That two-month time jump might have been the best possible thing for True Detective‘s second season. After all, how do you follow up a sequence like last week’s breathless shootout? But more than that, it’s a way to reset the board for the latter half of the season (at this point last season, Reggie Ledoux had been killed, and the 1997 narrative done away with). “Other Lives” is tight, efficient storytelling, and at times it was genuinely riveting television. While not perfect, this is by far the best episode of the season.
Director John W. Crowley, a veteran of indie films like Boy A and Is Anybody There?, handles the episode with skill and aplomb. What “Other Lives” requires of the viewer is a willingness to sit through yet more character introduction – and somehow, through some witch’s brew of acting, writing, and directing, this isn’t boring. Ray (distressingly clean-shaven) has quit the Vinci PD and is now acting as muscle for Frank, who for his part has quickly moved to running not only drugs but girls through his club. Ani is extolling the virtues of big dicks at her sexual harassment seminars (McAdams’ dry delivery, and the male detectives’ eagerness for her to share more, is note-perfect); when she’s not doing that, she’s unhappily working in the evidence locker.
But in many ways this is Paul’s episode – or rather, it’s Taylor Kitsch’s. For the last four episodes, we’ve seen Paul struggling, with varying degrees of success, to repress that which makes him who he is. He tries to repress his homosexuality, which manifested last week in the world’s worst wedding proposal; now he tries to repress his rage, which he’s unable to do. Kitsch is on fire in “Other Lives,” and in a perfectly nasty scene, he explodes at his mother for taking twenty grand that he brought back with him from Afghanistan. She taunts him right back, hitting him where it hurts, bringing up his “weirdness” and, with dark zeal in her eyes, his friends, “the boys.” “You could have been a scrape job,” she tells him. Jesus. I’m worried about the baby Woodrugh on the way, if this is the way that Paul was raised.
While there are still some storytelling kinks to be worked out, this is arguably the most promising episode this season (from a narrative standpoint). When Ray finds out that the man he killed wasn’t actually his ex-wife’s rapist, you can see him barely keeping it together. Ray’s character – who in my review of the pilot I described as potentially a “straight-up villain” – has made an impressive 180, which is ballsy storytelling, the kind that can easily fall flat on its face if it doesn’t work. Luckily it does, due in no small part to Colin Farrell’s predictably great performance (sure do miss that mustache, though).
The biggest problem plaguing True Detective this season is, unfortunately, the plot. That’s not to say it’s boring, but i can get confusing at times – and you know what, yeah, sometimes it is boring. Plots about land deals are almost always boring, and that negative aspect of the show really stands out in an otherwise fine episode.
There was so much I loved about “Other Lives” – Ray kicking the shit out of Dr. Pitlor in an impressively brutal scene; the revelation that Jordan can’t have children; the discovery that Dixon was looking for Caspere’s diamonds possibly even before Caspere was dead. And Frank finally has something to do, as he’s been tasked with tracking down the hard drive from Caspere’s sex dungeon (studio apartment my ass, I know a sex dungeon when I see one. Ladies). There are still problem spots in the show, to be sure, but if the latter half of the season is this good or better, it could go a long way towards redeeming True Detective.
A Few Thoughts
- That was a cool clock in Frank’s office, with the dominoes as the numbers
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Frank moved to Glendale, which I can tell you, as a San Fernando Valley native, is a definite downgrade
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Last point about Frank: he gave us the season’s first smile!
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Ani is smoking real cigarettes now, which is a nice touch. McAdams, for all her prom queen trappings, plays angry very well
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Sorry I didn’t get to last week’s episode. I was back home in Denver and was pretty swamped
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And lastly, this week’s most True Detective-y lines, for which I will never provide context:
“You deal with pimps, you get pimp-ish results”
“The enemy won’t reveal itself, Raymond”
“It’s like blue balls in your heart”
“If I was a man, I’d have the world”
“Help me out with this and I promise to do a fearless and searching moral inventory”
“Loyalty is important. And usually painful”
“You do security for some comeback mobster”
“He was a fucking god-warrior that day”
“Now we’re following birds”
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