by Brendan Foley
The True Detective orgy scene was the stuff of legend before anyone knew a thing about the damn show itself. And the knowledge that some kind of huge orgy scene was in the offing has been hanging over every episode, every cryptic mention of the special ‘parties’ that the elite of Vinci and surrounding neighbors attend. We’ve spent the last seven episodes waiting for that orgy-shoe to drop, and tonight, it did.
If there’s a knock to be made about the sequence, it’s that the episode prior does not, at first glance, seem to arc towards such a sequence. The first 2/3 of episode seven are actually fairly focused almost exclusively on Velcoro and Semyon and both men’s struggle with feelings of guilt and paternity.
Picking up from last week’s cliffhanger, Ray and Frank sit across from each other, guns drawn, with Ray demanding to know why Frank set him up to kill the wrong rapist. Frank insists that he believed that he was giving Ray the correct information all those years ago, and promises that he will tell Ray who gave the bad information, provided that Ray brings him the hard drive for the camera from Caspere’s place.
The Ray/Frank relationship has been a bit schizophrenic all season. Sometimes, it seems like there is genuine affection between the two men, or at least a legitimate bond. But other times, Vaughn plays Frank as if he really could not give the slightest of shits about Ray (not even bothering to pronounce his name right) and views him instead as a tool, in every sense of the word. As such, the big confrontation here doesn’t pack quite the punch it could’ve, even with Farrell laying on the eyebrow-intensity at an almost unfathomable degree.
Ray spirals from there. He confronts the probable-rapist and delivers one of those colorful threats he’s so fond of (this one involving a cheese grater and the man’s cock), then has a supervised visit with his son. Once the kid goes away, Ray indulges in hard liquor and line after line of coke, in perhaps the single highest energy sequence on True Detective yet. This season has been short on big meme-able moments, but Colin Farrell spazzing out after inhaling a Scarface-esque mound of cocaine might do the trick.
Ray then breaks every single thing in his house (turning his hands bloody, just as in the dream sequence) and calls his wife to tell her that he will not protest custody so long as she promises to never reveal to their son his true paternity. Characters on this show tend to be slaves to the past, but here, at least, there might be a pinprick of hope for a character to be free of yesterday’s sins.
And speaking of sins: orgy. Ani gets her sister to get her on the bus to the big forest estate, while Ray and Paul follow behind. Each of the women at the party is given a dose of “like, pure Molly” and then it is off to the races.
Director Miguel Sapochnik does something really smart with this sequence: he pitches it almost entirely as a waking nightmare. Like the gunfight from a couple episodes back, this sequence is less concerned with being thrilling (or titillating, as the case may be) then with plunging you into the impressionistic viewpoint of Ani as she stumbles through the funhouse mirror of sex and depravity, with distorted images of naked bodies sprawling all over the place, formless words drifting over her, and time collapsing in on itself. Whenever we cut outside to Paul and Ray taking out guards and snooping into offices, the show is back on solid ground. Inside the party, nightmare logic rules. With last season, it felt like the camera indulged in the lurid and sleazy material at the same time that the text of the show condemned the male gaze. Here, because we see entirely through Ani’s warped, terrified mind, the sex and nudity on display offers no purchase, no enjoyment. It’s sex pitched as bestial horror.
If the show wasn’t working on a dream-logic level, Ani stumbling over the missing girl she’s been (sort of) pursuing since the first episode would feel like a coincidence too far. As is, the girl seeming to materialize in the bathroom while Ani is adrift on a torrent of nausea and awful memories (memories that confirm that, yes, Ani’s childhood in the hippy-dippy communes included rape. Gonna be some thinkpieces on that tomorrow, I’ll wager) fits with how things were being played out, as does the sudden onset of violence. Someone tries to get fresh with Ani and she lashes out, leaving two guys down and one almost certainly dead.
Our true detective squad flees the party, bullets ringing in the air behind them. They may have just pissed off the most powerful people in the state, but they managed to pull one girl from the fire, and Paul makes off with a file containing all the details of the shady land deal that Frank and various other crooked figures have been pursuing all season. The slow burn is igniting.