Streaming [HBO] True Detective

[Warsaw]

In the end, looking at it from a pure character driven piece, it was easily one of the best things I've seen on the small screen. Both Marty in the hospital, and then Rust looking at the night sky were some brilliant moments of acting. McConaughey will get the Emmy, but Woody deserves as much of the credit.

The whole thing with the Childresses was suitably creepy as ****, but still remained as plot devices, and nothing more. It was a great ride, but definitely not genre defining or anywhere as important as the journey of the leads. I won't lie, I was hoping for some of the otherworldly Lovecraft/Chambers horror to find it's way into the show. Never quite got there, but in reality it was never about that sort of stuff, even if the Internet loved theorizing about it.

An excellent series (will only ever compare it other miniseries) that would easily find itself amongst the top handful of its kind. Incredible acting. Gorgeous Directing. Smartly written. What more could you want?

 

[democritus]

I have to say, I really enjoyed that mini-series.
Superb acting, stunning visuals, top-notch concept.

However, I did find that the second half was a bit of a let down. I didn't wish for or expect True Detective to fall into formulaic tropes; this series has never been about that. However, at the same time I don't feel that you can incorporate that much symbolism and structure something to feel so thematically huge, only to let it collapse in such a straight-forward and unimpressive finale.

Maybe there's the warning about those expectations in the first episode; we are all too happy to manipulate the narrative to suit our agenda. Yet, there were so many innuendos and intimations that made it almost unavoidable not to do this.

I did notice there was a bit of cheeky wink to those expecting a twist, North By Northwest on the television and Childress adopting Mason's voice made me expect something typically Hitchcockian was coming up. Another subtle troll there perhaps.

We were gently pushed down the rabbit hole and yanked back up again and I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. In terms of plot, so much remains unresolved. Perhaps we'll see this explored in the next series. Perhaps we won't.

I guess, you could say the character arc was the real plot here. Rust and Marty finally gets some closure so why shouldn't we? We were trying to solve a mystery, whilst our detectives were just trying to work a case and sort their shit out. A great series makes you think. True Detective may frustrate but at least it provokes a response. More of a Twin Peaks than a Lost.

 

[Quokka]

Really enjoyed the series as a whole and similar to what others have said I think the plot is there more to give us somewhere to get to know the Cohle and Hart rather than solve a crime.

 

[Catfish Alley]

Really enjoyed the series as a whole and similar to what others have said I think the plot is there more to give us somewhere to get to know the Cohle and Hart rather than solve a crime.

And the creator did say that right from the start. I almost feel like it was the end of a series but it was just a season - and a brilliant one. Can't wait to see where it goes.

I saw a advertisement for this show late last year and I made sure to note when it started because I thought it looked interesting. Certainly wasn't disappointed

 

[bok_party]

Pretty satisfied overall. As a proud atheist I wasn't too fond of Rust's little near death experience, but certainly not enough to kill it for me.


I guess you're referring to the bad guys' voice echoing all around them? Pretty stupid but with the set up of the surrounds, I guess you can kind of accept/forgive it.

I thought it was more like rust was a fly stuck in a spiders web. The voice was just the spaghetti monster speaking and it echoing through the place.

Also, I think someone mentioned it before but I think that's a great idea that the yellow king is involved throughout the country/Deep South for example and each season is respective detectives solving a case that will eventually bring the FBI or something similar to finding him.

 

[Connoisseur]

What was that wormhole thing at the 38 minute mark? Is it related/connected to the spiral we've seen popping up across the series? I presume it has something to do with the mythology of where the writer took inspiration from for this show.

 

[FRUMPY]

I think the fact I started reading this thread and other things on this show led me to finding the last 3 episodes a bit flat. Instead of just watching it I was looking for clues/theories and reading too much into scenes. I only started reading this thread after about 3 or 4 episodes. Sort of think would have been better to watch the series for what it is and not try to read too much into it. Looking back now some of the over the top theories are a bit of a laugh.

Sent from my GT-I9305T using Tapatalk

 

[Unknown Identity]

So, my internet was down when I got home tonight so I couldn't download it.

After a few hours I decided to sweet talk my ex into letting me over and set it to download on my smuggled in laptop while I distracted her.

If she gets pregnant I'll force that my son be called Rust.

The finale was amazing, just saying.

 

[DIG]

That scene where Rust was chasing the bad dude thru the bush, then the maze, his voice coaxing him on, the stick figures gradually getting bigger and bigger until he was almost entangled in them like an insect in a web (mummified victims encountered on the way), was just incredible - the fight scene at the end was almost a let down after that.

Brilliant show, McConaughy was incredible. Some of the dialogue was the best I've ever heard, up there with the best of The Wire.

 

[Sterge]

They did say all along the series was about the journey not the ending. The people looking for all kinds of plot twists and conspiracies were never going to find any.

