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Monday 10 March 2014

Uncracked Monday: True Detective Tears

(I don't normally care about spoiler alerts but I guess I'll post one here: there are spoilers to the final episode of True Detective ahead. Do NOT read this if you haven't yet seen the last episode of the show; or indeed, if you haven't watched the show at all, you shouldn't even be fucking here at all, you should be downloading all 8 episodes and watching them, motherfucker!)

Today will be an unusual "Un/cracked Monday" because I won't actually be posting a link; there'd be little point.  Since today's entry is dedicated to the "true detective" thread on RPG.net, which someone suggested I take a look at.  Why? Because it is full of the delicious tears of nihilists, secular relativists, and general pretentious fuckwits disappointed with what 95+% of viewers thought was the utterly magnificent finale of True Detective.

Why again? Various reasons, including that they were reading into the show all kinds of feminist messages that led them to hope would have some big payoff in the end with some really heavy-handed message to the viewers about how awful men are (rather than the heroic example of fraternity and masculine heroism we actually see); but the biggest and my favorite is because in the end the show "betrayed" the propagandist message all the fashionable atheist-nihilists were getting wood about from Det. Cohle. 

They all wanted meaninglessness. They wanted Cohle to see nothingness; they wanted Carcosa to be their vision of the utter meaninglessness of existence and wanted other people to come away from the show feeling hopeless.

Instead, the creators provided the most amazing twist they could have done: instead of making the supernatural real, instead of making one of the detectives un-heroic (or even the 'real killer'), instead of revealing some other hokey spin of plot or character; in the end, they had Cohle discover fullness and meaning, existing even in the dark.

They wanted Carcossa and instead they got Nuit, the body of the stars. The luminous emptiness of Vajrayana. Nothingness, with twinkles. The Great Work.

So yeah, fuck them. I wasn't hoping for such a result, and it was the best surprise ever when it came to pass; when the end message was something other than pointlessness, and they really graduated up from "freshman philosophy" into something profound.

RPGPundit

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10 comments:

  1. I thought the ending was brilliant. For the first time Cohle stepped a little out of the darkness and knew fear. My hat is off to the writer for giving us an ending that lived up to the promise of the show.

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  2. Naw, it was a bit of a fail for me... less because it had a happy ending than because the resolution just seemed so mediocre compared to the rest of the series. That ending would dovetail nicely with a whole lot of other Teevee shows, but not so much with this one. It ended up feeling a bit like something from M. Night Shyamalan rack of hokey twists.

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  3. On the contrary; it was the one and only twist that wasn't hokey and predictable. If we'd had tentacle things, or Rust was the real killer, or marty was the real killer, or there was an evil cult of powerful guys that actually got caught, or Marty's wife was the real killer, or Marty's daughter was the next sacrificial victim, all those would have been boringly cliche.

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  4. Seriously, motherfucker? Google it.

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  5. I've made my peace with the last episode... I think that by dying in that sacrificial chamber the 'bad guy' became the final sacrifice... this gave the tranfiguration to Rust instead and he got the power... used it to rewrite himself and the ending. Made it over into the buddy cop movie he secretly wanted.

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  6. Just watched the last episode of the season yesterday, and to say the truth, I was not very impressed.
    Acting is indeed very good and tho whole production is of excellent quality, but the guy hallucinating at the end and coming from a coma with self discovery was a predictable resolution.

    Good show, but not on my would watch it again list.

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  7. You're just mad he betrayed your materialistic vision!

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