2x03 Maybe Tomorrow

I mean, it would have been hard for - any - crime drama to top True Detective Season One, and while this season is serviceable and still better than most cop dramas out there, it lacks the humor, charisma and chemistry that Harrelson and McConaughey brought to the screen. Even though Martin seemed lost at sea without a rudder for much of the season, and Rust was locked inside his own existential cage, these two guys were still likeable in nuanced ways. I'm not seeing much to like about any of the main characters in Season Two. All of them seem like they're one bad day away from stepping in front of a train. The best I can say so far is that Velcoro shows empathy for the defenseless and sticks up for his son, who is being bullied, but he does it in the most unhealthy way imaginable, you know, in between shooting lines of coke and passing out at the local bar as a depressive singer croons about her "least favorite life," presumably the current one. All of these people need major psychological therapy. I can't say I'm all that invested in the main plot either. A creepy city manager with a penchant for weird art and weird sexual deviations gets offed, and the incident is possibly related to some shady developer deals and a proposed rail line. Also, there's a shady Russian-Israeli crime boss named Osip because, of course there is. I'm more interested in the interplay between Velcoro, Semyon, Bezzerides and Woodrugh at this point, and the performances of Colin Farrell and Rachel McAdams hold the show together for me and will be the reason I keep watching.

Rough. So much about this episode ranges from awkward, goofy, tonally mismatched, to downright trashy. I mean, this episode contains a scene on a movie set with a director that looks suspiciously similar to Fukunaga...and he's played as an asshole. It's that kind of direct callout that feels like middle school, not the follow-up to one of the most acclaimed television seasons of the century.

The episode opens with high camp. A dream sequence so heavily inspired by Twin Peaks that I actually paused and wondered for a moment that I had read this entire season wrong. Perhaps it was supposed to be campy the entire time, perhaps that tone would actually lead to me finding something interesting about this as it drifted into surrealist absurdity. But then it just drifted back to the same stuff we'd been seeing before. Self-important, meandering, and with a serious lack of metaphorical drive.

There were some good things in this episode that started to peak out though. There's more tease to the dynamic between Velcoro and Bezzerides, which has a nice push and pull to it. They can't really read each other, but it feels like they relate to one another more than they'd like. For as much as Bezzerides would prefer to think of Velcoro as some ultra-corrupt schmuck, Farrell plays the role excellently as a man stuck in the middle of incidental corruption--a man who broke bad for noble reasons; a decision that seemingly haunts and curses his life from then on. In this episode, I felt like Farrell finally elevated to the level I expect from him. Thank god.

But as I've been mentioning, Kitsch's character is just plain awful. Woodrugh's sole purpose has been as some figurative metaphor--flipping the script on trophy wives who feel as though their only purpose is to appear beautiful. Woodrugh is repeatedly told the same type of thing: he's just beautiful, he should use that to his advantage. And he feels as though he's not being taken seriously. It has blown past verging on absurdity. It now just feels awfully tone-deaf. We're meant to blow past the racism and homophobia Woodrugh exhibits to empathize with him solely because of his alleged beauty. That wasn't a joke. That wasn't an extrapolation. That is legitimately the character. A man who is haunted by his past and his beauty that he becomes suicidal. Come on.

I am so deep into wondering if I should skip to the third season of this show when it supposedly "returns to form", but I feel like I've invested three hours so I might as well keep going. I didn't realize that when people said the second season was bad, it was for such innocuous reasons. Clearly the first season of this show was as tight as it was not only because of the direction (and, by the way, Fukunaga's inconsequential beef with Pizzolatto was related to Pizzolatto wanting to cut that tracking shot in the first season. This subsequently led to Fukunaga being branded as difficult to work with...because he fought for the best tracking shot on television), but also because it's clear that Pizzolatto had ample time to bake that first season. Embellish those philosophical monologues, fine-tune them so that they didn't feel goofy or self-involved (at least, not unintentionally). When forced to crank out a second season so quickly, True Detective instead sputters out an awkward, middling plot whose only saving grace is the performances by actors that were likely only secured because of the strength of the first season. Pizzolatto's hubris must have been seriously checked when this aired.