Matt Smith reviews the second episode of True Detective…
True Detective, especially this week, is all about subjectivity. Who’s telling the right story, whose point of view and recollection can be trusted. Both views running parallel are rarely shown, so the show, while not holding your hand, certainly tells you where to look. Do we go with the focused detective who’s constantly on the job but is, by his own admittance, a drink and drug abuser? Or the detective who’s distracted by marriage problems and the trouble caused by his partner?
That’s what True Detective shows us this week; with the revelations on the past case coming from both Rust Cohle and Marty Hart meaning the question of what actually happened has to be asked. How reliable is any of this, coming from two sources that maintain they don’t exactly see eye-to-eye? Two opposing ways of thinking, two very different characters thrust together. It’s the classic cop pair, in that they’re a terrible pair. While Hart seems unfocused on whatever’s in front of him (he seems to use one thing as an excuse to get away, only to go off and try a third thing instead), Cohle clings to the case for dear life. Cohle just tries to survive, while Hart just lives his life.
Another set of differences to come to the front is the amount of self awareness. While that’s Cohle’s MO, the confidence he has in knowing himself meaning he can go about his life, Hart seems to replace it with self-rationalisation. While that may sound like Hart is the character who’s worse off, his life seems happier and better for it (for the most part). It’s these conflicts, both with the characters themselves and the ideas they represent, which make the show interesting.
Who are the two police officers interviewing them in the future timeline? Does Hart want to help them; considering he seems a little ireful that someone else has taken on his old case? Yet more mysteries to solve, along with the mystery of Cohle’s daughter. Details of what happened to her seem to run parallel to the serial killer case they’re chasing, just to keep us hooked. Not with our own theories, but just the unknowing of what happened in the distant past, and the not-so-distant past.
All in all, the series defies any criticism of the actual case due to the slow movement of the story telling. We haven’t seen enough to say if the case is worthy of a detective show. It’s fitting that one of the first shots of this episode is a slow-motion shot of the characters staring at a sculpture, as the audience wait on tenterhooks, enraptured by what’s on our screens.
But at the same time, I can understand if some people have switched off. This isn’t a show for those wanting a bit of action and excitement with a new case every week (which can be found in, say, the episodes of Elementary or, going even further to the other end of the scale, something like Hawaii Five-0). True Detective is for those who want to concentrate and take in every little detail of these characters, if not the case. It’s so far been about the two characters butting heads. It’d be nothing if not for the richly written characters and two leading performances at the forefront of all the advertising for the show.
It looks fantastic, with the eye-catching colours of the decrepit places the two detectives visit coming through in greens and browns. The use of antlers and the aforementioned sculpture provide something for us as an audience to remember, but the use of antlers merely brings to mind Hannibal, another show in that pantheon of the modern great US drama. Whether they have any significant symbolic meaning or link to future plot developments within the series, True Detective again has me stumped, but perhaps not in a way it’d like.
It’s still the great show I said it was last week. With the amount of stories told with this set up, it’s inevitable that some similarities are going to come up. But it’s where it counts, in the character relationships, the performances and slow burn of the mysteries where True Detective gets it right. But am I telling the truth? Perhaps I’m leaning too far one way already. After all, this is only a critic’s subjective view of a show. I won’t tell you where to go for your TV, but I will say that after these first two episodes (especially the stellar debut) I can say I’m officially hooked.
Matt Smith – follow me on Twitter.
Originally published March 4, 2014. Updated April 11, 2018.