At the end of the day imo this was a master class in storytelling wrapped up as a simple whodunnit

 

[muttley45]

Great finale to a great series, but i bet there are so many disappointed internet detectives out there at the moment, i admit i was sucked into half the theories floating around, and there still seemed to be something fishy about old maggie baby, but it was what it was

 

[Catfish Alley]

Great finale to a great series, but i bet there are so many disappointed internet detectives out there at the moment

I laugh at those people I have to admit I never thought anything strange about Maggie. People were led to distraction by great storytelling.

 

[Quokka]

I hope they don't link future seasons into the yellow king, for me part of the idea was about having to accept partial wins and not expecting absolutes, kind of like they say at the end one more bit of light with the darkness always around. I know Hart also talks about other cops getting them but the locations was the other big character in the show and I think they have a better chance of a good season two if they go with a completely new setting, characters and opening case.

 

[RobbyRoy]

I hope they don't link future seasons into the yellow king, for me part of the idea was about having to accept partial wins and not expecting absolutes, kind of like they say at the end one more bit of light with the darkness always around. I know Hart also talks about other cops getting them but the locations was the other big character in the show and I think they have a better chance of a good season two if they go with a completely new setting, characters and opening case.

Spot on. And it's about the detectives, not the crimes. So the main aim should be for them to get the closure at the end, as Marty did (Rust not so much, but I don't think that guy could ever experience closure). I like to think Rust probably got better and went back out there to find the Yellow King. But let us move on and change it up completely.

 

[Jobe Watson]

Only disappointing aspect was they didn't delve in to and develop the mythos of the Yellow King and the symbolism as much as they could have. In the end, it was just some crazy inbred hillybilly who was linked to the cult killing people off his own bat. They could've gone much deeper with it. Still, as they said, it isn't about the destination but the journey. They didn't give us all the answers, which I liked.

Just as an aside, I found it laughable that Marty was able to link the green eared Spaghetti Monster with the recently painted house from 17 years ago. I mean... who gets paint on their ears? And how did that suddenly click for Marty after all these years? Just seems the writers were looking for a quick way for the detectives to find out the identity of the green eared dude and that was the best they could come up with.

Characters were amazing, script was amazing, acting was amazing. Cinematography, music, effects, all fantastic. I'd still rate Breaking Bad above it, just for pure longevity and quality over 5 seasons, but this came pretty close. Hard to see how they'll match it in Season 2... you wouldn't think we could see a character as unique as Rust again.

 

[bourbons]

Pretty decent finale. Lawnmower man was creepy as hell. The carcosa scene was amazing, those stick bundles getting bigger and bigger, eventually supporting mummified bodies. The visuals in this show are consistently amazing and dread-inducing.

Any theories about the vortex/universe that Rust saw in Carcosa? Rust's 4th dimensional beings looking down on our flat circle of time or just another one his halucinations?

Strange that there was never any tie-in with Marty's daughter. Even now knowing that the drawing on the kitchen wall was just a production co-incidence, pretty weird that nothing more came from showing the audience her other drawings, dolls and behaviour.

As good as the show was as a whole, for me it definitely peaked around the middle, with episode 4 and that mammoth tracking shot being the highlight. But even the flatter parts are still better than 90% of everything else on TV so can't really complain. I'd like to see the Yellow King motif continue into subsequent seasons, don't know if they'll go there though. You'd almost have to set in the south again, the environment was such a pervasisve part of the show's texture and provided many of the most striking visuals. Can't wait to see what they do, tough act to follow.

...
There was nothing explicit about that.
Obviously certain parts were left to interpretation, people can make of those bits what they will.

even by the high level set by fans of this show, youre reading way too much in to things.

Nothing explicit re: maggie, but I think the time spent on the eldest daughter qualifies as one hell of a red herring.

There was only one problem with the finale,

Spoiler

the green house/green ears link that led them to Errol.
It would have made far more sense for it to have been green earmuffs, especially since both times we have seen Errol he has been on the lawnmower.

Agree with that, the green paint being the final link in the chain seemed kinda silly and something that they could have uncovered in '95. And how the hell does someone paint both their ears lol?? A few specks maybe, nothing that a fleeing child would notice. [edit: Jobe Watson beat me to it^]

..
However, I did find that the second half was a bit of a let down. I didn't wish for or expect True Detective to fall into formulaic tropes; this series has never been about that. However, at the same time I don't feel that you can incorporate that much symbolism and structure something to feel so thematically huge, only to let it collapse in such a straight-forward and unimpressive finale.
...

Agree with that too. Not that the series wasn't great for what is was, but there was probably a fraction too much bigger picture/symbolism stuff for it to be an essentially by-the-numbers serial killer case.

 

[Sterge]

Not Sure if this has been posted but

"This is really early, but I'll tell you [it's about] hard women, bad men and the secret occult history of the United States transportation system,"

 

[hawks realist]

Awesome show but it felt a little bit rushed to wrap it up in 8 shows.Even another 2 episodes would have been good to just tie up a few things but i guess they ended it this way so people would form their own conclusions.

