman's rape as a man's background

True Detective

"Back then, the visions...most of the time I was convinced that I'd lost it. But there were other times, I thought I was main-lining the secret truth of the universe."

True Detective is a gritty, existential detective story, created by writer Nic Pizzolatto and director Cary Joji Fukunaga and starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. From the 1990s to the present day, two detectives struggle with their own demons as they pursue a serial killer cult who seem entirely at peace with theirs.

Beginning with a cruel, ritual killing in 1995 Louisiana, the story spends six episodes working primarily in flashback, as former State Police Detectives Rust Cohle and Marty Hart are interviewed by younger detectives who seem intent on uncovering a truth that will reveal Cohle as the killer. In the final two episodes, with the past section wrapped up, the series concludes with Cohle and Hart's personal quest to finally get their guy.

Cohle (McConaughey) is a buttoned-down struggling alcoholic who lost his daughter in an accident and subsequently his marriage. His fellow officers call him the Tax Man on account of the ledger he uses in lieu of a regular notebook and his aggressive, nihilistic atheism endears him to no-one in Louisiana. Hart (Harrelson) is a family man with anger issues and a self-destructive sexual obsession with women who resemble his wife. Everyone else in the series is pretty much some form of cipher. The story is told through the two central characters, and thus they are the only characters of substance, with the rest of the world existing only as they perceive it.

The central mystery is as much a psychological quest as it is a police procedural, with the killer less a criminal and more a manifestation of the dark-halves of Cohle and Hart's personae. It is perhaps notable that the last two episodes contain the only scenes which have neither Cohle nor Hart in them, and that these scenes all feature the killer, making him the only other 'real' character in the film. The investigation is in some ways secondary to the clash between Cohle's grim worldview and Hart's equally destructive laissez faire attitude. In many ways, the series is the psychological and philosophical core of the buddy cop genre laid bare and stripped of all the extraneous fripperies of slapstick humour and bonding.

"The world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door."

The transformation of the two leads between their 1995 and 2012 incarnations is truly extraordinary. Young Cohle is lean, smart and formal, while the older version is a wreck of a man with straggling grey hair. Hart goes the other way, from moderately slobbish to dressed and pressed. I spent the best part of an episode wondering if the younger versions weren't lip-synching body-doubles.

The ending of the series is in some ways bleak, with the realisation that most of the people who were involved in the murders will never be brought to justice, but viewed as an existential journey it is also uplifting. Future seasons are slated to focus on completely different characters, and that feels like the right choice.

If I have a criticism of the series it is that the absolute focus on two male protagonists and a male antagonist resulted in a show in which women lacked agency, and I would like to see at least a female protagonist in season two, not least because it would be different and the format of the show demands different if it is not to simply repeat with a change of clothes. It would not be possible to make another season about Cohle and Hart, at least not without spoiling everything that made True Detective unique, and the risk is of making a season that is about Cohle and Hart with the serial numbers filed off.

"...once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light's winning."