True Detective on HBO

[RocketMan]

Yeah, It Follows was the shit. I also nearly shit my pants in the cinema. A great movie.



Dr. Pitlor is one of the most RI elements about the second season thus far. I love how he goes from the seemingly powerful wheeler-dealer in the early episodes to the whimpering errand boy in the latest episode. Rick Springfield aces the role, I think.





I have a feeling that David Morse's Bezzerides the Elder will be revealed as one of the Men Behind the Curtain.

[Rory]

The climactic shoot-out of Episode 4 made me curious about how he's navigating the borderline between bullshit entertainment and substantive dramatic exposition. That scene to me was pure unreal fantasy. I think the protocol of PDs across the US is along the lines of: officer(s) taking fire = hunker the fuck down and await the choppers, the APCs, the arrival of overwhelming numerical superiority. As opposed to raising one's fragile skull above cover into a stream of automatic weapons fire and bravely popping off a few 9mm rounds. Not.

It was the anti-CSI protocol they were following - Seeing the way bystanders get shot (by police and 'bad guys') and even seeing someone get wiped out by the getaway SUV. It wasn't very CSI to see cops ('good guys') get shot either.
Which is more unreal fantasy: CSI or TD?

I thought it was a pretty powerful scene - far removed from the anodyne pyrotechnics of network TV cop shows. It was closer to how a firefight might have gone down in, say, Iraq. Swap cartel soldiers for Academi contractors - isnt that what they were pointing towards with Woodrugh?

[Wombaticus Rex]

I took the shoot-out to be a reference to the North Hollywood shootout

It's probably worth noting that regular LAPD actually requisitioned some AR-15s from a gun store that was up the block, went back outside, and engaged the perps in the middle of the street. So...realism is pretty relative. I believe both of the perps were killed on live TV in LA, but not until SWAT arrived.

Still, at the end of ep4, my roommate immediately made the same point: "You think HBO told him they needed another crazy finish for the halfway point?" The parallels to Rust Cohle's undercover work raiding a trap house -- with the f'ing masterful steadicam work -- are impossible to miss. It would have felt a lot more "sexed up" if not for the restraint of ep5, which grounded the spectacle in its own aftermath.

One detail I completely missed: When Velcoro is stalking Frank's lithe ginger assistant with the loyalty issues, that's little Theo Chessani inspecting the goods. And he brings them to ... Osip, the vaguely Russian heavy, who is not even supposed to be in Los Angeles.

[IanEye]

I took the shoot-out to be a reference to the North Hollywood shootout

It's probably worth noting that regular LAPD actually requisitioned some AR-15s from a gun store that was up the block, went back outside, and engaged the perps in the middle of the street. So...realism is pretty relative. I believe both of the perps were killed on live TV in LA, but not until SWAT arrived.

That whole incident is somewhat humorously covered here.

[km artlu]

Thank you Wombaticus and Rory for providing valid perspectives on that scene. I feel better now.
Right - Woodrugh's demeanor spoke volumes during the shoot-out.

[guruilla]

It’s been a while since I wrote a meta-analysis of popular media (since The Counsellor), but True Detective season 2 is so good that I want to exercise that muscle a bit here. Somehow RI is the place I come when stuff is still embryonic.

I just caught up with this thread now as I didn’t want to read any spoilers. Yesterday Plutonia & I re-watched the first two episodes, followed by 3 & 4. Will catch 5 tonight.

Early impressions. The show is all about power. The lack of it, the abuse of it, the struggle to get it and then to maintain it; the inevitability of losing it and what happens then. Power and potency.

The idea that the show is about characters and not story, as expressed by Nic Pizzolatto: hasn’t epigenetics blown that arbitrary distinction out of the water forever? As above, so below. Any plot maps the internal struggle of the characters to make sense of their world and assuage the existential identity crisis of death-awareness; all forms of violence (all bids for power) are quests for identity, and so on, and so forth.

The show lays this out by showing the symbiosis between the characters’ emotional and sexual issues (dysfunctions) and their abuse of power at a social as well as personal level. The difference between social and personal power abuse is arbitrary and imaginary; politics is always personal, which is why everything is politics. Character is story, society shapes individual, and vice versa.

