True Detective Recap: Everything is Fucking
This is the show True Detective should have been all season long – a dangerous, taut, suspenseful crime thriller about a corrupt city. Last week’s episode was merely a taste of what this season had the potential to be.
The penultimate episode, “Black Maps and Motel Rooms” was the best hour of television this season has produced. Only eight episodes make up this season, but it should have been even shorter. One of the structural flaws of this season has been sprawling the plot over eight episodes, and it would have largely benefited from having fewer episodes. The plot could have been nicely resolved in six episodes since, when you come down to it, the plot isn’t all that complicated. The way it’s been told was making it complicated.
Six episodes would have forced Nic Pizzolatto to formulate a more taut and suspenseful season rather than dumping all these bits and pieces of information on the viewer and expecting them know what in the actual fuck is going on.
“Black Maps and Motel Rooms” does pay off, though. If you decided to stick with this season, you would have been very happy. It’s an episode of television that at the very least serves to tie up the loose ends, make it a nice tightened bow, but it also serves as a ruthless set-up for next week’s 90-minute season finale, a finale that is sure to be a bloodbath based on Frank Semyon’s shopping list alone. Speaking of, it was another great episode for Frank. The viewer finally gets to see gangster Frank, the dangerous mobster he was always supposed to be. Again, Vince Vaughn does a sinister job of portraying it. That Emmy nomination is definitely in his future.
The documents Paul and Ray managed to steal at last week’s sex party reveal that they, Tony Chessani and Blake, are buying Caspere’s shares for cheap and redistributing it for a much larger some, selling it to that Russian Osip. Ray takes these findings to Frank. Frank in turn promises Ray the name of the guy who fed him the false information about his wife’s attacker by the end of the day. Blake rocks up for a meeting with Frank that, in hindsight, is a pretty stupid game to play when you’re fucking the guy over. After Blake realizes he’s made, Frank smashes him with a whiskey glass before choking all the information out of him.
All of Frank’s allies have turned on him – he has no one left to stand with him – and Blake reveals that it was Osip’s plan all along to take Frank’s place in the organization. Blake confesses to killing Stan but insists Stan tried to make a deal with him. It is revealed that Blake gave Frank the wrong intel on Ray’s wife’s attacker because he saw it is an opportunity to step up, an opportunity to show Frank what he can do. The man Ray killed was a meth head who threatened to go after Blake. Frank eventually shoots him, lets him bleed out on the office floor. Frank quips that he saw something in Blake, but now he “shit the carpet”. Red shit.
Osip and his Russian minions paid Frank a visit at the casino. They’ve bought the clubs and the casino, but wait, there’s still a bright future for a young upstart like himself. Osip wants Frank to run the day-to-day business but unfortunately Frank had to turn down the offer. Frank decides to burn down his empire instead with the plans of leaving country. His escape will more than likely end in a bloodbath, though.
Vera, the not-so-missing whore, helps Ani and rest of the detectives to solve the mystery of the blue diamonds as well the mystery of Tasha, the girl who was always with Caspere. Apparently, she was Caspere’s favourite girl, but she had other plans. She tried to blackmail them with photos but found herself tied to a chair in that shack Paul and Ani discovered a few episodes ago. Paul eventually helps them solve the case of the blue diamonds: Kevin Burress, Ray’s old boss at the PD, and Dixon, that fat, now dead, detective who looked like he wasn’t interested in this case at all, were part of a jewelry store theft with Caspere in 1992 where two people were murdered. Ray and Ani discover that the murders left two kids orphaned, one of whom – a daughter – appears on Tasha’s photos. She, who is named Laura, assumed another identity to become Caspere’s secretary in plot to exact revenge for her parents’ murders. If we were to assume that she killed Caspere, she must be Birdman? The same Birdman who fake shot Ray in episode two? The answers to those questions are likely to be revealed during the season finale.
The best line of the episode belonged to Vera. “Everything is fucking” could be read as an answer to Mad Men’s constant existential struggle to figure out “Is that all there is?” A 3-word line from a constantly coked up whore delivers an existential statement so perfectly. With that said, this season stumbled over philosophical pondering; but “Everything is fucking” is all it needed.
Ray is framed for the murder of Assistant Attorney General Davis. Poor Mrs. Barksdale. Ray was supposed to meet her at some abandoned space but found her dead in her car. He thinks they must have used one of his weapons. Davis was the only person linking them to the state, and with her dead, their basically scrambling to survive.
For all the good work Paul did during the episode, he didn’t even get a thank you. Get on it, Jimmy Fallon. He gets sent photos of him kissing his fuck buddy, and if there’s one thing Paul is fighting desperately to keep hidden, is his homosexuality, so being blackmailed because of it puts him in a precarious position. As it turns out, it’s the security company he worked for who is doing the blackmailing. He meets his ex fuck buddy where he’s supposed to be buying the photos. It’s all been a plot to make sure Paul doesn’t betray confidentiality. Inside a dark tunnel, he meets a man who wants the documentation he stole from the sex party. Instead of giving Ray and Ani up, he gets involved in a shootout. He eventually kills them all, but outside he is shot and very likely killed by Kevin Burress, the tall skinny man who paid that girl to pawn Caspere’s diamonds and was involved in the double homicide at the jewerly store himself. Ironic that Paul basically dies in a dark tunnel when he spent the whole season in a dark closet trying very hard not to escape from it.
It leaves viewers with Frank trying to get away, Ani and Ray hunted by corrupt police, and Paul dead.
Suspenseful episode to say the least, and the show is being wrapped up excellently. A shorter season possibly would have avoided all the tedious pitfalls along the way, but for the first time this season, one could say one can’t wait for next week.