 

[Vincent Chase]

"For me as a storyteller, I want to follow the characters and the story through what they organically demand. And it would have been the easiest thing in the world to kill one or both of these guys," Pizzolatto told HitFix. "I even had an idea where something more mysterious happened to them, where they vanished into the unknown and Gilbough and Papania had to clean up the mess and nobody knows what happens to them. Or it could have gone full blown supernatural. But I think both of those things would have been easy, and they would have denied the sort of realist questions the show had been asking all along. To retreat to the supernatural, or to take the easy dramatic route of killing a character in order to achieve an emotional response from the audience, I thought would have been a disservice to the story. What was more interesting to me is that both these men are left in a place of deliverance, a place where even Cohle might be able to acknowledge the possibility of grace in the world."

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplayl...dings-why-it-wasnt-neatly-wrapped-up-20140310

 

[Quokka]

What was that wormhole thing at the 38 minute mark? Is it related/connected to the spiral we've seen popping up across the series? I presume it has something to do with the mythology of where the writer took inspiration from for this show.

For me it was Chole hallucinating like he has before and it's the spiral from the case but also standing there he's feeling like he's finally at the centre of the case, which has been most of his life for years, the vortex I suppose, so it's finally spiralled him down to that one moment. Just my 2 cents no idea if it's in the ballpark or not.

 

[Sal_Paradise]

Any theories about the vortex/universe that Rust saw in Carcosa? Rust's 4th dimensional beings looking down on our flat circle of time or just another one his halucinations?

Not that I necessarily agree or disagree, but this is one of the theories I came across that a few people seemed to accept.

I hate to spoil this for all you guys but you need to do some research on the actual book the yellow king and on Corcosa and the entire H.P. Lovecraft world.

The yellow king author was an influence on lovecraft.

Corcosa is a city on a planet in another universe, its a universe that if we visited would instantly drive us insane, (so would seeing the play "The Yellow King").

The only way to access this other universe is through ancient incantations, occult activity and performing abominations which twist our reality to the point that a gateway opens, that gateway would lead to that other universe.

What Rust saw was that gateway, chances are you have to be a bit clairvoyant to even sense it but Rust is a fairly deep and "sensitive" (as in clairvoyant) character.

I also know that the writer is ok with you thinking its not real, in fact he would prefer most people think it was a hallucination of Rusts, the "reality" of the show is that Rust saw a portal to another dimension, created from sheer pain, terror and horror beyond normal human experience but the writer knows that the underlying supernatural references might turn off the hardcore "detective" type TV watchers, in other words he wants the skeptics to remain skeptical but wants to tip the hat to the sci fi/horror lovers out there, the ones that know better.

Btw, all these ideas were also used by Clive Barker when he made Hellraiser, the idea that pain was a whole other dimension and that we could access that dimension by creating abominations, in hellraisers case it was the lament configuration, in the True Detectives case it was the occult torture and killing of people, same ideas.

 

[Zach Package]

it's getting panned a bit on the net, i f**king loved it.

The cinematography in TD is absolutely second to none

 

[TheLad!]

people were getting annoyed that the references from earlier (flat circle) didn't reappear,

that final fight scene was held in the middle of a pit, so that if anyone ever was at the top of that thing they would look down and see the flat circle, it didn't abandon its own mythology it was just more subtle.

those sci-fi nuts can GTFO it was never going to be about that and if thats how it ended i would've been so mad, (like i was at the ending of Prestige) you can't finish a straight up and down reality show in ****ing scifi or magic, that would've been a copout

 

[djrossie16]

It was an excellent final episode. I feel that the dialogue at the hospital at the end of the show will really resonate with me as the days go by. Some really deep stuff. Look initially it did feel like a bit of a let down because frankly the show's conspiracy theories and discourse had gotten outta hand. I think if you look at it as an eight episode exercise it was superbly done. The partnership between the two detectives will go down as one of the best buddy combos in tv history.
The highlight of the episode was of course the chase leading into those catacomb like eerie structures. Imagine if the two detectives had been taken out. I'm thinking that could have been an interesting way to end it as well. It certainly would have been memorable.
The show could have probably used a a couple more episodes to explore more in depth a couple of characters but ultimately it really excelled in showcasing the brilliance and flaws of these two detectives.

 

[UpForGrabs]

My spoiler-free life over the past two weeks helped me insanely well. I went into the final episodes with no ideas as to what could happen, no expectations, no crackpot theories.

And you know what? I thought the finale was just about as perfect an episode of television as there could be. That was the most spine-tingling and skin-crawling episode of television I can remember, and I have no problems whatsoever with the way it ended. It always comes back to me that as viewers we expect far too much of a story, and we expect shows to end how we think they're going to end...

Spoiler

I have no problem with the whole cult not being brought down. I have no problem with Cohle and Hart living at the end, or Cohle's speech at the close.

We shouldn't let our own expectations of what should happen drive our opinions if those expectations aren't met. To say that something's disappointing because it didn't end the way you thought it would? That's just plain odd to me.

Not trying to overhype the show but as a whole that was the best first season of any show I can remember. It's so far ahead of the rest of the field that I couldn't possibly think of something that would fit in #2.