Example: Ray abuses his police power to track down and beat the father of the boy who bullied his son. By desperately trying to manage the train wreck of his life, he only gets more deeply tangled up with the wreckage.

For me, it was apparent from the first episode that season two levels up from season one. The richness of texture and hue (visually and sensorially it’s the richest TV show I’ve ever seen) and the sheer care that’s gone into it is obvious in just about every frame. Beyond that, it is going far deeper into the psychology of corruption. There is no longer the imaginary dividing line between “cops investigating mystery” and “crime being exposed.” Season two is mapping out the landscape of criminality (politics and social engineering) by following the ones on the edges of power, the cops and the smalltime criminals, as they begin to cross over into the perennial twilight of Plutocracy and realize that there is no terrain that doesn’t belong to it—not even the seemingly spiritual (and certainly not the personal or sexual).

Sexual dysfunction in the series is not just a metaphor (it’s all metaphor once you learn—or at least learn about—twilight language), but also both a symptom and a cause of the larger social corruption. Maybe that should read “corruption,” because in TD, society and culture are more the agents of rot than results/victims of it. In other words, the rot is systemic and endemic (as in the line from Bram Stoker’s Dracula: “Civilization and syphilisation have advanced together”).

There’s talk at this thread about the first season and how effectively it exposes social corruption. My impression was similar to Brandon D’s, the show sort of had it both ways and so let viewers leave with the reading they were most comfortable with. I was definitely disappointed by the end even though I didn’t see it as a total cop-out and in some ways would agree that it was more realistic. But dramatically the show also petered out a bit, because tracking and killing a lone perp just isn’t nearly as compelling as seeing little guys come up against massively endemic state corruption.

The question for me is always, how much is this or any given show spreading the rot by “exposing it” (revelation of the method, etc.), and how much is it the inverse, subtly exposing it by seeming to spread (i.e., glamorize) it? (Something I really liked about Natural Born Killers.)

I don’t think it’s possible to answer this at anything other than an individual level, i.e., in what way does an artwork’s exploration of vice intersect with and deepen one’s own growing recognition of a lifelong complicity with the social horrors? And of course, how much is enjoying these shows a symptom of and indulgence in same said complicity, and how much is it leading to an extrication from it?

The degree of pain our “entertainment” causes us might be a good measure of that. Good art never made anyone feel virtuous.

We get the world and the TV shows we deserve because we aren’t separate from the process by which both world and TV are being generated. To watch a TV show is to co-create it; ditto with social involvement at any level. We are all complicit in the rot because we are all carrying the microorganisms that implement it. It’s not the rot that turns us into walking corpses, however. (By corpses I mean spiritually empty vessels for capitalist agendas to transport their goods through.) It’s the resistance to it, i.e., to the base reality of the body and of death. Death is not the enemy; denial is.

The David Lynch influence on season two is almost embarrassingly obvious, but I love it anyway; less obvious but worth mentioning is how (IMO) the film has been informed by The Counsellor, which laid the template (and set the bar) for exploring the overlap between human exploitation, political graft, metaphysical “evil,” and spiritual/existential crisis/awakening.

TD is an existential detective show. The mystery is always a puzzle because existence is a metaphor for something else. Like Frank gazing at the water stains, something in our environment is nagging at us that we have misinterpreted the data and ended up in a dissociated fantasy, a socially engineered Bardo realm. The world we see is made of papier-mâché, and the crazed need to prop it up and make it seem real is what drives the capitalist machine. It is all the desperate mental activity (accumulation of wealth and power and sexual gratification) of a boy abandoned by his father in the dark of a basement, with only rats for company. The frantic fantasy enactment of culture is the only way for us to paper over the cracks of the dream, and prevent it from dissolving.

Frank is small-time crook who finds himself on the threshold between dream and reality: i.e., in a liminal space. He is suspended between the basic social climbing that everyone is doing, and the inner circles of the Plutocracy where a different criteria applies, where the bid for power has taken over completely (become full-blown pathology) and any childish doubts and fears about what is real (any possibility of a healing existential crisis) have been banished forever. In their place is the nihilistic conviction that nothing is real, so everything is up for grabs.

