by Brendan Foley
I’ve seen some people refer to tonight’s True Detective as a “make or break” episode. We’ve reached the exact midpoint of the season and the people who have thus far gone ungripped by the goings on in Vinci have staked out this as the point-of-no-return for the show to hook them. Last season’s midpoint climaxed with the insane, eight-minute long tracking shot of Rust Cohle trying to escape a residential area while it descended into apocalyptic violence, a sequence which sealed the deal on True Detective as appointment viewing.
If this episode four can’t compete with that one in terms of filmmaking prowess, it makes up for it with sheer, unadulterated excess. Our true detective squad, closing in on their best lead so far (a drug-dealing pimp whose girlfriend was spotted hocking Caspere’s possessions post-murder) lead a posse into what they think will be a standard infiltration, only to be met with waves of machine gun fire. Heads are blown off, meth labs explode, SUVs crash into buses, mobs of innocent bystanders are machine-gunned to pieces. It’s a nightmare, an explosion of urban warfare that leaves characters and audience both gasping for air and stunned into silence once the last round spits off the pavement.
If there is a knock to be made against season one’s episode four climax, it’s that it was an incredible sequence in microcosm that served no larger purpose to the show, practically a minor movie unto itself. Rust and Marty Hart never had to deal with the consequences of setting off a race riot that decimated houses and left dozens injured and many dead. Here, the closing shots underline that all this carnage left literally at our true detectives’ feet will not be so easily cleared away. With the prime suspect dead, cops dead, bystanders dead, that’s a whole lot of mess to sort out.
The explosive finish was fitting, as tonight’s episode was geared entirely around the repressed and the buried bubbling up to the surface in destructive ways. Paul wakes up hungover to discover he went home with his Army buddy and “put out some fires last night”. His hotel is staked out by reporters demanding to know about his military past and his recent dalliances; his motorcycle was stolen; and, to top everything off, the girl who desperately tried to shake him out of her life turns up pregnant. Paul is getting more and more caged in, and he’s only pushing the bars in tighter on himself by trying to subsume everything about himself. After feeling like an auxiliary piece for the early goings, Paul is starting to feel like a real, vital part to the show and this episode featured stand-out work by Taylor Kitsch. Dude works best when he has as little dialogue to deal with as possible, and Paul’s silent, tearful cab ride away from his indulgence is great stuff.
Ani’s office affairs blow up and land her with a suspension, her gambling debts are now an active concern to the department and, oh yeah, her cult leader dad knew several of the principles from the investigation from way back.
And if the true detectives’ lives are falling apart around them, no one’s got shit on Frank Semyon this week. His recent losses have sent him back to the hustling life, demanding monthly tithes from various associates, starting up drug trade through the club he repossessed from the motherfucker whose teeth got ripped out last week, and generally carrying on like the very bad man that Frank had been insistent was long gone. Frank, even more than Paul, feels like he’s off on his own show much of the time, but Frank as chatty, schmoozing crime lord is a much better fit for Vince Vaughn than other episodes have had it. And character and actor both seem to acknowledge, maybe even relish, this return to safe ground. As much as Frank likes to talk about wanting to go straight and put the life behind him, it’s clear that indulging in his darker self is a relief after so much time spent walking the line. If the future he dreamed of is closed off, then why not go whole-hog into the past?
Even Kelly Reilly as Frank’s wife whose name I don’t know gets in on the trip down a mine-laden memory lane, when she tries to bring in an old boyfriend as an investor to one of Frank’s projects. Last year gave us the phrase “time is a flat circle” and this year is only reiterating it.
Which, I guess, it would. Because, uh, because of the circle. Of time.
The past takes on an almost physical palpability in tonight’s True Detective, seeping through every moment and every instant like a fungus manifested in the characters’ clothes and homes. It’s been a persistent theme all season, yes, but this episode brings the notion of the inextricability of the past from the present (and potential futures) to full boil. Everything is tainted, from the land plots that Ani and Ray discover (and which match a well-worn pattern on one of Frank’s club’s tables, suggesting that the criminal element of Vinci is very aware of, and very interested in, the tainted land), to the trees that Frank tries to grow on infertile ground at his home (Nic Pizzolatto never met a metaphor he wouldn’t happily club to death with a blunt bat) to the characters and all their attempts to cut bait with the past.
The City of Vinci, we are told again and again, is a toxic and useless vestigial lump on California, rotten all the way through to the core and producing nothing but bile and waste. Can there be any such thing as justice in a town, in a world, so suffused in the bleak? Ray does his damnedest to convince Ani that no, nothing can be done to fix what’s been broken from the start.
But, and this is important, Ray is the only main character who doesn’t have a new piece of dirt land on him this week. Instead, we see him give his father’s badge to the son that, by pretty much everyone’s guess, is really the child of the man who assaulted Ray’s wife whose name I also don’t know. Ray’s been through death and back, and is staring down a state investigation that will bring his every sin to light. Faced with these calamities, Ray doesn’t falter as he might once have done, but instead takes an object of the past (a disgraced item, at that) and turns it into something beautiful and proud that he and his son can share. Maybe the past isn’t a fungus, but a map, and maybe our heroes will be able to sift through the rubble and come out the other side.
And maybe, just maybe, Ray will become… The True Detective.
Or maybe the true detective will be the Conway Twitty guy from last week. I don’t know with this fucking show.