It’s time for this season to stop being a flat circle.
Review by Brandon Wolfe
It would seem that rumors of Ray Velcoro’s death were greatly exaggerated, which is something the Internet tends to do. The truly rumpled detective, it turns out, was blasted twice at close range with “rubber buckshot,” leaving him with light bruising and some cracked ribs, but otherwise no worse for wear. This is, of course, patently ridiculous. Whatever the form of ammunition, the blasts we saw Velcoro absorb would have almost certainly been fatal, or at the very least would have resulted in devastating bodily injury. Also, if the mysterious parties who killed Ben Caspere, among others, were as ruthless as we’ve been led to think, then why would they cut Velcoro a break like that? The net result of his shooting stands as a really cheap cliffhanger ending and a crushing blow to the show’s own internal logic. For what is thought of as a high-caliber prestige show – or what was once thought of in those terms – pulling a thoroughly hacky fake-out like this feels far beneath True Detective. Season 1 perhaps wasn’t perfect, but at least a bomb never went off in Rust’s face, leaving nothing but black smudges.
Frankly, killing Velcoro off might have been the smarter play. That’s something that would have been truly shocking, and would have set the audience well off-kilter. Plus, for all the alleged star power Colin Farrell brings to the show, there remains little to suggest that there’s anything more to Velcoro as a character than the pungent whiff of mournful degradation that he exudes at all times. His lackey-ish ties to Frank Semyon, his ambiguous corruption, his tattered relationship with his ex-wife and potential son, none of it resonates in such a way to establish the character as anything more than a loose collection of pulp clichés. Pulp clichés are the show’s lifeblood, but it used to at least take the laudable initiative of making them feel vibrant and fresh in spite of their familiarity. And I’m afraid that cribbing an outré, faux-afterlife opening sequence directly from David Lynch’s playbook isn’t a viable alternative for actual inspiration.
That’s the major issue True Detective continues to face as it nears the halfway mark. This season is in no hurry to shake off its stultifying ordinariness. Season 1, by this point, had offered us unsettling occult murder scenes, eerie backwater secret societies, a framework spanning two decades concurrently and a captivating live-wire of a central protagonist. Season 2 has been content to hand us a rudimentary murder case, the suggestion that (gasp!) corruption exists among Southern California movers-and-shakers and a group of heroes defined solely by rote personal flaws. Apart from vague murmurs about her unusual upbringing, what is there to Ani Bezzerides besides a steely aura and a constantly furrowed brow? This week we’re given further evidence of Officer Woodrugh’s repressed homosexuality, as he violently lashes out against a fellow veteran when he makes reference to an intimate encounter they once shared, but that does little to justify the fact that Taylor Kitsch’s performance is composed entirely of interminable brooding. There has to be more to a character than the problems that he or she face, and True Detective is struggling to locate the people amidst the personal demons.
The strongest apple in the bunch, mainly by default, has to be Vince Vaughn’s Semyon. The character amounts to little more than a harder-edged version of the standard Vince Vaughn slick-talking big-shot, but Vaughn, unlike his co-stars, is allowed just enough meat in the form of Frank’s frayed desperation and barely concealed rage to make some impression. When Frank intimidates a flunky into revisiting payments on a debt already paid or dismantles a defiant gangster before removing his golden grill with pliers (punctuated by one of the increasingly rare Pizzolatto gems, “What kind of way is that to greet the world?”), Vaughn’s ferocity, augmented by his impossibly tall frame, gives Frank a modicum of dimension, allowing him to stand out among a cast still desperately seeking that second note (however, the revelation that Frank suffers from erectile dysfunction seems to serve little purpose beyond expanding Pizzolatto’s continued fascination with deconstructing masculinity).
“Maybe Tomorrow” otherwise scarcely shows a pulse. Unlike the ghastly Carcosa mystery that fueled the previous season, everything about the current case feels hopelessly conventional, even with masked men and oversized bird heads haunting the frame. Why should we care about any of these people when precious little of their actions or their overriding assignment is of any interest? This is the dilemma True Detective needs to crack if it wishes to avoid being branded as a one-hit wonder. Catching lightning in a bottle twice is a tall order, but much more so when you put away the kite and key and expect the lightning to come straight to you because you feel you’ve earned it.
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