Matt Smith reviews the fifth episode of True Detective….
True Detective, in an ironic turn considering the nature of its two protagonists’ jobs, is the first series where I’ve had to avoid spoilers. What really did tear the two detectives apart? What is the truth, and what are the lies amongst the testimony from each of them.
With characters all different shades of grey, with moral boundaries crossed while still perhaps in some form of right instead of wrong, it’s very easy to classify True Detective as a neo-noir played out on our TV screens. Characters stuck in situations of their own making, all on a headlong course for their inevitable fate. While many genres have that (the romcom being the most obvious opposite), True Detective is so bleak you can’t help but feel sorry for the characters at the same time you consider how loathsome they truly are. It’s the mark of a morally complex narrative, in this case along with its slow burning style, which makes it perfect for television.
Indeed, some of the visuals had the same quality and feel as other examples of similar works. Sin City springs to mind as Cohle and Hart keep on the tail of their suspect. That slight feeling out being out of place, a literal shakiness giving the sequence a strange, fast-paced haze that truly makes you feel like you are just along for the ride.
The tension of this week’s episode is so palpable; it deserves its own special mention. Sequences leading up to the drug house and the cross cutting finale to the old school are full of creepy visuals. Music in the background never pushes itself too far forward to distract, instead helping the fingers and fists clench. Congratulations to the props department are essential also. Something about those wooden, telltale objects is incredibly unsettling, along with the knowledge that Rust Cohle may somehow have even more to hide.
Nic Pizzolatto and Cary Fukunaga, the writing and directing arms of the show, are obviously a good team and the way information is given to the audience is impeccable. With a perhaps deceptively simple premise, they’ve managed to squeeze every ounce of tension and excitement for this show out by letting the audience know the right amount of information (and be given the right lies) every step of the way. Care for the characters wouldn’t happen on the part of the viewer if there were a misstep, so it’s remarkable that a TV series (even one as comparatively short as True Detective) has perfectly managed the plotting in such an exciting fashion.
It’s telling that in my review notes for this episode, half the points are not comments on the show but merely my own questions and theories about what’s going to happen. With the true antagonism behind Cohle and Hart’s relationship slowly revealing itself, as everything else in the background quietly works away, it’d be easy for a show to lose focus and become merely plot. With the episode ending with an ironic commendation of the two characters’ bravery, the show is falling deeper into despair as we see the sad truth hidden amongst all the lies. And if it carries on like it does, I couldn’t be happier about it.
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Originally published March 25, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
