The Friendship angle wasnt that interesting

Well said.

The actual writer of the show said as much. People assigning meaning to things that aren't really there and then those same people get upset when there doesn't end up being that meaning that wasn't there to begin with. What are you paying more attention too, the show or the internet theories on reddit?

Sure it was. Just because it didn't have some big revelation, plot twist, split personality, smoke monster, demonic possession and/or dream sequence doesn't mean it wasn't good.

It was the same old partners dont like eachother but learn to respect each other story we've seen in every cop movie.

What did you expect it to be? Them to be the same person, or an alien or something?

It was a story about 2 detectives and a case. Again, the writer and creator said as much.

Can you tell me anything at all about season 2?

Nic Pizzolatto: Okay. This is really early, but I'll tell you (it's about) hard women, bad men and the secret occult history of the United States transportation system.

Finally, you wrote this entire thing in a vacuum, as someone relatively new to television, not knowing how it was received. And the show comes on, and people go nuts about it, they are penning raves, coming up with elaborate theories about the Yellow King and Lovecraft and everything else. How did it feel to see your creation being received in all of these ways?

Nic Pizzolatto: I felt like, look, it's all good, and I really mean that. To me, that is what it means to connect and resonate with people. It means that they are going to project onto the work. There's never been anything I didn't love that I didn't connect with on a personal level because to some degree, I projected upon it. That said, I think I've made clear that my only interest in the Chambers stuff (Robert W. Chambers wrote "The King in Yellow") is as a story that has a place in American myth. And it's a story about a story that drives people into madness. That was mainly it. Beyond that, I'm interested in the atmosphere of cosmic horror, but that's about all I have to say about weird fiction. I did feel the perception was tilted more towards weird fiction than perhaps it should have been. For instance, if someone needs a book to read along with season 1 of "True Detective," I would recommend the King James Old Testament. I wouldn't tell anyone to go buy Robert Chambers. It's not that great a book. Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner I think are in there far more than Chambers or Lovecraft. But again, I guess I hope that these 8 chapters, once the totality of it is evident, it might provoke a re-evaluation. But if it doesn't, I'm very happy with the reaction we've had. It couldn't have been better better. I'm just surprised by it. I remember talking to you three months ago and having to convince you: "This just sounds like every other show," "I know, I know." And now my wife read a comment the other day that said I live out in the desert, and I run some kind of cult. (laughs) I don't know what I can say about that. I think this show answers everything it told you to ask. The questions it didn't tell you to ask are questions best left to one's self.

I keep thinking back to the interview we did before the season, and the moment when I was asking you about comparisons to other serial killer shows, and you said that you couldn't care less about serial killers. How seriously were we ultimately meant to take the actual Dora Lange investigation, and how much of it was just a line to hang the character examination on?

Nic Pizzolatto: I don't think it was an empty vehicle, is what I guess I would say there. I don't think it could have been just anything that these guys were working on. I think it's relevant that the person they're chasing is both the victim of an historical evil and the perpetrator of an historical evil. The killer in that way is a physical articulation of cultural aspects that have sat behind the scenes, even informing that polluted landscape that provides so much of the background. If you go from the idea of something being in its natural state and then being perverted, and that this particular villain, for lack of a better word, is a killer of women and children, and his methodology is intimately tied to a mythology of belief — I do think if you want to go back and watch 7 and 8, there's enough given in the fragments that everyone states, there's enough that you can actually piece together historically, how Sam Tuttle in the early '30s led to Errol Childress in the first decade of the new millennium. I would say it wasn't an empty vehicle at all. I think the killer, his methodology and his actual crimes were endemic, not only to our characters, but to the world we were dealing with. It wouldn't have worked to have a robbery that didn't get solved properly in 1995. There's almost a way that Cohle, Hart and Errol, these men are in some ways the creations of their fathers, if you pay attention to their backstories.

All of the things that, in the previous episode, Cohle was telling Marty that he had uncovered, and what we saw on the videotape, pointed to a larger group of men working on these things. But we get to the end, and it's just Errol left, along with his father in the shed. How many other people were involved in the specific things that Cohle and Hart were investigating?

Nic Pizzolatto: There's the men in the video, and there's about 10 of them. Then you can begin to look at that as if that cult began to disintegrate shortly afterwards, and then there were always revenants existing on a local level. If you track the name Childress, you realize Sheriff Childress was the sheriff when Marie Fontenot disappeared, an Officer Childress was attending to Guy Francis in 2002 when he committed suicide. The conspiracies that I've researched and encountered, they seem to happen very ad hoc: they become conspiracies when it's necessary to have a conspiracy. I think it would have rang false to have Hart and Cohle suddenly clean up 50 years of the culture history that led to Errol Childress, or to get all the men in that video. It's important to me, I think, that Cohle says, "We didn't get em all, Marty," and Marty says, "We ain't going to. This isn't that kind of world." This isn't the kind of world where you mop up everything. We discharged our duty, but of course there are levels and wheels and historical contexts to what happened that we'll never be able to touch.

