I, like millions of people, watched the second season of True Detective because the first season was awesome. And I, like many of those millions, have one question:
What the fuck, HBO?
If you didn’t watch the new season, consider this entire column a spoiler alert. [Editor’s Note: If you didn’t already get the hint from the headline.]
The basics: an old guy dies. Three detectives — Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell), Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch) and Antigone Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams, and, yes, I said Antigone) — try to solve the case. Mysterious Frank Seymon, played by Vince Vaughn, is involved. Somehow.
If you’re a person who has put together a string of sentences that makes sense, you’ll have problems with the plot and the screenwriters’ inability to make English sound like English.
If you’ve ever watched a good actor, you’re going to want to punch Vince Vaughn in the face. His method seems to be not blinking while pronouncing his lines as if they’re spelled phonetically.
Taylor Kitsch is hot, but that hotness couldn’t fire up what should have been a complex and interesting storyline about a man struggling with his sexuality, but instead was a sloppy mix of scenes where Kitsch looks really, really far away from the camera, as if he doesn’t want to get caught with the dialogue.
Even if you’ve never seen an episode and have no idea what I’m talking about, watch last Sunday’s finale. Whether or not you’ve seen earlier episodes doesn’t matter.
After you get past the scene in the woods where Vaughn and Farrell wear gas masks, force yourself through Vaughn’s five-minute death scene in which he inexplicably has a hallucinatory conversation with a group of black guys dressed like Run-DMC.
Then there’s the kicker.
Of the four main characters, McAdams’s Antigone is the only one who survives because, as the show reminds us over and over again, she’s a survivor. The show desperately wants us to know Bezzerides survives sexual abuse and her own sexuality (or, in True Detective terms, her I-wear-a-knife-in-my-boot badass bitch who’s so fierce a scorned co-worker/lover brought sexual harassment charges again her). And, in the end, she’ll survive the loss of Farrell’s Ray Velcoro.
Not only does she get to live, she gets to have Velcoro’s baby. She’s escaped to Venezuela where she snuggles his son into a Baby Bjorn-like printed sheet (colorful so, wink-wink, it must be ethnic) before walking down the street into sweet, on-the-lam happily ever after.
I see what you did, HBO, turning tragedy into triumph. Bad girl’s gone soft. All is right with the world, even the ugly, constantly dusty True Detective world.
That’s just foul.
My rewrite: of the four main characters, only Antigone dies — one of those long, jerky deaths. She never comes to terms with her childhood sexual abuse; she beats up the guy who charged her with sexual harassment and then fucks him again; and, she never sleeps with Velcoro because, well, Colin Farrell’s hair is really disgusting and too reminiscent of the mullet he sported in Miami Vice that left me sleepless for weeks.
Sometimes you have to kill your darlings. That, dear friends at HBO, is verisimilitude. And decent television.
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2015.