Frank doesn’t know what to do with the money he makes because he hasn’t yet reached the level where the real power operates. At that level, money is irrelevant except as a means to control others. Frank’s attempt to level up, and how it is sabotaged by the murder of Caspere, seems to be the main plot engine. What I get from it is that Frank is being prevented from joining the Plutocracy, because he’s not one of the club, for whatever reason (maybe he’s not part of the hidden bloodlines, maybe he’s too moral and isn’t willing to cross the lines that have to be crossed; he seems to care about children, which may be the real “prize” at the secret Plutocrat parties). Because he’s denied access, he is forced to level down, and re-forge ties with the petty crime world he left behind (the same world he was trying to level up from), in order not to lose his footing in “reality” entirely.

As far as Frank sees it, the only purpose to having money, beyond his capacity to spend it, is to leave it to his children. But his attempts to have children are thwarted by his own impotence in the face of a plastic cup. (Frank Semyon = Honest Semen?)

As the recipients of money, status, and power, children are the Plutocracy’s poison receptacles: the poison IS the power, so to speak. For Ray, his son is his only ostensible reason for living, i.e., for struggling to gain power in the world. Once that relationship is taken away from him, he no longer has anything to live for, hence no reason to go along with the power drives which Frank represents.

If Ray is the show’s hero, it is only insofar as he begins to act autonomously and not merely as a power-puppet (i.e., controlled by his own trauma-drives).

Like Frank in the hospital scene, and Ray who is indifferent women since his wife was raped, Woodrugh is also impotent because of his ambiguity about his sexuality, which relates to his past with Black Mountain (i.e., corporate power).

Most obscurely of all, Ani’s ties to quasi-spiritual groups and her childhood involvement with “social research” have manifested in her conflation between sexual freedom and the capacity for violence (the knives, etc.). It is too soon to try and untangle these various snakes, but with any luck the show will do the job, or at least provide enough hints for us to intuit the shape of the festering ancestral/psychosocial wound that’s being mapped here (and sold as corporate product).

As for the occult history of transportation and the recurring shots of highways, it might be worth exploring the metaphoric angle; again, as above so below, the infrastructure of Vinci, how it has become so utterly industrialized that a) it’s a major source of planetary pollution; and b) it has hardly any residents and mostly just workers, and exploited ones at that — this may be hinting at how trauma, sexual and otherwise (abuse of power, social engineering), affects the human nervous system and turns the body into an empty receptacle (poison container) for inhuman forces (psychic fragments) to possess.

But I'm only guessing at this point, and throwing it out there to see if it sparks any thoughts or associations.

[brekin]

I'm going to fade out because I'm just running on the fumes of my engine of discontent from Season 1, and can't bring myself to patronize Season 2 (which still isn't as "good" as Season 1, right?). But to address "the hard to follow" stance leveled at non true blue TD fan boys and girls or more commonly the "Inception defense" (you don't like it because you don't get it.)
To most people Season 1, and from what I gather from the commentary here, Season 2 isn't hard to follow- (Ipod people aside) it is just hard to see, and believe, where it is leading. That to me points to how TD, related to its puzzle vs. mystery dynamic, doesn't know where it is going, or why. TD then, is not complex, it is just a complicated mess. Pizzolato isn't making a Swiss clock, he's pouring cheese into a Swiss clock.

TD is actually easy to follow in some ways, that is why Season 1 was exciting. Each episode presented new and interesting ingredients like a alternative Iron Chef contest, ooh blowfish! that's poisonous! Pineapple! Interesting choice! Steak Tar Tar! Where is this all going! Funions! The creativity! What will he make with all this?

The thing is, he makes a pizza, a pizza with everything on it. That is the final dish.
The pizza isn't complex, it's just a mess.
That isn't hard to follow, just hard to stomach.
I think it even qualifies as a mess, a variant of a Wicked Problem, albeit a self created one.

Wicked Problem

A wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. The use of term "wicked" here has come to denote resistance to resolution, rather than evil.[1] Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems.

