True Detective
“Other Lives”
(HBO)
C+
From the start of True Detective’s second season, critics and fans alike have struggled to come to terms with its slow-burn quality and the uneventful nature that has plagued its first four episodes. Considering its awe-inspiring first season, the new incarnation’s optimistic apologists are desperately hoping for some light at the end of this long-winded tunnel. After last week closed with a left-field action scene of typical turns, devotion began to dwindle. By the end of last season’s fourth outing, we were following an epic tracking shot of Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle, hopped up on drugs and fighting his way through a ghetto. Where is that visceral, immediately satisfying television? Nowhere, yet. Expecting things to gain momentum last week, here we are again expecting the same: Will this episode breathe some life into a series that is on the verge of flat-lining? Well, sort of.
“Other Lives” picks up two months after the shootout that transpired at the end of the last installment and uses the majority of its time closing out one arc before quickly setting up another. The former, however, continues to meander in ways all too familiar by now. Unchanged but encountering new struggles, the leads are engaged (more clearly than any episode yet) in the central struggle of creator Nic Pizzolatto’s vision: warding off the external forces that prevent their insatiable inner drives.
Semyon is still enamored with his brooding obsession of reclaiming power while quelling his wife’s baby fever, illustrated in one of the most grueling scenes of this season. In required sexual harassment classes, Bezzerides sarcastically entices her accomplices with thoughts that she is a size queen with a much-needed dose of humor: “I really want to have trouble handcuffing the thing.” Velcoro begins custody battles and persists to sell out his slimy skills to Semyon in order to fund his lawyer. The weakest link of the show, Woodrugh, is destined to lose an ongoing sexual harassment case and gets into a nasty verbal encounter with his mother when he realizes she spent $20,000 stashed at her house — money Woodrough planned to use for his future child.
In the middle of all this, one scene attempts to harken the brilliant poeticism of the first season but falls flat. Velcoro, driving at night, wears an intense stoicism on his face, lamenting that “pain is inexhaustible; it’s only people that get exhausted.” With this overt and shoddy display, True Detective reaffirms what we’ve known for far too long: Scenes like this reveal season two as continually disappointing when it reaches for the poetic sentiments that were so effortless and thought-provoking before.
Things pick up in the final act when the three detectives are reunited to work undercover on the Caspere case, despite its public solving. This has the trio tasked with following up on their own source, which ultimately furthers the central mystery. The star of this episode, Velcoro, is given the biggest reveal when he learns that the man who raped his wife (whom he supposedly killed) is in police custody. Colin Farrell delivers the best acting moment of the season with an extended close up that captures a range of emotion, from confusion to sadness to a controlled rage. That last emotion guides him to Semyon’s door with a rough knock, a crazed look in his eyes, and the insistence that they “need to talk.”
But “Other Lives” is yet another episode that spends too much time putting its characters in new situations that yield old results. There are a few reveals that partially save it, at least somewhat revitalizing interest that the next chapter may have something exciting in store. With only three episodes left, let’s hope Pizzolatto saved the best for last.
