Probably because the bottom is dropping out. He is adjusting his holster, but he’s also touching his stomach. When Semyon tells Velcoro, in a flashback, that he knows the identity of the man who raped and assaulted his wife, Farrell makes this seemingly unconscious twitch, at once an aggressive and defensive move. When he sees his kid get taunted in the schoolyard, his hair shakes with rage and shame. I can’t recall seeing someone with this kind of vulnerability - this kind of irrevocably damaged presence - on television. Back then, shots like that were world-building now they are simply mood-sustaining.įarrell is the one thing in the show, so far, that feels new and real. Overhead shots of freeway exchanges and oil refineries come and go, with none of the haunted impact of the first season. Justin Lin’s camera has yet to find its own way of looking at this world, still seeing things through Cary Fukunaga’s stylishly tinted glasses. The lines they speak are written in the cadence, and imbued with the Kierkegaard CliffsNotes wisdom, that we have all come to know (and love to quote out of context) as “ True Detective speak.” Vince Vaughn’s Frank Semyon says things like, “This place is based on a codependency of interests,” gesturing with a whiskey glass to what is basically Commerce Casino.
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For the most part, the actors are performing as if they know they are on True Detective. Based on the small-sample-size theater of one episode, we have witnessed a bit of Skynetification with True Detective - it has become self-aware.
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He is not just the main attraction of this second season of True Detective, he is the sun that keeps it alive. I can pay no higher compliment to Farrell than to say his performance is so captivating that it pushes aside all conversation of likability.
TRUE DETECTIVE SEASON 1 EPISODE 2 RECAP PROFESSIONAL
He is a husband who tries to pay a family court lawyer in cash. And he is a cop who takes an opportunity for personal revenge and a subsequent career of professional corruption. He uses the power of his badge to beat the father of his son’s bully within an inch of his life. He is a father who calls his son 1 a “fat pussy” when the child is tormented. One of these detectives was smart, the other was steady. The real quest was finding the true way to live a hard life. You could search for the Yellow King, Reggie LeDoux, and any number of other bogeymen. The early episodes of the first season were about the tension between these two ways of living - confrontational honesty and constant fabrication. Say whatever it takes to make it through another night, hoping that the morning apologies will make it go away. The alternative is to do what Woody Harrelson’s Martin Hart attempted to do: lie - to yourself, your partner, your wife, your kids. If you looked the world in the eye, as Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle claimed to have done, your only option was to become a mad preacher, sermonizing about the illusions under which we all live. In its first season, True Detective was a show about the destructive side effects of having or lacking empathy. He smokes weed, does bumps, and brown bags whiskey - except who needs a brown bag? He’s the law. Velcoro is an ex–Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputy, seemingly exiled to the city of Vinci, where he is now a detective. So what do we do with Colin Farrell’s True Detective character, Ray Velcoro? He’s about as good a cop as he is a father, and let’s just say no one was sending him greeting cards on Sunday. We want Walter White to become Heisenberg, Don Draper to buy the world a Coke, Jimmy McNulty to save a city.
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In the absence of likability, we ask for excellence. In a world where we are inundated with entertainment options, who really wants television to be a form of punishment? Investing hours in fictional people is something we willingly do, provided we get some kind of return on that investment.Īnd if you can’t be good, be good at something. A show’s larger themes can easily get pushed aside for more immediate concerns about whether we like its characters. This character is “the worst,” or that character did or didn’t deserve what happened to them. That’s what we’re all here for, right? So often with prestige dramas, we talk about issues of likability.