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True Detective

#61 User is offline   worry 

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Posted 10 March 2014 - 11:09 PM

I thought there was "enough" direct revelation there (and plenty by implication), but in actuality I'd say there was revelation in every episode....primarily when Rust, Marty, or both together were doing actual detective work (which I assume is one of the points of the show in general, as a continuing genre exercise). Eps 7 and 8 reminded me of the DoD/TCG thing, being essentially two halves of one final piece, somewhat separate from the six eps that came before.
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#62 User is offline   polishgenius 

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Posted 10 March 2014 - 11:16 PM

View Postworry, on 10 March 2014 - 11:09 PM, said:

being essentially two halves of one final piece, somewhat separate from the six eps that came before.



Oh, definitely-that's one of the unusual things in this show and why it's probably the closest tv show we've had to cinema-storytelling - because NP very deliberately divided it into a three-act structure over the whole thing, rather than by each episode (other shows have done dedicated long-form story, obviously, especially The Wire, but they've never done it this precisely).

Episodes 1-3 were one structure, 3-6 were another, and obviously the last two were the finale.
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#63 User is offline   Whisperzzzzzzz 

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Posted 11 March 2014 - 01:16 AM

That was stellar.
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#64 User is offline   Vengeance 

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Posted 11 March 2014 - 01:28 PM

View PostBriar King, on 11 March 2014 - 01:01 AM, said:

It's gonna be hard to top this show this TV season I think. Boy I sure do hope that S2 brings this lvl of epic ness this one had.


That is what I am afraid of. Season 1 was so awesome. That they have to really hit everything perfectly dead on to even match that level.
How many fucking people do I have to hammer in order to get that across.
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#65 User is offline   Stormcat 

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Posted 11 March 2014 - 03:43 PM

Finally watched the last episode. So good.
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#66 User is offline   Trull's son 

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Posted 11 March 2014 - 04:56 PM

Great season. So spooky.
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Posted 11 March 2014 - 06:00 PM


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#68 User is offline   worry 

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Posted 11 March 2014 - 06:28 PM

Details of season 2 are as follows: "hard women, bad men and the secret occult history of the United States transportation system." (Some of) those hard women will be the detectives/protagonists, and it appears S2 will maintain some level of spookiness as well.
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#69 User is offline   Stormcat 

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Posted 13 March 2014 - 09:03 PM

I just read this interesting theory and thought I would share it.

http://www.reddit.co...true_detective/

Quote

True Detective is a Metafictional Show about Characters Who Are Driven to Madness By The Incomprehensible Revelation That They Are Works of Fiction

I believe that this is what’s really going on in this show. The real message is about the audience’s masochistic relationship with the characters, and our endless insatiability for flawed, downtrodden heroes fighting against evil that is never vanquished. From book to book and show to show and movie to movie, we keep telling the world’s oldest story about good versus evil, light versus dark, endlessly, circularly. How many times has Jesus been tortured to death by the Romans? How many times has Wendy Torrance been chased around the Overlook Hotel with an axe by Jack, running for her life? How many times has Little Red Riding Hood learned of her grandmother’s death at the hands of the Big Bad Wolf?

Nic Pizzolatto has said in interviews that the message of the show, and all we really need to understand it, is contained within the first episode. A couple of major lines by Rust stick out here.

I think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody.

People out here, it's like they don't even know the outside world exists. Might as well be living on the fucking Moon.

This place is like somebody's memory of a town, and the memory is fading.

And by episode three, we get a little bit more:

…all your life, all your love, all your hate, all your memories, all your pain, it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream, a dream that you had inside a locked room, a dream about being a person.

What's it say about life, hmm? You gotta get together, tell yourself stories that violate every law of the universe just to get through the god damn day. Nah. What's that say about your reality, Marty?

People... I have seen the finale of thousands of lives, man. Young, old, each one so sure of their realness. You know that their sensory experience constituted a unique individual with purpose and meaning. So certain that they were more than biological puppet.

Let’s not forget classics like:

Someone once told me time is a flat circle. Everything we've ever done or will do, we're gonna do over and over and over again. And that little boy and that little girl, they're gonna be in that room again, and again, and again, forever

Rust may just seem like a pessimistic asshole, but really, it’s just that his character can at least somewhat understand the nature of his universe.

And remember Joel Theriot’s sermon?

This world is a veil and the face you wear is not your own.

The Light of the Way ministry seems to have knowledge of this too.

And LeDoux before he gets his brains blown out?

