True Detective Season 1 (NO SPOILERS)

[chemicalsword]

great discussions going on in this thread. signs that we are dealing with a quality show. something we all can appreciate even if we have disagreeing theories....

 

[jay211]

@HEXGRAM -- Your theory that Marty takes down Rust is just as ludicrous and ridiculous as the theories you are bashing. Marty is NOT going to help take down Rust. What in the hell has given you that idea from what you've seen. That would be a terrible ending. If anything all signs point to Marty helping Rust close this case down. Now, maybe one of them will get killed. But I don't believe for a second Marty is going to take Rust down.

 

[heisenburrr]

I just watched the scene again, Marty mentions Rust getting a read on them in a joking manner, it's a reach to act like that was a tip off, intentional or not, in any way

 

[hex]

@HEXGRAM -- Your theory that Marty takes down Rust is just as ludicrous and ridiculous as the theories you are bashing. Marty is NOT going to help take down Rust. What in the hell has given you that idea from what you've seen. That would be a terrible ending. If anything all signs point to Marty helping Rust close this case down. Now, maybe one of them will get killed. But I don't believe for a second Marty is going to take Rust down.

Nothing makes me believe it, I'm tossing out ideas. It could happen. You can't say it's NOT going to happen, you have no idea. It wouldn't be a terrible ending, it would be in line with all the 19th century literature Pizzolatto is so fond of quoting. It's not as if I pulled this idea out of thin air. The "heroes" losing, getting killed, winding up in insane asylums are the bread and butter of Lovecraft.

Fred.

 

[jay211]

I agree. You right. I can't say for sure it won't happen. But I think it highly unlikely. I think it will have a bitter ending. But I don't think it will be because Marty betrays Rust.

 

[BigSteve]

A lot of this stuff has been mentioned in here, but it's worth checking out:

http://io9.com/the-one-literary-reference-you-must-know-to-appreciate-1523076497

that post, plus the comments... [mind blown]

 

[Microfracture]

I just watched the scene again, Marty mentions Rust getting a read on them in a joking manner, it's a reach to act like that was a tip off, intentional or not, in any way

He's referring to the people who believe the theory that Marty is still working this case with Rust. If Marty were to say "he's been working you" to the detectives then that would undermine what they're doing, and potentially tip off the detectives and expose their actions.

Which is why I believe it's just Rust following the case, and Marty wouldn't care if he was still on it one way or the other, hence him being amused about Rust working 'em.

 

[hex]

I agree to an extent. but in doing proper detective work they would inevitably have to question Rust about certain holes. his sick father... how they really got the lead on the Ledouxs... the "shootout" at the meth lab.. just for starters. hell basic crime scene detecting and forensics could easily prove the shootout didn't go down the way Rust and Marty claim. Reggie would have to have gunshot residue on his hands and body... footprints of Rust and Marty scampering through the woods avoiding the AK slugs... etc. Then Rust resurfaces and they have him in photos at the recent crime scenes. They had no choice but to question him even if they believed he has the upper hand in the box. those detectives are not in the same league as Rust. the younger cat admitted as much when he said some of that earlier "ramble" went over his head.....

That's what I'm saying though. These two cats are rookies, nothing makes me believe they'd be able to see through Rust's ruse. The guy is head and shoulders above everyone else on the force.

I don't think they are suspicious about the shoot out. If they are there would be no reason to confide in Marty that they think Rust is crooked. We can either chalk that up to some "TV shyt" where forensics didn't further investigate the shooting to move the plot along, or we can assume Rust and Marty were smart enough to alter the crime scene to reflect what you said.

Fred.

 

[hex]

He's referring to the people who believe the theory that Marty is still working this case with Rust. If Marty were to say "he's been working you" to the detectives then that would undermine what they're doing, and potentially tip off the detectives and expose their actions.

Which is why I believe it's just Rust following the case, and Marty wouldn't care if he was still on it one way or the other, hence him being amused about Rust working 'em.

Exactly. Talking to some of these people is like pulling teeth man.

Fred.

 

[Shogun]

http://grantland.com/hollywood-pros...tisfyingly-weird-mysteries-of-true-detective/

Hallucinatory spirals, talk of “black stars” rising in the sky, dead women trussed up like ancient horned gods and tattooed with mysterious symbols, all supposedly in reference to Robert W. Chambers’s fairly obscure weird fiction classic The King in Yellow? Damn, True Detective, you’ve given me a lot to absorb.

