Season two of True Detective came to an end last night, in a way that was at least consistent with the rest of the show to that point: It made very little sense. Nobody can explain it. The solution to the whodunit was not only banal but also predictable and had only a mild connection to the rest of the plot. The action was separate from the cause of the murder—the basic definition of a failed murder mystery. The murders were identified within the first twenty minutes, too, a way of acknowledging that the murder was totally tangential and that we should all just forget about it.
Season two of True Detective was a strange combination of slick overproduction and basic incompetence. What AppleMaps was to technology releases, this season of True Detective was to television shows. And yet I wrote a good review of it—the first three episodes, anyway. Go ahead and read it. In my own defense, I did point out that the show basically had no working plot. A few episodes later, when a coherent plot still hadn't emerged and the action had grown wilder and wilder in its absurd inconsequence, my colleague Anne Peele and I had the following email exchange:
Anna: I know you were high on the first three episodes, but there's no way you're still enjoying it, right?
Me: Correct. Actually, there's a pretty substantial difference, I find, between binge watching them and just watching them.
Anna: You have more time to think about how shitty they are between episodes. Last night was melodrama on Klonopin.
"Melodrama on Klonopin" is just about right. Without the structure of plot—and the finale revealed that there never was a meaningful plot structure—it all just seemed like what it was, one scene after another. The low point to me was Vince Vaughn's line "That's one off the bucket list, a Mexican standoff with real Mexicans," but one could debate endlessly about the low point of Season 2 of True Detective. The pointless orgy. The tacky blue diamonds. The tear gas. There are just so many options.
Of course there was a certain sense to it, although it wasn't the kind that you expect to find in a genre show, and one that was mostly hidden by the fact that everybody who watched True Detective was expecting a show about detectives. Season 2 was really an ensemble drama, with intersecting plots, about the nature of fatherly abandonment. That's the only way it makes sense.
It owes a great deal to The Departed, Scorsese's great film about the Boston mob. At the end of all the male intergenerational struggle, the younger criminal asks the mob boss who has betrayed him, "Is that what this is about? All that murdering and fucking, and no sons?" Every single storyline of True Detective asks that same question. The murder turns out to be abandoned children revenging their dead father. Then there is the infertility of Frank Semyon, the paternity test and tortured uncertainty of Ray Velocro, the unwanted pregnancy of Woodrugh, with Ani Bezzerides' child at the end. And here, we see the actual craft at work in Season Two of True Detective, because those plots intertwine perfectly, maybe too perfectly. When Semyon kills his former mentor, the Russian declares, just in case anybody failed to pick up the threads, "You were like a son to me."
So there is a way that True Detective works: as an elaborate tone poem about absent fathers and lost sons. If that's what you were looking for, the show almost functions. But if you were looking for a working television murder mystery, it was as sad and adrift as Vince Vaughn walking bleeding through the desert without even any funny lines for shade.
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