by Brendan Foley
“Time to wake up.”
The first and most obvious hurdle that the True Detective finale needed to clear was how utterly disengaging the Ben Caspere murder was as a central spine to the season. What began as the springboard into larger corruption and narrative convolution dragged along for so long that many viewers could barely even articulate how Caspere fit into the larger narrative by the end. And so the finale spends a whole lot of time and energy clarifying exactly what has been going down in the city of Vinci and how it relates to the tangled rat’s nest of sex clubs, bird heads, meth labs, and super, super sad country singers.
So the finale confirms that yes, the random city aide from the third episode was indeed the daughter from the jewel store heist in 1992. And the random set photographer from that same episode is, in fact, the brother from that robbery, and he is the one who killed Caspere and shot Ray (why he would steal and keep the infamous bird mask is not explained in any way).
These are fine reveals and revelations, so far as your standard noir narrative is concerned (and in case you didn’t know that Nic Pizzolatto wants you aware of what he’s doing, this episode recreates the famous Sunset Blvd. opening shot, right down to the angle and positioning of the floating corpse). The problem is, the finale is built around narrative payoffs to a narrative a touch too convoluted for the answers to truly satisfy (I watched this finale with my brother who admitted, after a long info-dump scene, that he still wasn’t clear on why certain guilty parties did certain things) and emotional payoffs for relationships that never quite clicked.
Take Jordan for example. This week, Frank sends her to Venezuela, promising to follow her shortly thereafter as soon as he kills some motherfuckers and gets some money. She pushes back, he plays the callous gangster, she shrugs it off. Thoughts of Jordan pervade Frank’s mind the entire episode, climaxing with him sharing a final conversation with her as he stumbles to a lonely, bloody death in the desert.
I can see how that relationship makes sense on the chalkboard, or in the notebook, or the chalk-sketch or whatever the hell Pizzolatto uses to arc this stuff. But Vince Vaughn and Kelly Reilly had something like anti-chemistry throughout this entire season. He only occasionally seemed comfortable with the mannered dialogue, and Reilly never cracked it. What’s more, the show had nothing for Jordan to do besides mope about Frank. Hinging a huge portion of the finale around that relationship would have worked like gangbusters had that relationship been something worth investing in. It wasn’t and so, despite Vaughn turning in some of the best work he’s done on the show (if not some of the best work he’s ever done, period), the final tragedy of Frank Semyon didn’t hit me in the heart like it was aiming to.
But if you want to talk about someone singlehandedly elevating material, you have to start with Colin Farrell. Again, Ray’s relationship with his son has been a constant. Everything about Ray’s actions tonight, from going off-plan to see him one last time (and allowing the bad guys a chance to spot his car and tag it) to his final recording, all was set-up long ago and played beautifully by Farrell. But the kid was such an uninteresting lump, none of Ray’s long, touching speeches about how much he loved the kid and admired him, none of it registered. If the show had allowed for at least one spark of true connection between Ray and his boy, Ray’s final death among the trees, with the unsent final message, would’ve hit like a sledgehammer. As is, it’s still well-executed (heh) and affecting enough, but that comes down to just how strong Farrell has been across all eight episodes.
I’m kind of frontloading this thing with what bothered me about the finale, because on the whole, I did like it. It didn’t have the desperate, kinetic energy of last week’s installment, settling instead for a doom-soaked descent into tragedy. All the narrative threads collapse into one another in a satisfying fashion, and many of the explanations and revelations work well.
And Pizzolatto goes full noir with his conclusion. Frank’s refusal to ever compromise and to make a show catches up with him, as the Mexicans he reneged on by blowing up his own clubs drag him to the desert and drive a knife through him. Ray is shot to pieces beneath the trees that look like giants (just as not-dead ghost/dream-dad Fred Ward cautioned) and his final message to his son goes unsent. He is framed for all the crimes committed in the name of Vinci progress, leaving his father to mourn and his ex-wife grasping the paternity test that proved that Ray was, in fact, the father of her son. Paul has a highway dedicated to him while his mother, girlfriend, and child watch on. And Vinci continues to roll on, Mayor Chessani’s son stepping in as mayor (after the original edition got Sunset Blvd.’d) and the surviving guilty continuing to prosper in the Vinci and with the rail corridor. The final moments remind us that this is a story about story, with Ani, Jordan, and Ani’s baby (fathered by Ray) handing the story off to a reporter and then vanishing into a Venezuelan festival.
Was it a good enough ending to justify the ride? I don’t know. I’m not entirely clear as to why people would continue to invest hours of their lives invested in watching and yapping about a show they hated after two or three episodes, but whatever. For me, True Detective season two has had plenty of great moments, plenty of frustrating moments, and plenty of sequences stuck right in between. The finale was of a piece with that, bolstered as always by the exceptional work by Farrell, Rachel McAdams, and even Vaughn tonight.
Was it a great season of television? At times. There were moments, and even sustained stretches, where I found season two to be the equal or superior to the first season, even if it lacked a transcendent figurehead like Matthew McConaughey as Rust Cohle. But then there were times (including most every scene with Vaughn and Reilly for much of the run) where the show spun completely out of control and you had to figure that some crucial factor had gone missing.
(The easy explanation a lot of people have been going with is that Pizzolatto screwed up by having this season directed by multiple people instead of collaborating closely with a single director. Maybe that could have swayed things, but the material that worked weakest this season [Frank’s gangster shit, the obsession with fatherhood, the overly-tangled plotting] would have been there regardless of who was behind the lens.)
Maybe if the season had capped out with an undeniably classic conclusion, the critical consensus would shift. Maybe people would look back at the whole eight hours and appreciate how the pieces fit together, and forgive the wheel-spinning or misdirected story threads because the whole would be so strong.
Instead, the finale was of a piece with the show. It was messy and maddening, but also gorgeous and thrilling and at times outright moving and haunting. As Ani and Jordan loaded up their weapons, their child, and vanished into the crowd, I found myself satisfied with the journey I’d taken, however bumpy the road had been. It was a shame, in fact, to wake up.