We lose a lot of rights when we look the other way when it doesn't affect our lives or it isn't a cause we agree with.

Everyone was expecting an ending with darkness and despair. Rust dies or kills himself, Marty dies or is the Yellow King, Maggie and her dad are in on it, etc. It was an ending with some light and hope...there's your twist.

I think that started well before Lost. How about Twin Peaks and then The X-Files.

I have to agree with RPB that the ending described in the spoiler Panther posted the link to would be less than satisfying. After all the great dialogue and the feeling of a menacing presence hanging over the entire world of the show, tying it up with a Die Hard style shootout would be a huge disappointment, regardless of whether Cohle and/or Hart live or die.

Also, once the writer's vision is committed to tape, his opinions about what happened off-screen or after the camera stopped are no more important than anyone else's. He had his chance to make anything clear that he wanted. If he didn't, it's up to the viewer to interpret things for himself. RPB thinks Tony Soprano died in the diner. Some other people don't. No one is right and no one is wrong. And even if David Chase came out tomorrow and said Tony was shot by Members Only, that doesn't make it true. He had the opportunity to make that occur and he didn't. for better or worse, it's open ended.

Everyone was expecting an ending with darkness and despair. Rust dies or kills himself, Marty dies or is the Yellow King, Maggie and her dad are in on it, etc. It was an ending with some light and hope...there's your twist.

every mystery show is littered with red herrings. that's not what i'm talking about when i say it's straight forward. it's thematically straight forward. it's actually unfolded kind of predictably so far--which is fine, because this isn't a show that's designed by crazy twists. and i think if you're looking for one in the finale, you're going to be disappointed.

What was the point of the scene with the grandpa? Why show the little girls and have the one say No to asking Grandpa's help?

Everyone was expecting an ending with darkness and despair. Rust dies or kills himself, Marty dies or is the Yellow King, Maggie and her dad are in on it, etc. It was an ending with some light and hope...there's your twist.

And that was ultimately the thing that I was slightly disappointed with. Overall, I enjoyed this series very much but they had an opportunity to tell a different kind of story and in the end they didn't really.

Because this was an 8-episode mini-series, I felt like this truly was leading to something dark and final and ultimately it was just another odd-ball pair of detectives getting their guy and understanding their connection to each other. It was done well and I very much enjoyed the characters but it wasn't new.

Aside from that, there were a number of references, specifically with the daughter, that never really got explained other than as a demonstration of Marty's neglect and the impact on the family. OK, but the drawings and dolls weren't just generic references to sex. They were specific to this actual case but that gets chalked up to coincidence or just a connection that was never explained.

Also, why was everyone saying they'd seen Rust before and kept telling him to "take off his mask". There were a number things like that. But, whatever, it was a very good series with two compelling characters.

This was straightforward. It showed the tension between father and son in law and mother daughter.

I never thought the grandfather speculation held any water

To what end though?

They took Unforgiven and ended it like a spaghetti western.

I have more to say on this

I don't think most people would consider Munny the bad guy, I think most would consider him a white hat.

He was a repentant widower raising two kids. He swore off alcohol and killing. He needed money beacause his farm was failing, and he was avenging the disfigurement of a woman and later his friend's death. That's a white hat.

He was a repentant widower raising two kids. He swore off alcohol and killing. He needed money beacause his farm was failing, and he was avenging the disfigurement of a woman and later his friend's death. That's a white hat.

He was a repentant widower raising two kids. He swore off alcohol and killing. He needed money beacause his farm was failing, and he was avenging the disfigurement of a woman and later his friend's death. That's a white hat.

That's wrong. In a Western, the white hat wins. In Unforgiven the bad guy went on to prosper in dry goods.

OK, so I'm supposed to believe that a schizophrenic back woods simpleton somehow ring lead the modern version of the cult. I'm also to believe that he somehow read the works of an incredibly obscure, insignificant work of literary horror and has shaped so much of the cult's nomenclature around it.

Pizzolato is the literary version of good dolphin in high school, he cannot close.

We lose a lot of rights when we look the other way when it doesn't affect our lives or it isn't a cause we agree with.

I don't think he's necessarily portrayed as the ring leader.