True Detective Season Two*

Have you seen my baseball?

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0114868/

 

That's my main issue with it. I also don't care for Vaughn or Farrell. It's not looking good for me this season.

 

Not really. S1 started with two cops working together on a case they've already been assigned and most of the time was spend in banter between the two leads while am interview narrative ran in parallel. In S2, we start with at least four different narratives without a clue how they connect until the very end of the episode, which made it disorienting.

S1 had likable, if flawed characters, as leads, both of whom delivered fantastic performances from the beginning and had me hooked to see what would happen next. S2 has no immediately likable characters or particularly memorable acting performances. Indeed many of the character foibles seemed hackneyed and overdone with some clunky dialog to boot. It Left me ambivalent about seeing the next ep.

Again, I'm just voicing my impressions of the first episode, which is all anyone can do (except the critics who have seen the first three). I'm definitely still watching, mainly because I liked S1 (flaws and all), but had this been the first episode of season 1, I might have been wavering in resolved at this stage.

 

Brown is a terrific actor. He was brilliant in Deadwood. Glad to see him here.

 

Never noticed her hair

 

I liked it.
The four backdrops of the main characters flowed well.
Sure made California look unsavory.

 

It would seem that given the setting and the vibe of season two that comparisons to Lynch were inevitable, but I didn't really see much overlap with his style in this first episode except maybe the woman singing at the bar, which still (to me) lacked Lynch's hallucinatory flourishes and felt more like a dive bar with a somewhat heightened atmosphere rather than a Lynchian locale. There's such an authentic aura that Lynch creates in his movies/shows that I don't really consider a moody, ambient soundtrack and some overhead shots of Los Angeles an effective comparison to his spirit in any real sense, at least not the way these things were presented in the premiere episode. Additionally, Lynch stories are usually somewhat abstract, fixated primarily on shady characters as opposed to shady contracts--even Mulholland Dr doesn't spend too much time dealing with the fine print. Lynch is also frequently surreal but rarely psychoanalytical. The story set up for this season of True Detective is so far rooted in land ventures, development deals and city corruption, and the protagonists all seem primarily motivated by past events.

Overall, I was engaged, but not that impressed. Unless I was missing something, I found it odd that McAdams' character kept randomly running into family members based purely on where her (seemingly random) investigations were taking her--it felt kind of sloppy to me. Additionally, the three investigators might represent very different principles and backgrounds, but they all give off the same cold, damaged vibe. I'm sure as the season progresses they will seek refuge and understanding in one another through a sense of shared mutual pain, but on the other hand it might have been more engaging to set them up as very different personalities so a genuine sense of conflict through character could be seen on the horizon. One thing that made season one work was how different the two leads were even if one of the leads was made that way due to a tragedy.

 

nice to see rachel mcadam playing something different.

her introduction and the allusion to her desire for kinky sex was also quite interesting, we'll see if it comes into play later on with farrell, or vaughn of kitsch.

 

Interesting start. I'll give it some latitude. I'm wondering if I will actually like any of the characters. The charm of Season 1 was that you could actually root the lead characters in spite of their terrible flaws. I'm not sure if that element will emerge here.

 

Don't worry. I've read on certain sites that the story does get 'occult-y' after a time.

 

I was apprehensive going into E1 which we watched last night. Reasonably well acted, and engaging enough to keep our attention. Frankly this time of year we are desperate for something decent to watch late at night. So it's all in the timing.

 

Do you figure it has to do with McAdams' father and the missing woman? I feel like the show kind of botched that information dump. Why not make McAdams a little more proactive by having her actually seek out her sister instead of coincidentally bumping into her during a botched raid? Why not have McAdams simply visit her father to report on her sister (and maybe see something that would later turn out to be suspicious)? It would make her character a little more of a "parental" figure, a little less of a bungling investigator. It also would have made her character a less drab than the others.

 

Really enjoyed it, probably because I made a mental note not to compare it to Season 1, but rather let it stand as a new series. Very entertaining, much more than anything resembling cop/mystery series' on network.