The phrase was originally used in social planning. Its modern sense was introduced in 1967 by C. West Churchman in a guest editorial he wrote in the journal Management Science,[2] responding to a previous use of the term by Horst Rittel. Churchman discussed the moral responsibility of operations research "to inform the manager in what respect our 'solutions' have failed to tame his wicked problems". Rittel and Melvin M. Webber formally described the concept of wicked problems in a 1973 treatise, contrasting "wicked" problems with relatively "tame", soluble problems in mathematics, chess, or puzzle solving.[3]
Rittel and Webber's 1973 formulation of wicked problems in social policy planning specified ten characteristics:[3][4]

There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.
Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good or bad.
There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
Every solution to a wicked problem is a "one-shot operation"; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial and error, every attempt counts significantly.
Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem's resolution.
The social planner has no right to be wrong (i.e., planners are liable for the consequences of the actions they generate).

Conklin later generalized the concept of problem wickedness to areas other than planning and policy.
The defining characteristics are:[5]

The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.
Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.
Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.
Every solution to a wicked problem is a 'one shot operation.'
Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.

Social Messes:

According to Horn, the defining characteristics of a social mess are:[24]

No unique “correct” view of the problem;
Different views of the problem and contradictory solutions;
Most problems are connected to other problems;
Data are often uncertain or missing;
Multiple value conflicts;
Ideological and cultural constraints;
Political constraints;
Economic constraints;
Often a-logical or illogical or multi-valued thinking;
Numerous possible intervention points;
Consequences difficult to imagine;
Considerable uncertainty, ambiguity;
Great resistance to change; and,
Problem solver(s) out of contact with the problems and potential solutions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

Look at the criteria above, especially of social messes. It's like TD's show bible.
I look at it this way. TD has two main problems which make it a social mess as defined above, especially "No unique “correct” view of the problem":

1. It tackles so many exotic, taboo and varied themes and lines of inquiry that it can only be a mess unless the creator has the courage and insight to break free of the usual political, economic, ideological and cultural constraints to address "what lies beneath". In fairness to Pizzolato he has said that his show is less about ideas and more about the characters, so he's not going to go there, because he wants to only at most toy with dark themes to give his characters some juicy lines to chew on with their bar talk and ultimately no A list star is going to what to be portrayed as The Beast. To have the themes explored in TD with honest conclusions and ramifications would be box office poison for A list stars. TD is going to stay on the surface and not really engage the data.
In many ways its A list and cool visuals preclude it from not remaining a hot ass mess. If you can get by on the first two, why seriously examine the themes that attract viewers in the first place? In fact if you have the first two involved in a Mess, it will take some time before reasonable viewers realize there isn't anything there. True Detective is just a intellectual Ponzi scheme which constantly is luring investment in rapidly created new symbols and allusions that never pay off.

2. It would take some serious forecasting and workmanship to tie together all the threads TD starts to unwind. We've seen what happened with Lost when it started building the yellow brick road as it walked it. When you deal with such speculative themes you are going to pull some weak ass conclusion unless you are truly a improvisational genius or have it all mapped out before hand. Because TD season 2 has had probably been even less mapped out than Season 1 we are going to see an even larger fail. If you build an Escher type house and start painting without a thorough prep you are going to paint yourself into all corners on all planes.

True Detective is a very cool cooking show but ultimately it just cooks up a Hot Mess Pizza.

[Rory]

It’s been a while since I wrote a meta-analysis of popular media (since The Counsellor), but True Detective season 2 is so good that I want to exercise that muscle a bit here. Somehow RI is the place I come when stuff is still embryonic.

I just caught up with this thread now as I didn’t want to read any spoilers. Yesterday Plutonia & I re-watched the first two episodes, followed by 3 & 4. Will catch 5 tonight.

Early impressions. The show is all about power. The lack of it, the abuse of it, the struggle to get it and then to maintain it; the inevitability of losing it and what happens then. Power and potency.

The idea that the show is about characters and not story, as expressed by Nic Pizzolatto: hasn’t epigenetics blown that arbitrary distinction out of the water forever? As above, so below. Any plot maps the internal struggle of the characters to make sense of their world and assuage the existential identity crisis of death-awareness; all forms of violence (all bids for power) are quests for identity, and so on, and so forth.

The show lays this out by showing the symbiosis between the characters’ emotional and sexual issues (dysfunctions) and their abuse of power at a social as well as personal level. The difference between social and personal power abuse is arbitrary and imaginary; politics is always personal, which is why everything is politics. Character is story, society shapes individual, and vice versa.

