True Detective Season 3

Things from the premiere…

  1. The true-crime show that Hays is being interviewed for in 2015? “True Criminal”

  2. The D&D module seen (“The Forest of Leng”) is fictional. And researching “Leng” goes down a Lovecraftian road.

I seem to recall Leng is a mystical kingdom deep in Mongolia, etc?

This is way more the sort of story season 1 was telling, and while I don’t insist on the show continually retreading its most successful season, I think Pizzolatto is better at working in this mode than the Hollywood noir type of thing season 2 was trying. Plus of course we’ve got people like Milch and Jeremy Saulnier involved this time around.

(I don’t mean to slight Mahershala Ali, who’s doing a fantastic job, but I feel like mostly the leads have been quite good in every season - it was the material failing the folks in season 2, not the other way around.)

Yo someone update this thread if this show actually goes somewhere supernatural in the end. I got suckered into the first season on the off chance they might actually go there, and stuck around for season 2 cuz lol Vince Vaughn, but in the end, I just don’t like cop shows enough to linger through 12 episodes of grimacing and panning landscape shots just to get to the end of a fairly mundane mystery and watch a bunch of people get hurt, emotionally and physically.

I think references are all you are ever going to get.

Vaughn did grimace a lot, huh? The series seemed to cause him pain.

And industrial greater LA sure isn’t as picturesque as rural Louisiana when it comes to panning, spinning landscape shots.

TBH I’m not really interested in any agonizingly long landscape panning shots (reason # 14 I hate the first 95% of There Will Be Blood more than almost any movie), but if it’s gonna be a city, at least let it be a proper one rather than an endless beige sprawl like LA.

And really everyone just sort of grimaces through these shows. Lots of tough men and women, grimacing angrily at one another while reliving their various bland traumas until one of them suddenly gets shot, then right back to grimacing. . .

. . . man TD really isn’t for me, is it?

Jesus Christ, are there still people disappointed in season one because some Lovecraftian horror didn’t pop up and eat everyone in the final episode?

No, but S2 has me very, very cautious about S3.

To end my thread-shitting with this:

It’s not necessarily that Cthulhu himself didn’t rise up out of one of Matthew McConaughey’s rambling diatribes to devour the whole of Louisiana (not that that wouldn’t make the world a better place, in the end).

Rather, it’s that I don’t generally find that one case–however convoluted and meandering it winds up becoming as Pizzolatto drunkenly careens through four hundred pages of script-- and the various accumulated traumas and guilt and interpersonal dramas related to it is enough to carry a full season of a cop show for me. It’s like the Netflix Marvel shows: way too little content, spread thin like butter over too much bread (DOUBLE simile baby!), across way more episodes than it should be.

Actually veering off toward some crazy angle like cultists or whatever at least gives the story somewhere to go other than “Yep, that there case sure was hard on us, right pardner? Ayup it was.”

Well as I said upthread, I’m going to wait until S3 is done to even think about watching. Thinking back on S2, I really do think it was Vaughn that mainly turned me off. Man, he was weird.

Well, I thought the first two episodes of this season were fantastic. Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff were great. I love the conceit of the three timelines bleeding into each other.

Nick, is the plot (Yellow King smokescreen aside) basically treading over the same ground as S1?

I get feeling like you got swindled at the end of S1, thinking it was going one direction when it was going another. It just seems like at this point - holy crap, six years on - we’ve had time for the whole thing to sink in. There’s as much interesting about what the show doesn’t show us as what it does, in my opinion. On rewatching, it was more clear to me that there was a much larger and much deeper conspiracy going on than I picked up the first time around, mainly because the cult and the killer were much flashier. But I remember thinking at one point that Marty’s kids were going to end up victims, and that possibly his father-in-law was in on it. But looking back now, I think his kids may have already been victims, just not of the weird killer but sexual assault and rape. There’s a lot of ugly in this season that underlies just about everything that happens.

Or maybe I’m just a lot more tolerant of fairly standard detective shows. I do love a mystery.

I really like Dorf, too. But I think someone on Reddit nailed it when they said his wig was straight out of SNL’s The Californians.

Word is that his hair looks a lot better in the latter timelines.

I’d argue I’m not especially into it because it’s not a standard cop drama/detective show. They tend to wrap their mysteries up neatly and cleanly in 45 minutes or maybe a 2-parter if it’s the season finale. TD is all about the slow burn, which I suspect just isn’t for me.

Yes, in that there’s a case that needs to be solved by detectives in various stages of life while slow-burn ruminating on life itself. No, in that the mystery is different and the cold case now involves a man in his sunset years trying to recollect details from decades ago.

Ok, so it’s “redundant “ in that it’s cops and a cold case. I’ll give it a shot.

Also the fact that the main detective and his family are black in the south makes a real, if backgrounded difference.

The Wig and SNL !! Thank you, I knew something really bothered me about that character and you nailed it.