And I'll never understand the requirement that characters have to be likable has always been a head scratcher for me. Interesting, yes. But I have no need to be able to identify, or root, for a character in order to enjoy the show. Not trying to make friends with them.

Looking forward to the rest of the season.

 

Don't think there was anything coincidental about running into her sister. She organized the raid because she knew her sister was going to be there.

 

She did? I must have missed that part. To me she looked genuinely surprised to see her sister there. Can you remind me of the scene where it's made clear that her sister was the impetus behind the raid?

 

There isn't a scene. I'm just guessing. The raid was so weak, and it would seem that being a cop she could get a handle on where her sister was, what she was up to, and this might be a clumsy way of scaring her straight. It just seems way too coincidental, but of course, I could very well be wrong. I'm going to watch again so if I pick up on anything else I'll report back.

 

It was mentioned in the dialog during the raid. The sound mix is pretty bad on the show and it was easy to miss. I think.
I like shows where the main characters aren't so nice and unreliable. Hell, I'm not sleeping with them. We enjoyed the first episode.

 

Really?! I missed that, but perhaps not subconsciously

 

Can you elaborate? Are you saying when they busted in she was actively looking for her sister or something? What was the dialogue that gave you this impression?

What's funny is that (in spite of what I wrote in my last post) I would almost consider the raid sequence to be even weaker if McAdams did know her sister was there because of the way it was executed. It would suggest she organized a SWAT team for the pure motive of basically checking up on her sister. I guess either way it came off as clumsy writing to me, made all the more clumsy by her randomly being fed info about a missing woman which happens to tie into her father. It's like something out of a really terrible Jonathan Kellerman novel.

 

I heard her mention it during the raid. As I said above the sound mix is pretty bad and it was easily missed. But it was obvious (to me anyway) that she set up the raid to get to her sister. The way the show sets up its plot is not unlike a lot of film noir I've seen. Random characters who have some relationship to one another that will be revealed as time goes on, or one character has a past that catches up to them. I'm content to just go with it.

 

Heard her mention what exactly? If you didn't hear it verbatim, that's fine. I'm just asking generally what dialogue gave you the impression that she was there for her sister (I caught this episode during a free preview and now I can't re-watch the scene). The more I think about it, the more I feel like I remember her saying something like "where is she?" so it definitely would validate your point (I could just be making that up though).

But like I said I'm not sure it did her character any favors because of the way it played out--McAdams came off as kind of clueless as to what was going on. It's not exactly realistic to bust down someone's door without proper cause so just because her sister was there wouldn't be a sufficient reason to raid the place from a legal perspective--it's actually the kind of thing that could get you fired.

Are you suggesting here that the pasts of the three investigators are intertwined? A provocative notion that will hopefully play out.

Nevertheless, the fact that the show exhibits some generic tenants of classic noir isn't really an issue to me. The issue to me is the cause and effect that took McAdams from one place to the next and the fact that the three investigators are all sort of similar in a general sense. They're all serious and damaged and destructive and apparently not very good at their jobs based on the events of the premiere. What made season one work was that one detective was damaged and serious, but really good at his job, while the other was sort of "normal" and a little shallow and average at his job.

 

I caught that vibe...that the raid was a botch because their legal grounds became shakey and the cops seemed to eye her motivations
It's there.

The spa retreat is probably a sex recruitment thing for the powerful with occult slayings used to mask the criminals. Guesstimation only.

It would be cool that the last shot of the 1st show is one of reluctant recognition between the three cops.

 

Said bobdd: it's actually the kind of thing that could get you fired.

Yeah, like flashing your badge at someone's house and proceeding to smack them around with brass knuckles

 

When she see's her, the sister is surprised, but the cop is not. Then she takes her outside and the cop tells her sister "I ran this op because I heard a rumour".

 

Thank you, that's it.

She did say something like "where is she" or "I knew it" when she saw he sister. Plus what sberger said above.
I didn't see Season 1 (can't stomach Matthew M.)so I have nothing to weight this one against. I really don't care if it's at all realistic. For some of these shows, the less they try to make sense the more fun it is. For me, anyway.