(This post contains spoilers. You can read my thoughts on previous episodes of True Detective, season two, here.)
In the end, True Detective wrapped its much maligned second season with a perfect metaphor. Thwarted by the cartel — whom he has affectionately referred to as “the Mexicans” over the duration of the season — Frank Semyon was left to bleed out in the sprawling desert outside Los Angeles.
Only Frank won’t admit he’s been had. After all, he was so close. He looked Osip Agronov in the eyes before offing him and stealing $12 million — taking back what was rightfully his and then some. Frank had made all the arrangements: Jordan was safely outside the country and under the protection of Nails, and after paying off the help, Frank could join them in “two weeks… or less.”
As Vince Vaughn’s pale, bear-shaped body waltzed through the desert, Frank wrestled with the aberrations of his bastard father, of the low-life punks Frank cut through coming up in Chicago, and a pleading, bloodied suit-and-tie from Frank’s rise in the casino world.
Somewhere between life and death, Frank saw Jordan in the white dress. He straightened his spine, applying some of that endless charm we’ve seen from Vince Vaughn in countless comedic roles this century. He practically winked when he told her they have to keep moving — for a final moment, Frank believed he was in control, and that he’d get them out of there with his head held higher than everybody else.
But Frank had already sealed his fate. He had his chances to get away: Frank laughed when Jordan suggested buying a farm in “Night Finds You,” and when he sends Jordan with $100,000 to Venezuela, he can’t come along because “he needs to finish this.” Frank might have loved Jordan, but the Semyon plot line this season could be boiled down to Frank’s deluded sense of control — over Jordan, over his casinos and his money, over Ray Velcoro — and the melodrama of a wannabe gangster’s impotency.
Whether you enjoyed the show or not, the second season of True Detective simply ran out of juice by “Omega Station.” That left us playing Jordan — wearing our finest white dress and politely asking Nic Pizzolatto’s story to lie down.
This season was not a waste of time. I can see a not-too-distant future where TD2 picks up steam as the minority favorite installment of the show — “Yeah, McConaughey was boss in season one, but secretly Farrell’s year was better.” Pizzolatto’s second go-around gave Wedding Crashers alumni Vaughn and Rachel McAdams opportunities to color outside the lines. The orgy party and subsequent nightmare revelations of “Church in Ruins” was career-defining work from McAdams.
Whenever Pizzolatto tossed Vaughn a bone in the dialogue — “Congratulations, we’re club owners!” “I’ve never lost a tooth. Never even had a fucking cavity.” — he was money, baby.
This was a season that started with Ray Velcoro assaulting a 12-year-old boy’s father over scuffing up a pair of LeBrons. Farrell was given the most to do on an episode-by-episode basis, and thank God for those rubber bullets — Ray Velcoro was the lifeblood of this season.
What was lacking from TD2 was a sense of place. Yes, the breathtaking tracking shots of the L.A. highway system came to be representative of the show’s most honest self-assessment — everything is fucking — but considering the endless supply of background material for “Google search: L.A. + Crime Stories,” it’s unclear why Pizzolatto chose to make Los Angeles look like, well, nowhere special.
The season kicked off overlooking the abandoned minefields at the center of an epic political and economic scandal. By season’s end, Tony Chessani was revealed to be an accomplice in the murder of his father, the Mayor of Vinci, in addition to being a key cog in the purchase and sale of the land deal. But Chessani was featured in one scene the entire season — a particularly memorable one in which he momentarily parts with his painted-on ghetto facade to answer Ani Bezzerides’ questions.
Pizzolatto took us over and over again to Felicia’s dive bar. We frequented Frank’s poker room and occasionally drifted north to check out a fresh murder scene. There was the memorable orgy set piece, and the regrettable shootout at the end of “Down Will Come.”
But where was Los Angeles? For all the shady possibilities of L.A. — consider all the places the audience goes in Chinatown, The Big Lebowski and Boogie Nights — it felt like the majority of TD2 took place in the same three rooms. We spent more time crying over Stan and chasing after runaway floozies than on the mysteries of the city.
Who cares about the blue diamonds or some photographs from a party? Pizzolatto generated superfluous character after superfluous character, all the while leaving the most lively pieces to the puzzle — The Chessani family? Rick Springfield’s turn as Dr. Irving Pitlor? The bird mask? — sitting on the sideline for episodes at a time.
The elephant in the room all season was the absence of director Cary Fukunaga. Without a singular vision for the show, HBO’s collection of hired guns cobbled together a murky story without a sense of purpose. Pizzolatto clearly wanted to get away from the mysticism and make-believe that put True Detective on the map. But in cutting ties with Fukunaga and renting out the director job week-after-week, Pizzolatto’s heavy story lost its footing.
“The Western Book of the Dead” featured this haunting line from the underutilized David Morse as Elliot Bezzerides:
“When you see only with God’s eyes, you see only the truth: You recognize a meaningless universe… Today’s exercise is to recognize the world as meaningless, and to know that God did not make a meaningless world. Hold on to these thoughts. Hold them as both irrefutable and equal. This is how we must live now in the final age of man.”
Over the past eight weeks, we watched Paul Woodrugh drown on dry land. Frank swung for the fences and died alone in the desert. Ray never quite came to terms with losing the faculty of fatherhood, and opted to go down in a hail of gunfire rather than start over again. Ani escaped the country but couldn’t solve the crime, and like Paul’s girlfriend, she has been left to raise a child alone.
As Pizzolatto’s myopic, cumbersome season crawled to a close, he made it possible to mistake the ambiguousness for intent. It’s all the final age of man — a meaningless world not of God’s creation. But the show was not misguided as much as it was manhandled. Pizzolatto’s tunnel vision in the closing hours of TD2 made the show meaningless. It wasn’t about Los Angeles or the final age of man; nor was it about the temporal parochialism of our cynical society.
True Detective was about Pizzolatto stretching his ability as showrunner as far as he could. Unfortunately for True Detective fans, he never made it to us; Pizzolatto fell down somewhere way back there.