Example: Ray abuses his police power to track down and beat the father of the boy who bullied his son. By desperately trying to manage the train wreck of his life, he only gets more deeply tangled up with the wreckage.

For me, it was apparent from the first episode that season two levels up from season one. The richness of texture and hue (visually and sensorially it’s the richest TV show I’ve ever seen) and the sheer care that’s gone into it is obvious in just about every frame. Beyond that, it is going far deeper into the psychology of corruption. There is no longer the imaginary dividing line between “cops investigating mystery” and “crime being exposed.” Season two is mapping out the landscape of criminality (politics and social engineering) by following the ones on the edges of power, the cops and the smalltime criminals, as they begin to cross over into the perennial twilight of Plutocracy and realize that there is no terrain that doesn’t belong to it—not even the seemingly spiritual (and certainly not the personal or sexual).

Sexual dysfunction in the series is not just a metaphor (it’s all metaphor once you learn—or at least learn about—twilight language), but also both a symptom and a cause of the larger social corruption. Maybe that should read “corruption,” because in TD, society and culture are more the agents of rot than results/victims of it. In other words, the rot is systemic and endemic (as in the line from Bram Stoker’s Dracula: “Civilization and syphilisation have advanced together”).

There’s talk at this thread about the first season and how effectively it exposes social corruption. My impression was similar to Brandon D’s, the show sort of had it both ways and so let viewers leave with the reading they were most comfortable with. I was definitely disappointed by the end even though I didn’t see it as a total cop-out and in some ways would agree that it was more realistic. But dramatically the show also petered out a bit, because tracking and killing a lone perp just isn’t nearly as compelling as seeing little guys come up against massively endemic state corruption.

The question for me is always, how much is this or any given show spreading the rot by “exposing it” (revelation of the method, etc.), and how much is it the inverse, subtly exposing it by seeming to spread (i.e., glamorize) it? (Something I really liked about Natural Born Killers.)

I don’t think it’s possible to answer this at anything other than an individual level, i.e., in what way does an artwork’s exploration of vice intersect with and deepen one’s own growing recognition of a lifelong complicity with the social horrors? And of course, how much is enjoying these shows a symptom of and indulgence in same said complicity, and how much is it leading to an extrication from it?

The degree of pain our “entertainment” causes us might be a good measure of that. Good art never made anyone feel virtuous.

We get the world and the TV shows we deserve because we aren’t separate from the process by which both world and TV are being generated. To watch a TV show is to co-create it; ditto with social involvement at any level. We are all complicit in the rot because we are all carrying the microorganisms that implement it. It’s not the rot that turns us into walking corpses, however. (By corpses I mean spiritually empty vessels for capitalist agendas to transport their goods through.) It’s the resistance to it, i.e., to the base reality of the body and of death. Death is not the enemy; denial is.

The David Lynch influence on season two is almost embarrassingly obvious, but I love it anyway; less obvious but worth mentioning is how (IMO) the film has been informed by The Counsellor, which laid the template (and set the bar) for exploring the overlap between human exploitation, political graft, metaphysical “evil,” and spiritual/existential crisis/awakening.

TD is an existential detective show. The mystery is always a puzzle because existence is a metaphor for something else. Like Frank gazing at the water stains, something in our environment is nagging at us that we have misinterpreted the data and ended up in a dissociated fantasy, a socially engineered Bardo realm. The world we see is made of papier-mâché, and the crazed need to prop it up and make it seem real is what drives the capitalist machine. It is all the desperate mental activity (accumulation of wealth and power and sexual gratification) of a boy abandoned by his father in the dark of a basement, with only rats for company. The frantic fantasy enactment of culture is the only way for us to paper over the cracks of the dream, and prevent it from dissolving.

Frank is small-time crook who finds himself on the threshold between dream and reality: i.e., in a liminal space. He is suspended between the basic social climbing that everyone is doing, and the inner circles of the Plutocracy where a different criteria applies, where the bid for power has taken over completely (become full-blown pathology) and any childish doubts and fears about what is real (any possibility of a healing existential crisis) have been banished forever. In their place is the nihilistic conviction that nothing is real, so everything is up for grabs.

