Sunday!
True Detective Season 2 is finally out.
One of the big criticisms of the first season was misdirection. The first several episodes made some pretty big references to some fairly old-school horror stories. They perfectly captured the feel of Robert Chambers and H.P. Lovecraft as we followed along with two very different police detectives who were digging into some seriously horrible crimes that *FELT* like we were all scratching the surface of some seriously old and wicked culture that was more than possible of turning everything we knew about everything upside down.
And, at the end of the day, it was a world with Cthulhu Cults, but no Cthulhu. At the end of the day, it reminded me of nothing more than Frank Miller’s Sin City. You’ve got a very, very corrupt town with some very, very bad people in it and it requires cops that are juuuust corrupt enough to be able to swim in the waters where they can take down the big fish.
There were some absolutely *AMAZING* scenes, mind. Brilliant monologues, terrifying bad guys (the scene where we first see the meth cook? I shudder even now), a really well-done single take scene (a SIX MINUTE! single take scene!), and a final boss fight that gives everyone a glimpse of the universe. I don’t mind having gone out of my way to watch it. It was definitely worth the price of admission. It just felt like it added up to something less than the sum of its parts.
When it comes to Season 2, the main thing I’ve noticed so far is that nobody has really been talking about it. When Season One was on the air, there were a number of articles breaking down some of the more obscure references in the show. A whole bunch of “what do you think will happen next???” discussions. For Season Two? It feels like there were a lot fewer (then again, maybe I’ve just missed them). When it first started, there were a handful of “oh, it’s not as good” complaints and then… nothing.
So that’s got me a bit apprehensive but I have Season 2 sitting on the couch right now. I hope to start diving into it tonight.
So… what are you reading and/or watching?
(Featured Image is “Edison’s Telephonoscope” by George du Maurier from Punch Almanack for 1879)
One question that I wonder about as I sit down to watch the new season:
Is there a Tuttle in Season 2?
Don’t bother answering yes or no, of course. (I mean, if the answer is “no”, it’s not a spoiler at all and if the answer is “yes”, then it’s kind of a meta-spoiler for not only this season but the upcoming Season 3 and there not being a spoiler is kind of a let-down spoiler in a way so… yeah, I guess I don’t want to know until the show confirms one way or the other. But that is the question with which I’m going into Season 2.)Report
Tuttle in the MASH sense?Report
No, not that one (though that was a good episode). In Season One of the True Detective, there was a corrupt family who had their fingers in pretty much every pie (including one of the Cthulhu cult pies). My comparison was to the Roark family from Sin City (the family that has a archbishop here, a senator there).
Yes, I know the joke you’re fixing to make. No politics.
Anyway, I am idly wondering if this family was solely a Season One thing or if there is a branch that traces back to the same great-grandfather and grampa moved out to California.Report
(the family that has a archbishop here, a senator there).
Sounds like Edwin O’Connor’s All in the Family (No connection to the TV series; it’s sort of a roman a clef about the Kennedys.) If O’Connor is remembered at all these days, it’s for The Last Hurrah, about the decline and fall of the last of the old-style Irish machine-politician mayors of Boston. He also won a Pulitzer for The Edge of Sadness , the story of an Irish-American priest who’s a recovering alcoholic. In case it’s not clear, he was an Irish guy from New England who wrote about Irish guys from New England.
Chris, have you read any of those? You should definitely pick up The Last Hurrah, and maybe look for the movie version with Spencer Tracy.Report
I just started watching St. Elsewhere, and so far quite enjoying it. It’s a show I watched intermittently when it was current, but it’s heavily serialized enough that it can’t really be appreciated that way. Hulu has season 1 for free; anything beyond that would have to be obtained illicitly.Report
That remains my mother’s favorite show. That and Monk, the titular character of which she considers a kindred spirit.Report
I’d be happy to discuss TD Season 2 with you after you finish watching it, but I’m afraid anything I might say now – good or bad – would diminish your experience.Report
The fact that Cthulhu became a lumberjack was sort of weird.
