MajorKong wrote:
I have to say I'm pretty disappointed. I think it has many of the same problems as the second season while trying to mimic the beats of the first.
-The directing and the editing are unimaginative. Flat shots, predictable cuts. Nothing really draws you in.
-Like the second season, the tone is relentlessly morose. The occasional quip doesn't equate to levity.
-The shifting between timelines isn't handled well. I get it, its supposed to convey the confusion of an elderly man loosing his mind. Well, I'm as frustrated as he is. Each episode has like five shifts between three time periods. I don't have trouble keeping track, but the net effect is that you never feel grounded in any one era. Here's a scene where you get a note from the killer, here's a scene 10 years later where he loses his daughter at Walmart, here's a scene 20 years later where he's talking to a film crew about what went wrong. Then, back to the 80's where you get mounds of exposition about a new lead. It's just needlessly convoluted and kills the momentum of all three story lines. The first season shifted between time periods in an organic way that kept the plot moving, not so here.
-If you're going to spend a lot of time examining how crushing the loss of children can be to a family, you need to get to know the kids better. They're in one scene and all you know is that they're respectful of their father and call him 'sir' before they ride off. Everything else that you learn about them is indirect and clinical. If the girl shows up later as an adult there's no before to compare to the after.
-It's unclear why Hays is so affected by the case. He was in Special Forces in Vietnam, he's seen some shit, yet the unmutilated dead body of a child somehow leaves him wide eyed and permanently changed. Why?
-I'm not picking up on much chemistry between Hays and his wife or him his partner (though Stephen Dorff is the best part of the show). Normally I'm a fan of Mahershala Ali and I can't tell if the problem lies with his performance or its just how the character is written. Further, most of the secondary characters are bland (his grown son makes me want to nap).
-Much of the narrative is a rehash of what we've already seen in the series: rural locale, buddy cops, strained personal lives, victimized children, lets go accost the pedophile, check in with the pastor, shifting between time periods, the corrupt elite guy, lets team up again, a hallucinating main character, STICK FIGURES, people drinking at bars, etc... The first season was already well worn genre territory, but it felt fresh. This doesn't.
I honestly think Nic Pizzolatto has a bit a George Lucas thing going on. He breathed new life into some old tropes, thus igniting a creative spark that others ran with. You take away Harrison Ford, John Williams, and Irvin Kershner from George Lucas and you get the Star Wars prequels. You take away Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, and Cary Joji Fukunaga from Nic Pizzolatto and you get seasons two and three of True Detective.
Maybe it will eventually come together, and in spite of it's faults its not bad, its just that somewhere during the fourth episode I shrugged and said, "So what?"
Like my old coach said, "Do something! Even if it's wrong." The microbits of information is bad enough. The microbits from 3 timelines makes it triply worse. It was an extremely disappointing Ep4, I haven't seen 5 yet, but if they don't get on the stick, I'm gone. I won't make the same mistake that I made with S2.
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