‘Night Finds You.’
After a disappointing premiere I was hoping Episode 2 titled ‘Night Finds You’ would finally get the ball rolling instead of lightly touching it. Now the case has started, it seems the main story of series 2 will be ‘Who killed Casper and why?’ Which is fine by me. However, the long term problems of Series 2 are starting to be revealed.
Too many characters that are fundamentally the same. Every character can be summed up in three words: depressed, crappy past. None of the characters in the show are interesting to me apart from Ray. It only makes it worse there aren’t any positive/happy people in this story. This feels like what True Detective would be if Marty wasn’t there, Marty was a fairly normal guy. He had a family, he suffered from typical marriage problems and he liked mowing his lawn. But there’s none of that here. Ray, Frank, Paul and Ani are all chronically depressed self loathers who have less than cheerful pasts they like to pretend they’ve put behind them. This, is what makes this series 2 feel like a parody of itself at times.
The case versus the characters, it seems like Pizzolato is having a hard time deciding which of the two he wants to further. The case is moving so disgustingly slow I find myself hardly caring at times, while scenes with Ani and Ray conversing or interviewing I definitely find engaging, at times as an audience we’re just being fed too much information about the pasts of characters that we don’t need to know (a great example is Frank’s scene in bed at the start of the episode). Until he very end of the episode where it looks like Ray is killed, I hadn’t given any extra thought about the case involving Casper, or if I’d care when I found out whatever we were supposed to be looking for.
In regards to Ray being dead, I don’t think he is. By a landslide he’s the most riveting and compelling of the characters, plus Colin Ferrell is listed with 8 episode appearances on IMDB. If he is dead, then honestly what the in the hell?!
I’d like to say this was a ‘cyborg’ of an episode, some of it was artificial and some of it was natural. There were less lines forced in for the sake of sounding ‘cool’ or ‘thought provoking’ and as a whole the episode flowed better, even though we learnt little in terms of chasing leads and creating an engrossing case. A major improvement on the previous episode, the story looks like it’s starting to grow it’s legs and I think episode three will shoot this season of True Detective onto the path it wants to be, a solid, enticing show.
Words by Eddie Micheal