Where is the show going with its recently clarified Lovecraftian ties? Does it even really matter, when the ride is this great? The most satisfying part of a mystery is rarely its resolution. Sustained anticipation is much of the thrill. Like earlier TV mysteries Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and Lost, True Detective is a show with its own internal mythology, which taunts both the protagonists and viewers with signs just beyond our comprehension. When some bits of information are guaranteed to be important later, every single bit of information feels like a potential clue. Attempting to read a show scene by scene and pluck out exactly what will prove crucial from a galaxy of visual and verbal details can feel absolutely maddening.

A great dark mystery show can inspire the faithful to drop everything else in their life to spend all their time examining the current available information and speculating on the future. The best shows are all-consuming in a life-affirming way, like a book you cannot put down. True Detective has dropped several potentially meaningful references to The King in Yellow, a book of short stories organized around a fictional play of the same name. The play is only excerpted in brief in the book, but it is described as being a trigger for insanity, with a standard first act that leads into a second act that unhinges viewers into psychosis. Despite everyone in the world of the book knowing that reading or watching The King in Yellow will make you go crazy, the characters keep giving in to temptation and curiosity, unable to resist the pull of finding out what the second act will hold.

The idea of a piece of media that literally ruins your life has persisted; David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest centers on a film called “the Entertainment” that makes viewers unable to do anything but keep watching it until they die, and Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk classic Snow Crash concerns a viral opium-like drug that dooms its downloaders. As a concept, it feels extremely relevant to the age of binge-watching, when networks and showrunners are banking on our collective desire to lose hours of our life absorbed in something more exciting than real life. Because True Detective is a weekly show, that leaves six days between episodes to rewatch the available episodes and read other people’s opinions on Twitter and in blog posts, while keeping 10 other tabs open to research the otherworldly cursed city of Carcosa. True Detective instantly provoked obsessive fixation in viewers, parallel with Marty and Rust’s inability (or unwillingness) to control their own obsessions. True Detective teases that we might all be getting addicted to a show that is going to somehow push us over the edge.

You can spend endless amounts of time pondering True Detective’s more concrete questions, let alone the existential ones. Are the wooden triangles strewn around the sites of the ritualistic murders pagan symbols, bird traps, or neither? Given creator Nic Pizzolatto’s professed affection for weird fiction, were Reggie Ledoux’s gas mask and the reference to a “green-eared spaghetti monster” meant to invoke Cthulhu, the giant octopus monster that signals cosmic doom in the work of seminal horror writer H.P. Lovecraft? Is the mystery even going to get solved? True Detective’s flashback structure accentuates the gaps in our knowledge. Everything we know is gleaned from flashbacks and interrogations, but there’s no guarantee that future information won’t flip our perspective. Hell, there’s no guarantee that Rust and Marty’s flashbacks are accurate. After all, if we can see Rust’s subjective hallucination of birds assembling into a spiral in the sky, who’s to say we’re not seeing other events from his subjective perspective too? This kind of theorizing, not baseless but impossible to prove conclusively, will make you feel like True Detective’s detectives. Maybe the show’s obsessions with madness, reality, and truth really are contagious.

True Detective’s closest relative is Twin Peaks, which mined similarly nocturnal depths. Both shows espouse mythologies that feel extremely personal to the creators but also eerily universal, tapping into the same brain waves as paradoxical sleep. From this subterranean level, we get an unusually lucid view of pervasive Jungian archetypes: family dynamics, virgin/whore issues, the battle between body and mind. Rust and Marty represent two poles of maleness on one swampy plane, an anima and animus. But neither one is locked into type, and Rust is especially facile with shifting selves to serve his situation. He talks about his lack of belief in a self from the very first episode. Rust’s cosmic rambling could come off as pretentious were it not balanced by the biting straightforwardness of Woody Harrelson as Marty, who finds Rust’s nihilism tiresome and very much lets him know. Matthew McConaughey’s performance plays just the right chord, toggling between cynical acid-head and secret prophet. His light touch with Rust makes even the show’s heaviest philosophical medicine go down like Dr. Pepper in a Big Hug Mug.

