On Saturday morning I met up with a friend for coffee. At some point, our conversation turned to True Detective and our thoughts on the show. Afterwards, my friend mentioned that one day during the time show was filming in New Orleans, he took his infant son to Audubon Park where he ran into Woody Harrelson, who was sporting a tie-die and was enveloped in marijuana smoke. I found it comforting to know that Harrelson is every bit the stoner stereotype people make him out to be.
So let’s get right to it, shall we? Here are a few notes I made during last night’s True Detective about characters, scenes, etc. I found interesting for one reason or another.
– Okay, so last night’s episode was nowhere near as fast-moving for me as the pilot episode was. Last night’s episode was, to me, the Wire-esque “slow burn” that many who’ve seen much of the first season have described it to be. Still, though the hour seemed to drag a little, I was entertained and am looking forward to the next one.
– One big thing we learned last night is, as expected, Hart has some skeletons in his closet and isn’t anything close to being the “regular-type dude” he claims he was and is. He’s got his demons, his marriage is on the rocks, and he’s a more than a little combustible. The confrontation in the locker room was rather telling: Cohle was menacing while maintaining an ice cold exterior. Hart, meanwhile, exploded with in a potentially violent rage.
– Speaking of that scene in the locker room, I can’t help but wonder if Hart’s rage isn’t so much born out of his feelings of jealousy/insecurity about his wife and more that he’s angry that Cohle has so quickly been able to see right through all his bullshit. Hart’s the good guy at work, and he loves being the good guy at work. But Cohle knows he’s full of sh*t from the get-go. He knows there’s a f*cked up, tortured man lurking beneath the good ole boy/family man surface. And it’s starting to drive him a little crazy.
– Naturally, Hart has rationalized his philandering as something he needs to do in order to be a good family man. “It’s for your wife and kids, too,” 2012 Hart says. “You gotta take your release where you find it or where it finds you. In the end, it’s for the good of the family.”
– I have a feeling that Cohle is totally going to f*ck Hart’s wife, and it’s going to be tremendous when he does.
– A homicide detective who’s prone to hallucinations? That could get interesting.
– So not only did we learn last night that Cohle is prone to hallucinations, but we also learned that he has a keen sense of smell when he tells Hart to “wash up, you got some pussy on ya.”
– On the crime front, we learned some things about the victim: her name is Dora Lange and she had been working as a prostitute at a “hillbilly Bunny Ranch.” We also learned that she’d been attending church services regularly. We also learned that Dora’s mom is all messed up from working with dry cleaning chemicals much of her life. Must have made for a happy home.
– We also learned more about Cohle’s daughter’s death and how he’s come to view it in positive but cryptic terms over the years: “I think about my daughter now and what she was spared. Sometimes I feel grateful. The doctor said she didn’t feel a thing, went straight into a coma. Then, somewhere in that blackness, she slipped off into another deeper kind. Isn’t that a beautiful way to go out, painlessly as a happy child? Trouble with dying later is you’ve already grown up, the damage is done, too late.”
– Nice to see McConaughey channel Isiah Whitlock Jr. with a good “Shhhhhheeeee-it.”
– “I’m police. I can do terrible things to people with impunity.” — Rust Cohle, just after he beat the sh*t out of two mechanics for information about where the “redneck Bunny Ranch” was located.
– Oh my goodness, Alexandra Daddario! Oh my goodness. If you’d like to relive that little slice of NSFW heaven from last night, here it is in GIF form. And you just knew that Martin was an ass-eater from way back.
– More and more we seem to be learning that Cohle knows exactly who he is and is accepting of that person, while Hart seems delusional about who he is, then and now.
– “I can’t say the job made me this way. More like me being this way made me right for the job. Now, I live in a little room behind a bar, work four nights a week, in between I drink and there ain’t nobody there to stop me. I know who I am. After all these years, there’s a victory in that.” — Rust Cohle.
Your own thoughts, feelings, questions etc. are encouraged in the comments.
(Images via HBO)