For some reason, last night's episode of True Detective (working title "Contractual Obligation") welcomed Colonel Tex O'Hara (aka Senator Shady Bird Johnson) to the show --
-- but only long enough to sink a knife into his pervy hide.
Just one more pointless detour to nowhere on a show whose legs are already snapping under the weight of its accumulated plot cul-de-sacs, impossible coincidences and exhaustingly trivial details.
Two examples.
First, two key villains -- State Senator Exposition and Ernst Stavro Blofeld Exposition -- gather in an office with flimsier security than the Crossroads Motel to unnecessarily riffle through their Deeply Incriminating Documents and recapitulate their Nefarious Scheme while two of our True Detectives listen in through the incredibly thin walls of the one ground-floor room they just happened to find themselves adjacent to.
Second (and 50 feet away) our third True Detective -- drugged out of her head on some molly derivative that makes everyone else giddy and horny but which hits her like Scarecrow's fear toxin -- just happens to stumble straight into missing girl/prostitute/Key Witness, Vera Exposition, who she hustles out of the building, past the remnants of a security cordon that makes Andy Frain look like Seal Team Six, and into a waiting car, there to be whisked away to the penultimate episode.
Why this happened, I have no idea.
Why they have done any of what they have done, I have no idea.
Early on, True Detective got that "Star Wars Episode One: George Lucas Unbound" stank on it which the Red Letter review captured perfectly here, and nothing that has happened since has done anything but add to the sense of a doomed enterprise being marched grimly off a cliff that everyone sees coming.
The auteur who produced a pop culture masterpiece because he took advice from smart people and was forced to operated within reasonable constraints, suddenly freed of all constraints and any need to listen to anyone who could tell him that he's about to fly the Millennium Falcon into Mount Hubris at .5 past light speed.
A fall from such a height that, while the program itself is not worth watching for its literary or entertainment value, the spectacular arc which its failure describes is almost worthy of study in its own right.
Almost.
2 comments:
Okay, call me captain obvious - They're making this ahh stuff, up as they go along.
BTW my top pick for writers painting themselves in a corner was when the crew of 'Battlestar Galactica' finally made it back to earth. The writers at first appeared to be setting up the story for a major turn in the plot but instead spent the rest of series looking for a rabbit to pull out of hat, which they found in the end. I thought that the 'She was really an angel' really stunk up the series ending.
It's turned into the "Mod Squad" with suckier acting
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