HBO's True Detective

I enjoyed the show. I don't really get into cop shows, but it was well made. If there's an outcry of online fandom saying they hated it and that nothing panned out the way they wanted it to, that's more an issue of people over-analyzing a genre cop show and trying to make it too profound. I get the whole "The King in Yellow" references after having read it, but I never thought that it meant the show would jump genres from cop show to supernatural horror midway through its run. I guess some would be disappointed that it didn't, but that's on them. The collection of short stories are dark, but they're not entirely supernatural.

That said, there were some things that weren't tied up, but I leave those to be the red herrings or plain old plot holes.

 

I cringed right before Rust got stabbed, thinking the show had gone supernatural after all. But then I was relieved to realize it was just one of his hallucinations coming at the worst possible time.

 

I halfway expected San Neill to show up and tell us that the Event Horizon had torn open a gateway to hell, then I came to the same conclusion as you. It's a funny fake out considering how much dome were expecting a complete shift in genre.

 

I enjoyed the series and liked the finale.
I didn't expect every question to be answered, but I'm still left wondering about Marty's daughter.

 

Atlantic roundtable for one. Who, for one of them, had generated a 15,000 word theory of connectivity or something and then admitted he might have read too much into the show leading up to it.

Esquire is wondering if the show wasn't trolling all along.

It seems like some were expecting something profound, or Cthullu, at the end and what they got instead was a happy ending and a whole of bunch of unanswered questions.

In these TV times, unanswered questions are one of those things you can't do. Answering too many questions is another one of those things you can't do either, which leads to my long held contention that professional critics and the couch surfing amateurs who haunt the interwebs are miserable creatures, satisfied with nothing. To be fair, I also indulge myself in some of that from time to time.

I always thought that some of the fan theories didn't match up with the show much anyway. Like the daughter and her five on one doll scene. That morphed into she was raped by her grandfather, who was the Yellow King the entire time.

Or maybe it was a girl playing with dolls or maybe her detective daddy had left a folder sitting out and she caught a glimpse. Or maybe her parents had HBO back in the day and it was something she had seen.

 

I was kind of expecting one of both of them to be killed.

 

I liked the finale. i was a little underwhelmed by it.

I understand it's a cops solving a case story, but every other episode made it seem like more than that. I was just expecting a little more. I did like how the senator was able to distance himself from the case.

And I was also expecting one or both to die.

 

I'm okay with unanswered questions, because that's how things really work.

 

I got that he was hallucinating at the wrong time. But I too thought both of them were going to die, or at least one.

I kind of like how they kept Chole alive so that his character could finally be at peace with the loss of his daughter. The experience almost saved him in a way, if you want to call it that.

 

Is he at peace, though?
I think there are two ways to read that.
Is he weeping because he discovered that warmth and love only to lose it?
Or is he weeping because he felt that warmth and love, gave up his religious nihilism and believed it, but awoke to find out it was a dream, that it wasn't real?

 

Therein lies the rub I guess. I took it as he was finally able to be at peace with his daughter's death and the events that followed it.

 

Slate's latest in the series "You're All Racist And/Or Sexist, and Here's Why":

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/03/10/true_detective_has_a_woman_problem_yes_and_that_s_partly_why_people_love.html