True Detective
“Church in Ruins”
(HBO)
B
Frankly, it’s become a tiring affair to continually pick apart the flaws of True Detective’s current season. For the last five episodes, we’ve been served a main course of plot buildup and characterization with a delicate side of action. The plot has become too hefty of a portion, tainting our palettes with a taste that has worn on our tongues. The characterization is simply capricious, with some characters being overloaded (Semyon and Velcoro), some realized in just the right amount (Bezzerides), and others lost in every flavor of their counterparts (Woodrugh). As for action, there’s hardly any on the plate, and what has been served wasn’t all that satisfying. In retrospect, it feels like we’ve been eating at a restaurant that lost its Michelin Star.
Picking up immediately after the previous episode, Velcoro and Semyon briefly square off in a battle of severe dispositions. The scene further etches out the diplomacy of these men; despite terrible crimes, they remain reasonable mostly by use of an unwritten code that balances out their immoral impulses. Velcoro confronts his wife’s rapist afterward, readily listing off the gruesome acts he will commit if there is no death penalty. Once again, Velcoro’s rage begins to boil. In a meeting with his son (mediated by a DHS employee) Velcoro awkwardly seeks to establish any semblance of a bond with his child. Still, as his gift of a model stealth bomber clearly points out, he has yet to understand the boy and his own violent ways. Suffering this much-needed but harsh realization, Velcoro retreats to his house, accompanied with liquor and cocaine, to explode into anarchy against himself, banging and thrashing about the house and finally building the nerve to call and give full custody to his wife. It definitely seems that Velcoro’s demons are all too big to reconcile and he, much like Rustin Cohle, is moving toward a tragic form of retribution.
Semyon, on a similarly depressing path, seeks to find the hard drive that could reclaim his status. Like the last installment, his portion is a drag, laying the plot on thicker and thicker yet still failing to be compelling. At its core, Semyon’s storyline reveals the double-edged sword of Nic Pizzolatto’s current creation: One edge has carved out a bedrock of plot and character, while the other asks if said stone is interesting enough to warrant its excess. Through a precarious encounter with Mexican gangsters that concludes with the death of an unnamed woman, we get more buildup for its own sake but little action, let alone thought-provoking substance. Simply put, other characters are picking up, and Semyon needs to follow suit. Despite this, his role does well to repair the lackluster ideology of this season. Consoling the son of his dead business partner, Semyon endows advice about using our pain in a productive manner to become stronger, or, as he himself put it, a threshold of “pure, solid gold.” Conjuring a universality like this could easily fall on its head, but strong writing and Vince Vaughn’s convincing delivery pull it off.
The real star of this episode is the infiltration into the sex parties that have been heavily alluded to so far. Undercover as a high-end escort, Bezzerides enters the estate (on a required dose of molly) and wanders the corridors of open sex and preying eyes. She begins to hallucinate after a bad reaction to the drug, prompting buried memories of childhood sexual abuse. This complicated inner grappling provides Rachel McAdams with her meatiest dramatic turn yet. Employing dreamlike visuals and a romantic backdrop of sound, atmosphere is put front and center and impressively breathes life into this orgy of slimy upper-class men and escorts that recalls Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. In the end, Velcoro and Woodrugh successfully break in and steal incriminating documents before saving Bezzerides and a missing girl. This is the action we’ve been missing.
Despite its flaws, True Detective still reigns atop other cop dramas on television and persists to arrest our eyes weekly. Trudging through the meander of last week’s episode, “Church in Ruins” ends on a note that, at least partially, wiped the slate clean by reinvigorating the Caspere case with new leads for its central characters. To the fortune of the series, these leads pan out in ways that partially resolve disappointments and deliver one of the season’s best episodes.