 

[Shogun]

It doesn’t take long before Rust’s LSD-addled mind-set rubs off and everything seems connected. Suddenly you’re no longer just reading about True Detective. You’re reading about Fibonacci spirals in nature and the satanic ritual abuse moral panic of the 1980s. You’re listening to The Division Bell. The show leaks into your daily consciousness during the times you’re not watching it. It starts giving new shape and meaning to the outside world. It seeps into your subconscious, and you hear multiple reports from friends about nightmares that incorporated elements or characters from True Detective. But while a deep dig into the show’s mythology turns up lots of interesting worms, it’s not necessary to enjoy it. And even the most avid conspiracists acknowledge that their own private theories may likely turn out to be bunk. The theorizing is fun, but not as fun as the show, which offsets its metaphysical high-mindedness with fleshly punches to the gut.

Suspense also has a strong sexual component. Director Cary Fukunaga staged the six-minute shot that closed out the fourth episode as a display of stamina, nearly doubling the length of Orson Welles’s iconic opening shot from True Detective’s hard-boiled forefather Touch of Evil. Nothing demonstrates the scope of a director’s control like a long take. It’s this kind of ambition that makes True Detective such transcendent television, and so addictive. Waiting for the next episode feels like waiting to see an incredibly intense crush you get to see only once a week.

Fukunaga and Pizzolatto have an avatar in the show’s villain. Whoever the killer nicknamed The Yellow King might be, he is always two steps ahead of our antiheroes, leaving bread crumbs in the form of inscrutable symbols that beg for interpretation (and overinterpretation). Pizzolatto has been open about the horror roots of his twisty noir, naming writers like Laird Barron, Simon Strantzas, and Thomas Ligotti as influences on his work. The show straddles several genres and answers to none; it’s a spiritual noir, a buddy cop show, a murder mystery, philosophical horror, and Southern Gothic. It bends the branches of its more familiar tropes until they are as gnarled and knotted as an old oak’s. But like McConaughey, True Detective somehow makes even the most high-wire stunts look easy. The show’s supernatural trimmings seem to be allegorical, and I’d be very surprised if any monsters showed up other than the human variety, who frankly are already scary enough.

One of the biggest issues that plagued Twin Peaks, Lost, and The X-Files was that they ran for multiple seasons. They all set up their mythologies and mysteries to pay off big, and the longer they ran the larger that payoff was expected to be. Twin Peaks fumbled in its second season after solving the initial mystery. Lost gave viewers too many red herrings, then incited their wrath with a disappointingly magical ending. By the time The X-Files fully explained its unbelievably complicated mythology, the audience was no longer as rapt as they’d once been. Maybe just answering the questions at all is bound to be disappointing. When the answers do come, the pleasure of wondering what they will be comes to a halt. And all those hours spent keeping track of fictional numbers, events, and characters start to feel like a fever dream.

What True Detective has on its side that those other shows didn’t is its format. It’s an anthology show, akin to a miniseries. We have no idea whether the next season will also be about unspeakable cosmic horror and swamp murders. Five episodes in, True Detective’s big questions still remain open. But three episodes from now, we’ll know everything there is to know. We want answers more than anything, but we also never want this season to end. Even if True Detective does drive us all crazy with its second act, I’d rewatch it in a heartbeat. I keep getting older, and time is a flat circle. See y’all in Carcosa!

 

[Jmare007]

Hell, now that I think about it, a more likely scenario is Marty pretending to be cool with Rust and helping the cops bring him down. He never liked him, and that was before whatever beef they had. I wouldn't be surprised if he inadvertently helps them frame Rust.

Fred.

They've established that Rust can read people and know their intentions with just 10 minutes of conversation. Marty knows that too. Him teaming up with the other detectives would be stupid as fukk, specially if it works.

 

[Niggthaniel Essex]

This show has me going back to re-watch episodes and finding out clues and subtle hints. I'm damn near watching every episode with a pad and pen. As I guy who said "fukk Hollywood" with their repetitive bullshyt and the treatment of viewers as stupid morons, I'm loving this show.

Between True Detectives, House of Cards, and other shows, TV is MURDERING the big screen...and I like it.

 

[Bboystyle]

there is honestly no better show on television.

Game Of Thrones...

 

[Bboystyle]

This show has me going back to re-watch episodes and finding out clues and subtle hints. I'm damn near watching every episode with a pad and pen. As I guy who said "fukk Hollywood" with their repetitive bullshyt and the treatment of viewers as stupid morons, I'm loving this show.

Between True Detectives, House of Cards, and other shows, TV is MURDERING the big screen...and I like it.

Breh, HBO does not go the Hollywood route. They are straight up quality station with their series.