It's time isn't it? The black star. Black stars rise. I know what happens next. I saw you in my dream. You're in Carcosa now, with me. He sees you. You'll do this again. Time is a flat circle.

Whereas the Light of the Way adherents have glimpsed into their true nature and chosen to believe that, when they feel hollow and unknown, that god is watching, and whereas the cult members believe that they serve the watchful Yellow King, Rust sees beyond the void and tells himself that there is nothing, that there is just a cold universe in endless cycles of pain and degradation as the same little girls are abused again and again with every retelling. He does posit the possibility of the existence of an audience or controllers external to his universe:

It's like in this universe, we process time linearly forward but outside of our spacetime, from what would be a fourth-dimensional perspective, time wouldn't exist, and from that vantage, could we attain it we'd see our spacetime would look flattened, like a single sculpture with matter in a superposition of every place it ever occupied, our sentience just cycling through our lives like carts on a track. See, everything outside our dimension that's eternity, eternity looking down on us. Now, to us, it's a sphere, but to them it's a circle."

But by and large he believes that his and others’ existences are pointless.

Self-Awareness of the Cosmic Horror

This is where the Lovecraftian elements begin to resonate more. Weird fiction and cosmic horror is typified by curious characters driven to insanity by forbidden knowledge. The more they learn, the greater the horror they experience. In Chambers, it is the revelations of the full text of the King in Yellow that break peoples’ souls and minds, driving them to suicide and other madness. In much of the Lovecraft/Cthulu mythos, it is catching a glimpse of the Old Gods or the world beyond the ordinary plane of existence. To gain even a modicum of understanding that the world is not what it seems, and you are at the mercy of all-powerful malevolent beings who are indifferent or actively hostile to your existence. You can only ever help to win the battle, never the war. In True Detective, the audience are the Old Gods and cosmic beings. Carcosa is the world beyond the scenes in the story True Detective, that includes other works of fiction containing boundless evil that is fought pointlessly, over and over again across infinity, and the Yellow King is some character from Carcosa, the world beyond theirs, that drew worship from the cult.

This is what the show is about. Characters that live their lives on rails, dreaming that they are people, at the whims of an audience with a remote control, and the writer who tells them what to say and what to do. The writer visits horrors upon them, which we the audience demand. Hell, we even get the wonderful cameo of Nic Pizzolatto showing up as a bartender and getting asked by Marty why he makes him say the shit that he does. It’s a wry moment that rises above a cameo. It is the creator taunting one of the unaware characters, for Marty has chosen to believe in the religious explanation of the nonsensical world, and will never accept that he has been designed to suffer for our amusement. This masochistic taunting arrives again in the epilogue, as Rust laments that he was face to face with Erroll way back in 1995 – that he saw him – but was unable to notice him right in front of him because the story wasn’t written that way.

The Doors of Perception, and What Errol Childress Sees

Even the characters that catch a glimpse of the world beyond theirs still cannot comprehend our existence. I posit that drug use has something to do with how characters in this series become self-aware. Most of the audience is probably familiar with the notion that many cultures, including some people in our present culture, believe that perception-altering drugs like LSD can open our minds to a true nature of the universe. To see beyond the world in front of us. Imagine in the world of True Detective that this is also the case, and actually has truth to it. Rust, Eroll, the LeDouxs, Dora Lang, and the pharmacy robber, all have a history of drug use. Rust makes frequent mentions of his hallucinations following his time in vice. At least that is the story he tells himself. For what else can it mean when he sees the other-worldly spiraling of birds, or peers into the cosmic vortex?

Erroll Childress has fallen deep into this rabbit hole. He sees beyond the cracks through to Carcosa, where he adapted the Yellow King he saw into an object of worship for his acolytes. But there is evidence that he sees far more. In the final episode, we see that he leaps between accents and characters from other works of fiction, and talks about ascension to another plane. He has looked out through the abyss and found another world, clearly believing that his murders bring him ever closer to it.

He even seems to be aware of the author, and the audience. And while the acolytes only seem able to recite bits and pieces of the notion that they are on repeat, being watched by someone who is everywhere and everywhen all at once. I also posit that Erroll’s murders are being performed in defiance of the audience and the writer. He is marking his symbols and his signs throughout the series to insist that he is coming for us, that he does not answer to us. When Rust, acting as the agent of the writer and the audience demands that Erroll drop to his knees, he says only “NO”.

