Show still crawling along but ends with a bang.
Review by Brandon Wolfe
True Detective’s second season continues to plod along without generating much urgency or excitement. Now that the team of detectives have come together to investigate the brutal murder of city official Ben Caspere, we are starting to get more formally acclimated with this bunch of mopes, and the ways in which each of them is uniquely broken fails to make any of them compelling. If there is a common thread uniting all of the core characters, beyond a shared hatred of smiling, it’s how the wounds of the past fail to ever heal with time.
“Night Finds You” opens with a long monologue delivered by Vince Vaughn’s upwardly mobile Mr. Big, Frank Semyon, as he relays to his wife a tale of how he was once locked in a basement by his drunken bastard of a father, who then subsequently forgot about his son’s confinement for several days, leaving young Frank trapped in the dark, nibbled upon by hungry rats, one of which he pounded into pulp. Frank confesses that he still sometimes wonders whether or not he ever got out of that basement. And while Frank is a criminal, and thus is expected to have a less-than-rosy childhood, the cops circling the Caspere case don’t seem to have had it much better. Velcoro, the most outwardly unstable of the lot, was effectively broken by his wife’s rape, years earlier, and now views his son as the lone bright spot in his tumultuous life. Yet Velcoro’s violent tendencies have led his now-ex-wife to seek sole custody of the boy. Meanwhile, Bezzerides admits that of the five children who were raised by her hippie-guru father, she’s the only one that neither killed herself nor has run-ins with the law (she also apparently has a predilection for Internet porn, which the show seems to view as more troubling and ominous than it really should in this day and age). And CHP officer Woodrugh? He is prone to homophobic slurs while spending his nights peering in on gay escorts, cruelly severs ties with his neglected girlfriend rather than open up to her, has a queasily close relationship with his trailer-trash mom, and is, at least to some extent, suicidal.
So we have a collection of characters here that are deeply screwed up. That’s fine. Rust and Marty were screwed up as well. But the problem here is that these characters are defined by their damage and internal torment in ways that our previous true detectives weren’t. What is Velcoro to us beyond a self-loathing drunk? What has been established about Woodrugh beyond his laundry list of personal issues? And if you take away Bezzerides’ peculiar family issues, what’s left besides cold stares and an E-cig? Season 2 is piling on baggage as high as it can stack it, but to the point where there exists little else about any of these people beyond their personal demons. Rust and Marty had their problems, but they also had personalities and points of view that established them as more than simply troubled.
It’s tempting to write solely about Season 2 through the lens of how much stronger Season 1 was by this point, an impulse that should be quelled as much as possible, but the humorlessness of this second go-round is stifling. People may remember Season 1 for the antler-adorned corpses and assiduous Yellow King dread, but the partnership of Rust and Marty also bore a great deal of genuinely funny humor fueled by the stark contrast in the personalities and philosophies of its two mismatched protagonists. Compare that to the nonexistent chemistry between Velcoro and Bezzerides as they drive around gathering intel on Caspere from a variety of sources. There’s no friction, no head-butting, no humor (apart from a weak joke from Velcoro about what Bezzerides’ vaping looks like), just a low hum of mutual distrust. Season 2’s unwillingness to really knock its characters up against each other is creating a great deal of dead air.
But then, in its final scene, True Detective finally sparks the audience out of somnambulance, as Velcoro follows up a lead fed to him by Semyon about a secret secondary residence kept by Caspere. There, Velcoro is quickly accosted by a mysterious assailant, who unloads two shotgun blasts into the detective at close range. The moment is shocking, seemingly snuffing out this principal character to throw the audience off-guard, much like Psycho did with Janet Leigh all those years ago. And even though it’s easy to speculate that Velcoro was actually shot with buckshot and survives this attack, the implications of Season 2 potentially going on without him are intriguing. For starters, it would thin the herd a bit, tightening the focus on the surviving two detectives, while also thrusting Bezzerides into the spotlight, something from which this infamously male-centric show could benefit.
Whatever the case, this turn of events has given True Detective’s sophomore year its first nudge out of the slump in which it has been ceaselessly residing. If the characters are going to continue to be stiffs, at least the storytelling still has potential to jolt to life.
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