Frank doesn’t know what to do with the money he makes because he hasn’t yet reached the level where the real power operates. At that level, money is irrelevant except as a means to control others. Frank’s attempt to level up, and how it is sabotaged by the murder of Caspere, seems to be the main plot engine. What I get from it is that Frank is being prevented from joining the Plutocracy, because he’s not one of the club, for whatever reason (maybe he’s not part of the hidden bloodlines, maybe he’s too moral and isn’t willing to cross the lines that have to be crossed; he seems to care about children, which may be the real “prize” at the secret Plutocrat parties). Because he’s denied access, he is forced to level down, and re-forge ties with the petty crime world he left behind (the same world he was trying to level up from), in order not to lose his footing in “reality” entirely.

As far as Frank sees it, the only purpose to having money, beyond his capacity to spend it, is to leave it to his children. But his attempts to have children are thwarted by his own impotence in the face of a plastic cup. (Frank Semyon = Honest Semen?)

As the recipients of money, status, and power, children are the Plutocracy’s poison receptacles: the poison IS the power, so to speak. For Ray, his son is his only ostensible reason for living, i.e., for struggling to gain power in the world. Once that relationship is taken away from him, he no longer has anything to live for, hence no reason to go along with the power drives which Frank represents.

If Ray is the show’s hero, it is only insofar as he begins to act autonomously and not merely as a power-puppet (i.e., controlled by his own trauma-drives).

Like Frank in the hospital scene, and Ray who is indifferent women since his wife was raped, Woodrugh is also impotent because of his ambiguity about his sexuality, which relates to his past with Black Mountain (i.e., corporate power).

Most obscurely of all, Ani’s ties to quasi-spiritual groups and her childhood involvement with “social research” have manifested in her conflation between sexual freedom and the capacity for violence (the knives, etc.). It is too soon to try and untangle these various snakes, but with any luck the show will do the job, or at least provide enough hints for us to intuit the shape of the festering ancestral/psychosocial wound that’s being mapped here (and sold as corporate product).

As for the occult history of transportation and the recurring shots of highways, it might be worth exploring the metaphoric angle; again, as above so below, the infrastructure of Vinci, how it has become so utterly industrialized that a) it’s a major source of planetary pollution; and b) it has hardly any residents and mostly just workers, and exploited ones at that — this may be hinting at how trauma, sexual and otherwise (abuse of power, social engineering), affects the human nervous system and turns the body into an empty receptacle (poison container) for inhuman forces (psychic fragments) to possess.

But I'm only guessing at this point, and throwing it out there to see if it sparks any thoughts or associations.

That's a brilliant, thought provoking piece of writing. Thank you.

*and also for watching it before providing your thoughts

[brekin]

Rory wrote:

*and also for watching it before providing your thoughts

Please tell me regular, loyal viewer where any of my intuitive musings have missed the mark.
For if my analysis is incorrect and I haven't watched the show- I'm guilty of being lazy.
But if my analysis is correct and I haven't watched the show- it only further shows how predictable TD is.

[IanEye]

Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.

who knows these days
where on earth the money goes
oh yeah

.

[Rory]

Rory wrote:

*and also for watching it before providing your thoughts

It would be remiss of me to comment on something I haven't read, brekin.

[brekin]

Rory wrote:

*and also for watching it before providing your thoughts

It would be remiss of me to comment on something I haven't read, brekin.

Yeah, of course...but then one wonders how then you determined I hadn't watched Season 2? Just another mystery I guess.

[Wombaticus Rex]

Yeah, of course...but then one wonders how then you determined I hadn't watched Season 2? Just another mystery I guess.

It was in the first episode of season 2:

I'm going to fade out because I'm just running on the fumes of my engine of discontent from Season 1, and can't bring myself to patronize Season 2

Are you sure you understood Inception?

[minime]

Are you sure you understood Inception?

Please enlighten me.

[minime]

Ah well. It is after all a thread about 'True Detective'.

I will say this about that: 'True Detective' imo is about the exoteric of the esoteric, and 'Inception' is about the truly, deeply esoteric of the exoteric. Opposite sides of the mirror. Something, something...

Maybe, with time, the creaters of True Detective will have the time and inclination to flesh it out, or flesh it in...

Jabberwocky.

Anyway... R.I.P

I miss what it never was.