In the maze of “Carcosa”, he projects his voice as omnipotent, giving directions to Rust and calling him a “Little Priest”. This is because Erroll sees Rust as a servant of the Old Gods sent to contain him. He invites Rust to “Take off His Mask”, to release the illusion that he is a person, and to ascend with him after he witnesses the portal between worlds, to eschew his fate as the character that puts him down at the behest of the writer and audience looking to neatly tie up their masochistic story. Rust instead chooses to kill him, finding happiness in the brief moment of remembrance of the love of his imagined father and daughter, dooming himself to endlessly repeat the cycle for a fleeting moment of optimism.


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#70 User is offline   DeadHedge 

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Posted 17 March 2014 - 11:40 AM

Does this show get better?

I have watched epi 1 and part of 2 but im really struggling to get into the show. (boobs of epi 2 not included)

Im finding that after 10 mins my minds wandering and im thinking about what other shows i could watch instead, don't get me wrong i really want to like the show but it is seeming more of a chore to watch. At what point does the pace pick up or is it a slow morbid show right the way through (UK is on episode 3)

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#71 User is offline   Abyss 

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Posted 17 March 2014 - 02:32 PM

View PostDeadHedge, on 17 March 2014 - 11:40 AM, said:

Does this show get better?

I have watched epi 1 and part of 2 but im really struggling to get into the show. (boobs of epi 2 not included)

Im finding that after 10 mins my minds wandering and im thinking about what other shows i could watch instead, don't get me wrong i really want to like the show but it is seeming more of a chore to watch. At what point does the pace pick up or is it a slow morbid show right the way through (UK is on episode 3)

Cheers


The mysteries get deeper, but the pace and tone is pretty much consistent.


A couple of eps are balls out insane, but they're the exception.

I'd still give it another ep or two to see if you are too cold and dead inside to appreciate the glory it grows on you. 1 and 2 are mostly setup and then it gets a bit further into the story and the leads.
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#72 User is offline   polishgenius 

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Posted 17 March 2014 - 05:09 PM

The show is divided into three acts - 1-3 Act I, 4-6 Act II, and 7-8 are Act III. So the first three are basically placing the pieces, and it kicks on from there.

You really do need to see the finale of episode 4 if you want some intense, fast-paced stuff tbh. If you're not hooked then, there's no hope.
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#73 User is offline   Stalker 

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Posted 17 March 2014 - 05:30 PM

I thought it sucked after watching the first half of the first episode, so stopped watching. Like a month later literally everyone was talking about the show (late night show hosts, the internet, my dad was calling about if I was watching it, etc.) so I gave it another chance. It was still slow through episodes 2-3, but I found that it got much better from there, and I ended up really enjoying the season. The actors were fantastic in their roles (awards for Mcconaughey, I bet) and it was an interesting story once you get past the slow start.
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#74 User is offline   Jakovasaurus 

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Posted 18 April 2014 - 05:47 AM

http://timeisaflatcircus.tumblr.com/
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#75 User is offline   worry 

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Posted 08 May 2014 - 05:41 AM

http://vigilantcitiz...ive-season-one/
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#76 User is offline   Defiance 

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Posted 06 August 2014 - 09:49 AM

Just finished watching this. Holy shit was it good. I know it's been said over and over again, but McConaughey's performance in this was some of the best acting I've ever seen. Rust was such a fantastic character. It's kind of sad knowing that we'll never see him again, but at the same time I think that's what worked so well for this show - it has no intention of overstaying its welcome in any way. That said, I do wonder how season 2 can compete with what we've seen here.

Around episode 6 I started to really think about who the killer was. Generally shows/movies will introduce the bad guy fairly early on, at the very least in a brief scene. I thought that maybe it could be the lawnmower guy, what with the ending to episode 5 and Rust finding the voodoo stick things in the school, but I wasn't dead sure.

Structurally, the show actually reminded me a bit of the book It.
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#77 User is offline   Studlock 

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Posted 06 August 2014 - 12:16 PM

Actually the writer contains the rights to Rust and Hart so we might see them again but in a different format.
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#78 User is offline   Morgoth 

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Posted 05 September 2014 - 06:34 AM

Finished the season watching the last two episodes with Sarah last night. This show is fantastic!
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#79 User is offline   Jakovasaurus 

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Posted 12 September 2014 - 02:51 PM


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#80 User is offline   Abyss 

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Posted 24 September 2014 - 03:57 AM

Collin Farrel and Vince Vaughn officially announced as the leads for S2.
No, really. News and every thing.
...look, considering the performances S1 of this show got out of two of the biggest stoners in Hollywood, it's not nearly as ridiculous as it seems...
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