I reviewed last night’s fine, haunting True Detective for Rolling Stone, and just for fun I included some dreams I’ve had about the show.
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I say with absolute sincerity that more reviews everywhere should include the reviewer’s dream reactions. Solid.
Weirdly, I was less in key with this episode than the last.
While I could have cared less for the plot engineering of the big bullfight, I did appreciate Maggie’s quandry. Her character has gotten less than fair treatment, fair to say, but her reaction was handled more with better reasoning than I’ve seen elsewhere. Having been cheated & hurt repeatedly by Marty she chose to respond in kind: rather than attempt it with a stranger, she chose the one male she could trust. It doesn’t make her hamhanded seduction of Rust any more forgivable or feasible (as a writer’s choice) but it was a very -human- decision for her character, and it gave decent resonance to her condemnation of Marty as a coward. She didn’t fuck Rust because she was dumb with lust or lacked moral fiber, she did it because she was enraged and wanted to showcase Marty’s hypocrisy. That it allowed her to call him the C-word to his face a second time gave me no small amount of satisfaction. These are cheap soap opera tactics, yes, but I think they were employed sensibly enough. (As pulp goes, LOST remains the ne plus ultra of character being secondary to pointless plot complication.)
Per this ep, I didn’t enjoy the Maggie / Rust scene. It seemed meaner than it needed to be. I suppose Rust remains stung; her betrayal of his trust being the one time anything had gotten to him since his daughter died. Still, the scene seemed perfunctory, a reminder for audiences that shit went sideways. But seeing Marty tell her he was happy for her was nice. The second time I think he actually believed it.
The more I think about last night, the more it bothers me that Rust guilted Marty into watching the tape. The man left the job because he was soulsick. It’s just plain cruel to rope him in again.
Oh well. I don’t expect Rust will live to regret being an extra measure of bastard.
Marty didn’t tell the story about the baby in the microwave (a baby in a microwave. lol True Detective!) until after Rust showed him the videotape, so to be fair to Rust he didn’t know that Marty quit the force because of traumatic experiences like that.
I remember the sequence. You’ll note Rust kept after Marty about trying to find out “the real reason” for Marty’s departure. My money is that Rust suspected something of the kind: burnout and depression are pretty common causes of retirement among law enforcement. The particulars probably didn’t matter to him much. He just wanted the info. So I still find his determination to include Marty in a probable kamikaze run reprehensible.
But being a bad man for a good cause is Rust’s thing, so. (eyeroll)