But OK, I guess.Report
I’ve been really enjoying watching Nurse Jackie, and particularly enamored of the 99 percent Invisible podcast (one thing I dig is that it is SHORT).
Reading lots, still not caught up on bookposts from last year but have made plenty of progress (now in December AT LAST). Trying not to read TOO much so that I can get caught up first! That is not really happening though :D. The books, they call to me. Of particular note this week is the kid’s book The Snail and the Whale, by the same lady who wrote The Gruffalo. The meter and rhyme are perfect and the illustrations are perfect and the story is excellent. LOVE. I bought one for my niece’s birthday (she’s a big Gruffalo fan) and one for myself.Report
Retromania, by Simon Reynolds.
I have the Ash v. Evil Dead finale to watch tonight. I also need to knock out the last couple eps of Master of None.
Watched the first ep of In the Flesh, it was pretty good.Report
In the sixteen plus hours of airline travel over winter break, watched all of Mr Robot and about three episodes of US House of Cards. Compared to the hype, I found HoC very underwhelming; I can’t believe Netflix was able to build its brand on this show. I did like Mr Robot- a lot – though I have major problems with two key plot points.Report
I couldn’t make it through a full season of House of Cards; it is easily one of Netflix’s worst. Mr. Robot, on the other hand, is awesome.Report
I made it through the first season of the Netflix HoC, but only because I wanted to see how the plot was resolved. (In short: clumsily and unconvincingly.) The BBC HoC, on the other hand, was fun all the way through.Report
There are definitely a couple plot points that don’t really seem to add up. If Esmail is telling the truth and this is all just Act I of a story that he really does have mapped out, then it’s possible they might be resolved somehow in S2.Report
Here’s my two plot point heartburns, now that I’m at a computer with spoiler tags
1) The obvious Tyler Durden thing. (i.e. Christian Slater’s all in that dude’s head) I saw it coming for a while. But then, I was looking so hard for it, I could swear that an episode or two before the big reveal they had other characters talking to Mr. Hacker and Mr. Robot in the same scene. I’d have to watch it again to see if the did mess that up, or if that was in *my* head
2) I hate the whole Occupy, ‘we can cancel debt and people will be free’ thing. If, as the I believe the various ambient scene setting news broadcasts said, most all ATM and credit card transactions were frozen, well, then most of those New Yorkers are going to be very hungry in two to three days when the store shelves are all empty. (The run on groceries would actually all be in the first 24 hrs.)Report
IIRC there were situations (in the Coney Island hacker HQ) in which the other hackers would talk to both Eliot and Slater in the same scene. I think in those scenes we are meant to infer that at those times, it is different parts of Eliot’s personality taking over and running the show (Slater will retreat to the background and mess around with the popcorn machine or whatever).
More broadly, though, before the reveal, we see Slater meet with Wellick in a car, and they are in some sort of cahoots (Wellick threatens Slater, who responds that there’s no profit in blowing Slater up) – which means that Eliot is in cahoots with Wellick, somehow.
Yet, when Wellick shows up to Eliot’s apartment (then disappears), he appears to be acting as though he just figured out that Eliot was anything more than just a lowly Network Security Admin; and Wellick’s wife, while she doesn’t necessarily seem to KNOW Eliot, still seemingly has some sort of suspicion of or connection to him when she meets him outside their apartment.
Perhaps there will be flashbacks that resolve that part?Report
I just think continuity is hard. Especially with a thing made on a relatively shoestring budget and it’s the money of the most famous actor in the work on the line.Report
Continuity is only hard when you Don’t Like Backstory. Some people write 20 pages of backstory for their characters (And you wonder how Retta got the role expanded and awesomeified…)
If you write enough backstory, the continuity takes care of itself because you’re working in a decent framework.
