Ray’s not dead. We all knew he wasn’t going to kick the bucket, but True Detective spends about as much time resolving its cliffhanger as I just did: Ray’s not dead. The show moves right past it, so we might as well do the same. (There was, however, a good moment when Ray said that he’d been shot with rubber buckshot, before slyly adding “You know, like a cop would use.” This is a potentially interesting twist that is never brought up again.)
It’s hard to know what to make of this show. This season, at least. Nic Pizzolatto is still figuring out what he’s doing, and honestly I’m losing faith that he’s going to have a eureka moment. It doesn’t help that “Maybe Tomorrow” has a title that implies things will get better, just now now. It seems that, much like Frank Semyon, Pizzolatto is trying to go straight. He dabbles in surrealism with the opening dream sequence, which is a loving homage to Blue Velvet-era David Lynch, even down to the casting of Fred Ward as Ray’s father, Ward being the character actor who most strikingly resembles Lynch. The dream is “Tomorrow”‘s most interesting segment – except for one near the end, which we’ll get to – because once it ends, we get to see what a straightforward procedural looks like from the guy who came up with Rust Cohle.
So what does that look like? Shit, I’ll tell you when I find out. Pizzolatto knows the beats he has to hit, and he hits them, more or less successfully (but whoever fact-checks his hard-boiled dialogue needs to tell him that no cop, anywhere, ever, says “prost”). All four of True Detective‘s main characters are obfuscatory and elusive, which is fine, but that’s translated over to the narrative, which is…less fine. The intricacies of the Caspere case notwithstanding, True Detective is trying to have its cake and give philosophical monologues about it too. The show consistently puts its characters in tight, claustrophobic spaces (notice how there are never less than four people crammed into an office), then holds the audience at arm’s length. It invites us in but seems inconvenienced by our presence. The one time “Maybe Tomorrow” ventures out of its comfort zone and into a wide-open space – the palatial mansion owned by the mayor of Vinci, who I mistakenly identified as a judge in last week’s review – it’s populated by mere facsimiles of people. There’s a woman cutting pictures of models out of magazines and a man who affects a fake accent.
True Detective treats its tight spaces the way it treats Paul’s military background: a place where you can find yourself, a kind of crucible. Look at Paul in the club with the appropriately True Detective name of Lux Infinitum: his scowl deepens as he converses with the two hustlers; he’s either afraid of not being able to suppress his gay urges, or worried that he doesn’t want to (eagle-eyed viewers picked up on this last week when he called someone a “faggot”; I, uh…am not that bright). It’s at this club, where Paul literally bumps into Frank (“Maybe Tomorrow” leans heavily on coincidence) that Frank has his best scene.
I’m speaking, of course, about the fight in the back room, after Frank has been rebuffed and insulted by his former lieutenant Danny, he of the FUCK YOU grill. Frank circles Danny like a junkyard dog, and when he attacks, it’s just as vicious. Danny gets in maybe one good hit. The fight – and the scene – belong to Frank.
This is what I’ve been wanting out of Vince Vaughn’s performance all season. To go back to my dog visual, he looks like he’s been let out of a cage, all long limbs and steely determination as he bobs and weaves around Danny’s arms. If Frank is going to get back into this life, he better do it whole-hog. The funny thing is, despite all the buzz about Vaughn being the heavy, True Detective hasn’t played him as the villain. “Holy shit,” this scene seems to say, “can you imagine if he was the villain?” Well, it’d certainly make for a more interesting show.
Look, here’s the thing: I, like everyone else, loved True Detective‘s first season. I’m not quite sold on this one yet. I’m not going to continue comparing the two seasons (well, I’m going to try not to), because that’s an unfair way to approach an anthology show like this. But there’s been a marked dropoff in quality, and that’s due in no small part to Pizzolatto’s apparent unfamiliarity with not only his surroundings but his characters. But that’s okay too! He’s trying something new, and I will absolutely applaud and reward effort, 100% of the time. But you know what’s even better than effort? Success. True Detective keeps coming close, but it’s all too willing to blithely dismiss its moments of cop-show greatness, like Ray getting shot last week, in favor of a whispered insistence that this is all important. Oh well. Maybe tomorrow.
A Few Thoughts
- The bar that Frank and Ray meet at has a B, which I thought was a nice touch
-
Signs this takes place around LA: Ray knows the difference between indica and sativa
-
Signs Ray is an immortal supervillain: the woman from the state’s attorney’s office thinks he staged the shooting
-
This was a really bitchy review, but I gotta say, the cop vs. cop angle is one of Pizzolatto’s most inspired choices. It adds an undercurrent of paranoia and deceit to all the proceedings, which I really like
-
I hope someone makes a snide comment about Ani’s vape pen every time she takes it out
-
Lastly, like every week, I now present to you, devoid of context, the most True Detective-y lines of “Maybe Tomorrow”:
“You got your father’s hands”
“Suck your own dick”
“There was some fucked up psychology at play there before it was a murder scene”
“Do you want to live?”
“He looks half anaconda and half great white”
“Yeah, you’re tall, but you’re really little”
About Author
