True Detective - Episodes 7 and 8

I knew that a freshly painted house amongst all the Louisiana shitholes with their cracking paint and dilapidated houses would be a major clue that stuck out amongst the rot. That seems a little last minute solution to something that should have been a major revelation.

Once again it's nice to see Rust and Marty back together as a team as Rust is able to convince Marty that his crazy theories about the ritualistic deaths of children may very well exist. I am disappointed that we only found out who killed one or a few people. We never get down to the bigger conspiracy that we were promised all along. That let me down in the past two episodes. I wanted a huge payoff - not the whimper of an ending I experienced.

Maybe that is the nature of such a one person project. The writer also produced the show and sometimes  a singular vision can get lost after everything goes into setting up the story. Always write with you ending in mind and make it a good one or people we be let down. I know I was especially after all the joy I got out of the first episodes of his series. The final episodes are nearly free of all that great dialogue that dominated the first half of the series. It went from great to just another police procedural.

This could have been a show about the hunt for a monster but up until this episode we have seen nothing of the prime suspect. He lived with no fear of getting caught because of the decades he has spent perfecting his 'craft'. He is the most scary kind of serial killer. One who operate in a world where children and young women  go missing all the time and are never missed.

I didn't expect all the secrets to revealed but this is the kind of show where some secrets don't need revealing. The show is all about relationships and how two men find the courage to not leave this case unfinished. I just wish the large conspiracy was touched on. I understand that the next season will have complete new leads so any trips back down the rabbit hole by these two great actors is not in the cards.

 

Of all I have read today about the show, this paragraph came closest to how I was feeling at the end.

 

No matter what camp you were in when the show started (and I was in the camp that wanted to believe up until the bitter end), it is hard going to fully praise the series finale. After all the Googling about Cthulhu and eighteen-nineties horror stories, we were left with a fairly maudlin buddy-cops-take-down-a-psychopath-and-bond-for-life story. Instead of a supernatural twist or dark existential nothingness, we got a mashup of “Silence of the Lambs” and “Grumpy Old Men.” What happened to the grand conspiracy? What about Audrey’s sketches? Rust’s final revelation in the cosmos felt drastically unearned. And, even if the finale did work for you, it will be difficult to look back on the feverish reception of the first season of “True Detective” and not feel sheepish about the hours logged deciphering it. In a few short months, “Time is a flat circle” is going to sound as tinny and stale as Steve Urkel’s “Did I do that?”

 

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/sticking-the-landing-the-art-of-the-television-finale