(Of course, there’s one show which has too much continuity… as part of a deliberate attempt to be awful.)Report
This is not continuity in the story sense. It’s continuity in the ‘jeez this is always the largest section of the IMDB goofs page, get a fishin life people’ sense.Report
24 hours is Manhattan only. (and that’s assuming you kill all traffic off island)
Repeat after me:
Just In Time!Report
The best way to watch the Netflix House of Cards is to watch the BBC version first, so that you can occupy your mind with comparisons of why the latter worked better. With that, the weaknesses of the U.S. HOC blur a bit and you can focus on the enjoyable parts, mostly Kate Mara and Kevin Spacey playing a mustache-twirling bad guy. Also, Robin Wright’s restrained sociopath is nice, as well.
Season 2 and beyond is a whole other matter.Report
I watched the BBC version first and it was SO MUCH better that I couldn’t even stand 10 minutes of the US version.
Mileage, varying.Report
Its Tuttles all the way down.Report
Everything I have heard about TD/2 is that it starts slow but ends with a bang. Supposedly quite worth it. Its been on my to watch list for a while now (granted there really isn’t anything else on it so I am not sure if I have any excuses…) And I think that TD/1 works in a Cthulu universe, just not the final chapter in the book. In other words it isn’t the story where the heros meet the big bad, they just ran into one of the minions and escaped with most of their san points.
Finishing up Riddle of the Sands (been reading a metric ton of sailboat building books lately which has been spreading the reading a bit thin) and will start Ballards The Drowned World and Hemmingways Death in the Afternoon. Need the dual reading action.Report
We’re still watching PoI, and I’m watching Hannibal at a snail’s pace. It’s a brutal show, not only because it is uncomfortably graphic, but because of what happens to some of the characters who don’t die, so I can only watch it once and a while without being overwhelmed. And after sufficient time has passed since I last ate.Report
I recently read Ancillary Justice and the new (non-Dresden) book by Jim Butcher. I’ve also just subscribed to Netflix, and while New Zealand Netflix is a pale shadow of the US version, there are still some interesting things on there.Report
What did you think about Ancillary Justice, @james-k ?Report
@maribou
I enjoyed it. The setting was interesting, and they did a decent job of showing the unusual perspective the main character had.
I’m interested to see where things go next.Report
Okay. I saw the first episode. Trying to avoid spoilers for those who might also wish to watch the show.
There are a lot of little tricks that might be being played on me. The fact that I can see them does not really bother me yet, though.
Colin Farrell is one of my favorite actors and when he plays “cop with anger management issues”, he’s elbows deep in his element.
I’m used to seeing Vince Vaughn play a slacker-type than a fiendishly ambitious type. I don’t know if I think he’s doing a good job yet.
I’m conflicted about the character that Rachel McAdams plays so far. Somehow eerily completely unsympathetic. They should have had her succeed at something.
David Morse is in this. In the same way that I have Sean Bean being in a movie as an automatic spoiler for “Sean Bean’s character is going to die”, I have David Morse being in a show as an automatic spoiler for “David Morse’s character is the bad guy.”
Let’s hope they managed to avoid that.
There is, apparently, a third major character in the show in the form of the California Highway Patrol guy. I can’t remember a thing about him.
I really enjoyed Colin Farrell’s line about astronauts.
The relationship between Farrell’s cop and Vaughn’s mostly-gone-legit legitimate businessman is interesting.
The trick where we see a body being moved but they go out of our way to tell us “okay, this is a body, and this body is being moved, but we are *NOT* going to show you the person moving the body” is a trick that should bother me more.
The trick where Colin Farrell extracted a confession from someone and then acted on the information in the confession but we, the audience, have no idea if the information in the confession was anywhere close to accurate is a frustrating trick.
I can see how people might have been disappointed after this one after comparing it to the first episode from season one.
I am hooked, though.Report
If you liked that line, don’t worry there are so many more coming your way.
I want to say more about Season 2, but it’s probably best that I don’t.
