Renzatic on 11/3/2014 at 00:43

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Our baser instincts don't necessarily have to be violent. Hart's father-in-law was dogmatic and narrow minded. The sex drawings and dolls? There are a thousand different ways you could interpret that. Yellow can be anything callous and unthinking, immoral or wrong. The yellow in the jail scene could be as much about Hart using his position as leverage against someone else as much as it is about the violence he committed to get his point across. The Yellow King is all of these

Though I will admit that the whole "fuck it, we caught the guy, everything else is beyond our control, so why bother" bit was disappointing. The fact they know there's more out there, but they choose to ignore it because they feel they've earned their one little victory against the dark does run against the moral of the whole story.

nickie on 11/3/2014 at 16:58

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I can't get into at all and I've tried a few times. Every time I think I'm getting somewhere, someone slurps or sucks their teeth or similar and it just puts me right off.

Briareos H on 12/3/2014 at 07:32

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Absolutely agree, especially with that last sentence. I think the people around me who are disappointed about the ending the most are the ones who poured a lot vainly into the fan theories. Just like today many people can't go to a concert without channeling their whole experience through the virtual viewfinder of an iPhone, the internet news and media articles, forums and blogs are a filter through which viewers are going to build consolidated expectations that will probably never be fulfilled entirely, blocking them from establishing their own bigger picture.

True Detective is a simpler story that many made it out to be. There's of course a sort of symmetry within its structure itself, with the first four episodes being a dive into cosmic, existential horror and the subsequent four being a journey back to the surface, gasping for air, but at no point should we have expected the story itself to become an ever-complexifying web of occult intrigues. It never was going to be Twin Peaks and I'm grateful for that. Loved it.

demagogue on 15/3/2014 at 16:36

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Well I finished it tonight. I read some people criticizing the ending, but I can't imagine why. It was just what I thought it should have been & I was more than satisfied. I might compose some thoughts later on, but for now a few things that stand out to me...

First, the art direction and especially sound direction were fantastic. I don't think I ever notice sound direction in tv shows, but in this case it was memorable and added a lot. The soundtrack was also excellent.

I thought the key line from the first episode was when Cohle sees or hallucinates a girl apparently like his daughter & says "do you believe in ghosts?" I think her ghost is possessing him through the whole show. I also caught from the first episode that the police saw him as the main suspect. And when Cohle talked to the lawnmower man in Episode 3, and it was so extraneous to the plot, I had a strong hunch this guy has the scent of "Chekov's Suspect" (i.e., the trope where a police procedural introduces an extraneous character early on that has no good reason to be there, then plays it like Chekov's shotgun. He's going to be central to the story later on; he's the guy. Sometimes shows subvert the trope, but in this case they played it straight, which I was ok with).

I liked the "unreliable narrator" trick where the story they gave the interrogating cops was different from the story played out on screen, and it makes you wonder if some things we thought we learned were fabricated for us as well. I want to go back and watch.

bukary on 16/3/2014 at 13:43

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It is, indeed, golden age of television. Breaking Bad has just ended. And True Detective has emerged.

I just can't imagine that Pizzolatto will be able to make another series as good as the first one. The form and the matter (characters, story) were tied so close in True Detective that probably everything (including atmosphere, narrative tricks etc.) must be changed in order to avoid an accusation of copycating. I do not think we'll be seeing another Rust and another pedophile murderer. But I am still hoping for some intelligent detective story with the characters that can express the complexity of human nature in words.

It's great that there are so many great TV shows!

The first league: Breaking Bad, Sherlock, True Detective, Top of the Lake, The Fall, Broadchurch. And later: Black Mirror, Bates Motel (yes, I do like it!), The Killing, Hannibal, Hemlock Grove (yes, I also do like it!), House of Cards, Peaky Blinders, Ray Donovan...

If only I was on a vacation more often...