by Brendan Foley
(Spoilers IMMEDIATELY begin. You read, your problem.)
For the second time in three weeks, an HBO Sunday night drama climaxed with one of the most popular characters being shockingly ‘killed’ right before the cut to black. As Colin Farrell’s Ray Velcoro snooped around the second household of a cock-less murder victim, you knew something was going to spring on him to give us our big cliffhanger. But when the raven-masked murderer stepped out of the shadows to bury two blasts of a shotgun into Velcoro’s chest, there was nothing to prepare you for that shock. Farrell is the biggest draw of the cast (Vince Vaughn no longer counts as a draw), and Velcoro has been established in these first two episodes as the closest thing this season has to a central figure. Having him killed off two episodes into the season certainly puts the audience on their toes.
Knowing nothing about the remainder of the season, my guess is that Velcoro survives this injury, even if he spends the bulk of the season laid up (a time-jump a la the first season notwithstanding). There’s simply too much drama to be wrung out of both this character and this performance that will be left wasted in exchange for SHOCK! storytelling, that I have to assume Nic Pizzolatto has something more planned. And, hell, it’s not like that guy hasn’t loved to deal with men trapped on the borderline between life and death before.
Or maybe I’m just hoping that Velcoro survives because there’s very little else in True Detective that is holding all that much attention. The premiere’s conclusion with the discovery of the body and the joining of our main ensemble seemed to signal the show-proper beginning, but tonight’s episode remained in introductory stutter mode.
Velcoro and Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams) spend the episode looking into their victim’s personal life, unearthing that he had serious sexual addictions and dallied with a large number of prostitutes, any number of whom might have had pimps angry enough to pour acid into a man’s eyes and chop off their cock. Our knowledge of the Raven-Masked Murderer suggests plainly that this is not going to be a cut-and-dried “pimp cock cut” case like you get all the time, but will be something much darker.
Bezzerides and Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch) continue to exist mainly on the sideline of the Velcoro/Frank Semyon (Vaughn) drama, though we get some additional shading to both characters. Woodrugh is revealed to possibly be a closeted homosexual which means that it’s a question of ‘when’ he is going to beat up another gay man, not ‘if’. Bezzerides gets to talk through some of her own issues with justice and gender. Neither character quite pops, but if Velcoro is sidelined/dead, it should give both characters ample room to assert themselves.
Over in Vince Vaughn land, it comes out that the dead man had all of Semyon’s money locked up tight, never going through with the lucrative land deal that would have pushed Semyon’s holdings into legitimate wealth instead of underworld riches. He’s obviously less than thrilled with this development, and so he begins pushing his resources to catch the killer, not trusting Velcoro to make any real headway. It’s his tipoff that sends Velcoro to the second house of the victim, and into the line of fire for a crazy motherfucker with a raven mask and a shotgun. Why this person had either item remains to be seen.
Our hero getting shot in the chest was about the only real development of the larger case this week, but True Detective has always been more interested in the texture of the world than the procedural element. So we got Woodrugh bringing KFC to his mom who maybe-kinda wants to fuck her own son, we got Velcoro and Bezzerides driving around and exchanging philosophical inquiries into life and reality, not unlike Rust and Marty back in season 1, and we got Semyon opening the episode with a long monologue into the camera as he describes a traumatic incident from his past and his fear that all of his life since that horror has been nothing but a dream.
The notion of a ‘thin’ reality that might collapse at any given moment is, again, a familiar theme for this show, and I’m enjoying the way that Pizzolatto is threading his favorite elements and ideas into a story that could not be any more different from what we saw in the first season. It would not surprise me if Velcoro survives his attack and has a similar feeling as Semyon has had since age six, or if both Woodurgh and Bezzerides have traumas in their past that have left them unsure of the world they inhabit. It’d be a neat way to unite the disparate characters, and to create space for the kind of cosmic horror that season one played with, without having to violate the more ‘real world’ sensibilities of this season.
But even as we are on familiar, welcome ground, there’s still something…off. I’m having trouble quantifying what that thing is, but after two hours there’s nothing much pulling you along. The case that should be the spine around which the narrative and philosophical ideas hang is not interesting (raven-masked motherfuckers notwithstanding), and none of the actors or characters thus far have popped the way Marty and Rust did. Farrell’s good, McAdams is good, Vaughn, bless him, is trying as hard as he possibly can, but none of the chemistry is quite clicking the way it needs to. Farrell and McAdams driving around, bantering and arguing, should be the money-in-the-bank material that buys you the affection to follow the story anywhere, but it falls flat because there’s simply nothing happening between either character or either performer. Farrell pulls a lot of it off, but much of that is just on the strength of what a naturally strong performer Farrell is.
And now he’s dead. Maybe. Possibly. We’ll see. But one hopes that the season will start to come into focus, or else the languid pace and stilted story might drive away the audience before anyone cares to see what the actual ending is.