Posted on 03/10/2014 8:03:21 AM PDT by PJ-Comix
I hadn’t written anything about the HBO miniseries True Detective until now, because I was never quite sure where it was going. The acting and writing has been superb, but it’s been a guessing game as to the point. The texture of gritty, pulpy detective stories has been a given, as has been the oh-so-predictable gratuitous sex and nudity that goes along with the genre and pretty much every HBO series ever aired (and Showtime, for that matter). Was this going to be a Call of Cthulu update, or another series where viewers get another intellectual Bobby-in-the-shower Dallas moment in finding out that they didn’t see what they were told they were seeing?
Neither, actually — and that’s what makes True Detective a bit of a rarity. In the finale of The Sopranos, the ending left the entire world puzzled over what the writers wanted to say (although I think I figured it out after a few days, which I explained at the time at the link). Instead, we got two detectives who got it wrong almost two decades earlier finally set out to get things right. In the process, they also had their illusions about themselves stripped away — even Rust, who after years of rejecting anything redemptive about existence, comes to a painful but liberating realization at the climax. Instead of indulging in screenwriting schizophrenia, we see the eventual exposure of madness in the villain and the effects of “true detective” work.
(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...
I did think the series was great, and the spaghetti monster being a reference to the anti-religion spaghetti monster had occurred to me, too.
I did feel that there were a lot of loose ends in the plot, but maybe the next season, with different characters, will explore some of those as well. We know that Hart and Cohle are not back next season, but perhaps we will get some more explication of what really happpened to Hart’s daughter, whether her grandfather was involved with the cult, and some more about Senator Tuttle, who skated away cleanly this season.
Rust abandoned his nihilism and accepted that life has meaning, even if he can't quite grasp what it is. He was also finally able to come to terms with the loss of his daughter.
Marty made peace with his estranged family and showed them that there was still good left in him. He also proved to himself and Rust, by finding the tiny clue that linked everything together, that he was indeed a "true detective" and not just Rust's secretary.
But what was with Errol’s weird accents? One minute he sounds like a hillbilly and the next he sounds like a Brit.
Sucks!
Sucks!
He is physically enormous and preternaturally strong (lifting a strong grown man who is struiggling for his life off his feet).
He seamlessly blends between a British and a Southern accent as if he were out of time and place.
There is no record of his birth, and although he seems to be at the lowest rung of the social ladder, he is connected to the powers that be and is a hidden king among them.
The show didn't veer into magic or the supernatural directly - but it made everything suggestive and liminal.
See post 7.
Where you been?
Put the coupons down...SLOWLY...and back away with your hands in the air.
But that's all nitpicking. It had to end with these two "together" as it were, as they were the only ones who could stand each other. I loved the sense of revulsion, not only by them, but even by the corrupt sheriff, at what was on the video. I do think they made the black cops out to be a little too detached and almost unconcerned with the murders.
Yes to both.
I thought that was brilliant. He’s a fruit loop and even fruit loops can memorize poetry.
LOL.
bfl
The loose ends are intentional, IMO.
The story is about the detectives, not the case itself. We weren’t meant to watch and figure out whodunit...the point was the development of the two lead characters, showing their evolution over the life of the case.
Rust himself said (on the subject of closure) - “this is a world where nothing is ever solved”. Time being a flat circle, where things just keep repeating.
One thing that bothered me was the ending scene where Marty reconnected with his family. His daughters were teenagers back in 2002. Ten years on, they had the same girls playing the characters again. They looked no different yet they would be in their early to mid twenties. Also, everyone else aged except his wife. She looked the same as in 2002 and also as in 1995. Sorry, but everyone changes even a little bit after 17 years.
I really liked how they had that scene with the two girls playing in the yard and the younger one wanted the tiara and the older girl threw it up in the tree. The next scene she was a teenager, dressed in goth getting out of the car with a bunch of other goths. Nice symbolism with her throwing away the princess mantle.
I also liked how they both had daughters only. Speaking as a father of daughters, I think seeing what that sick bastard was doing to girls and young women would motivate you all the more to go after him.
His flipping between the British and Cagin accent I took to be just another manifestation of how crazy he was....
I’m just REALLY glad they didn’t show Spaghetti Face and his “wife” having sex...Bleccchhhh!!!
All those plotlines lead nowhere. This was nothing but another Deep South potboiler and the baddie was a bayou hick who was screwing his sister. None of the religious and political themes lead anywhere.
The coolest, baddest atheist on American TV starts sniveling about a dead girl whose presence he sensed like a New Jersey medium.
Jesus. Take back McConaughey's Oscar.Take back all those magazine covers and think pieces and blog columns about this cheap, deceptive piece of derivative, second-rate horror schlock.
What a travesty it is that HBO packaged this as some kind of intellectual, multi-layered high-end cable fare. This belongs on Cinemax reruns, right after Hills Have Eyes 2.
I can see that angle, but if we believe Rust and Marty that he is the ringleader of a larger conspiracy then it seems very unsafe of his coconspirators to put their reputations in his hands if he was just a loony.
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