This weekend I finished the first season of Person of Interest and watched a few of the second. I think I see where this thing is going, at least a little bit, but I’m not sure that I like it. I don’t know if this is a spoiler, but I’ll block it anyway. It feels as if I fell asleep during a take on a police procedural and woke up in a comic book. Generally, I like police procedurals more than I like comic books, so we will see where this goes.Report
With regards to POI moving from Season One to Season Two, I wouldn’t say that you’re in a comic book as much as that you’re watching sci-fi. When you get to Season Three, you’ll be watching an entirely different show altogether.Report
In sleeping on it, there are some serious parallels between Farrell’s relationship with his son and McAdams’ relationship with her sister when it comes to the whole “I don’t know how to protect you” thing. And, yeah, the Motorcycle cop did do a handful of things, now that I think on them.
The scene where the aforementioned body was discovered relied just a bit too much on coincidence for my taste though it seemed to have been deliberately placed so that it would be discovered and so, storylinewise, we’re talking a difference between being found at 4AM and 6AM, but still. It felt shoehorned.Report
I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Vaughn’s acting may be better than you initially think it is, if you remember that the *character* is acting – this is a mobster pretending (wanting) to be seen as a civilized, legitimate, educated businessman. So he uses big words.
But the “legitimate businessman” act isn’t totally convincing.
I don’t know if Rachel McAdams is unsympathetic, really; but to be shallow for a moment, I found her insanely-attractive in this. I haven’t really seen a lot of her other work.Report
This could be – should be – the man’s IMDB bio.Report
I have a soft spot for Midnight in Paris, despite not being much of an Allen fan. She is one of the female leads, and is as beautiful as ever, but that movie has Marion Cotillard, so…Report
And Carla BruniReport
Oh wow!!! David Bowie RIP
This calls for an entire retrospective post.
http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/legendary-singer-david-bowie-reportedly-dead/news-story/2e954a2164dae8fa1c021f3cddc5d738Report
Even if I had time for one (due to work, I don’t) this would be a daunting task. How do you sum up Bowie? I hope someone can tackle it.
R.I.P.Report
Also, is anyone NOT listening to Bowie all day today?
Aladdin Sane, over here.Report
Hunky Dory, though I’m probably gonna just through shuffle everything on Spotify.Report
Going through my library, I have a soft spot for this dark horse from his wilderness years:
https://youtu.be/CxXmcNxzNksReport
I’ve watched the first two episodes of “Making a Murderer”. Very interesting. Trying to do the whole “Serial” thing, though it might have lent itself better to a podcast. Thus far, at least, there aren’t a ton of visuals you need to see and there is lots of voiceover of meaningless background images.
What stands out is the way they create a cliffhanger at the end of each episode. Despite it being a Netflix show that released every episode at once. I wonder why they felt the need to do that?Report
What I don’t quite get about the sudden popularity of either Serial or MaM is that network TV has had these sort of ‘true crime’ stories for a few years now, branded under news divisions (i.e. Dateline, 48 hrs, 20/20). There’s so many of them that they’re able to repackage them on Investigation Discovery and thus air them 24/7. (and get Lester Holt host the interstitials)Report
What I found weird about the Serial phenomenon was that everyone was gushing about the format. “THEY’LL JUST GO AS LONG OR AS SHORT AS THEY WANT! CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?!?!”
While being unshackled from the 30/60 minute time blocks is a good thing, I don’t think the format is what made Serial work. It was just really well done. As mockable as the host was at times, she made a compelling story and that is ultimately what hooks most people: narrative.
I haven’t watched much true crime. From the little I’ve seen of MaM, what (might) set it apart is that it doesn’t present the story as a unique travesty of justice that is ultimately an aberration; it seems like it is shining light on the inherent problems in the system. Personally, I am just as — if not more — interested in the broader issue of police and prosecutorial misconduct, the difficulties of the appeal process, skewed incentives set by the parole board, etc. as I am by the specifics of the Avery case(s).Report