“You want to make flowers?”

NOPE.

SPOILERS for those who haven't watched yet...they are going to be hard-pressed to make next season as good as or better than this one.

What I got...or think I got

The dead dad on the bed (Errol's father/grand-father?) raped his own daughter and abused (raped?) the son/serial killer therefore turning him into a sadistic child murderer/rapist.

Errol’s multiple accents...I figured he was much more intelligent than we were led to believe. When he wanted to be. Brains mixed with nuts=bad combination.

When Rust is in the hosptial he says Tuttle and his men were on the tape but they couldn't get them all. The powerful always escape. You can't completely win against the evil and darkness in this fucked up world but you can try as best you can to push a little of it back. I would have loved to see it ending with Rust leaving the hospital with the thought of going to 'take care of' the governor.

The whole Childress house was creepy and disgusting, but this bedroom in the house is just chilling...

[Edited 3/10/14 0:31am]

Great ending. Matthew Mcconaughey won the Emmy for the last 5 minutes alone. The show was about the case at all. It was about Rust's journey out of the darkness of his own making.

[Edited 3/9/14 23:35pm]

My wife was really bummed that they didn't manage to expose the entire cult of powerful people, but I felt like that rang true to how such a thing WOULD play out in real life, if you really had powerful string-pulling men so powerful that even the cops were in on it, killing women and children. I kind of wish they had let that onion get peeled a little bit... it feels like there's more story there. But as Twin Peaks proved, it's very difficult to get people to watch a show based around a murder after the murder is more or less solved.

The main dangling thread that still bugs me, is the topic of Marty's daughter - obviously inappropriately sexualized at a young age. It felt like, that can't just be backstory on his character, they are showing us so much of this stuff, it's got to come up in the ending. Maybe his wife's dad - a rich and powerful man - had some involvement. But it never happened.

bobzilla77 said:

My wife was really bummed that they didn't manage to expose the entire cult of powerful people, but I felt like that rang true to how such a thing WOULD play out in real life, if you really had powerful string-pulling men so powerful that even the cops were in on it, killing women and children. I kind of wish they had let that onion get peeled a little bit... it feels like there's more story there. But as Twin Peaks proved, it's very difficult to get people to watch a show based around a murder after the murder is more or less solved.

The main dangling thread that still bugs me, is the topic of Marty's daughter - obviously inappropriately sexualized at a young age. It felt like, that can't just be backstory on his character, they are showing us so much of this stuff, it's got to come up in the ending. Maybe his wife's dad - a rich and powerful man - had some involvement. But it never happened.

I was wondering about that also. But I think maybe she just had gotten too close to Dad's work/hooker girlfriends/combined with teen hormones/curiosity/angst.

Anyway, this article is wondferful imo and I agree with it all.

Culminating a remarkable first season in fine, moving form, True Detective’s finale, titled “Form and Void,” took us to the heart of darkness at the vortex center of its weird fiction — as well as the final stage of its meta-commentary on the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, for better and worse. It was a tale that ripped dark marks on our bellies, then soothed us by “making flowers” on us. So to speak.

We start on the outskirts of the infernal plane. We begin in hell on earth. The ersatz underworld of The Yellow King — a.k.a. Errol Childress, a perverse product of paternal abuse, generational evil, and his own deranged, pop-culture informed myth-making — was a theater of the mind for a fantasy made real: His vision of Carcosa, the necropolis of Ambrose Bierce and the fallen world of Robert W. Chambers, littered with dead trees and body bags. Childress lured Cohle into his ascension chamber — the staging area for so many murders, and last night, a stage for an ancient ritual, the oldest story of all. Light versus dark. Good versus evil. “Little priest” versus wannabe Elder God. It was The Real World: Dungeons and Dragons, and Cohle, hard boiled to the core, was ready to play. I’ll see your abyss and gaze right back, Lawnmower Man!

He was fooling himself. Rust Cohle has always been fooling himself. His cynicism, his callousness were parts of the mask he wore to engage the world, to deal with himself. But it offered no protection when his mind — tweaking from the fetid evil around him — conspired against him and waylaid him with a vision of a coal-black vortex spiraling down to claim him. Maybe you were thinking: They’re going to do it! Cthulhu is coming! Coming to take us away, ha-ha! Ho-ho! Hee-hee! Beam me up, Lovecraft!

But no. It was gotcha moment, for Rust, and for us. Childress seized him and cut him to the core, literally and spiritually, like a knife to an empty can of Lone Star. “TAKE OFF YOUR MASK!” The Monster bellowed. It was as if Childress was telling him to cut the phony bologna nihilist crap, the useful fairy tale of baggy and buggy sentient meat denying his truth. Of course, you can say the same of his agent of enlightenment, his doppelganger. True Detective was always all about authenticity — or rather, the lack thereof, and the stories we tell ourselves to get us through the day (religion, or nothingness, or our private Carcosas) and in turn imprint (and inflict) upon the world.

What happened after Rust’s gutting exposes us as well: the final 15 minutes of “Form and Void” struck me as a Rorschach test for what you want from stories like this, for what we’ve come to call “resolution,” And boy, did we get a lot of it, both implied and explicitly stated, no more so during the last scene, with all of its mansplaining and bromantic uplift. Yes, uplift. The twist ending of True Detective’s bleak first season: a bracing refutation of its baroque pessimism. Cohle and Hart slayed the decadently dandy slumdog (schizo?) psycho at dream’s end, spent a good chunk of time processing their feelings and baring their souls, then exited, stage right, to star in The Odd Couple sitcom we’ll never get to see.

They were as stunned by this turn of events as we were. Cohle and Hart, flawed heroes and failed men, expected to be destroyed by their bid to pay the debt they owned the world, because these felt they deserved to be destroyed — and so did I. If you had told me four episodes ago, after Rust’s ugly car-Crash vigilantism and Marty’s complete unraveling, that we’d get a happy ending in which they’d be laughing and hugging and telling stories about the stars — like myth-making bards of antiquity — I would have thought you were a sauce-knackered tent preacher. What does say that about me? Perhaps a lifetime spent consuming stories has shaped my imagination to assume the worst. Or maybe I’m just, like, a really hideous person.

And so instead of losing their lives, Cohle and Hart were rewarded with new life. Marty found a little redemption — but not too much — and reconciliation he thought beyond him. Rust found some catharsis for the past, triggered by a near-death experience as his sense of self was becoming incoherent and fading away: A feeling of love and connection with his dead daughter and his beloved father. He wanted to sink and dissipate into that deep: “I said, ‘Darkness, yeah! [Instant classic McConaughey-ism!] And then I woke up,” said Cohle, despairing that what felt so metaphysically real was only a dream. Still, in this moment, we truly saw Cohle for the first time: He shed his last layer to reveal the profound grief that drove him. Wow. I thought we would get a grim and gritty climax that affirmed a gloomy worldview; we thought we would get Chinatown. Instead, we got the deconstruction of hipster/pulp cynicism that says heroism is a crock and the recovery of old school virtue; we got Casablanca.

THE FASCINATION WITH ABOMINATION

In which we spend a few hundred words making sense of The Yellow King.

We won’t be forgetting Errol Childress anytime soon. The collaboration of writing, directing, set and performance (Glenn Fleshler, terrific) in “Form and Void” combined to produce a memorable portrait of decadent, demented evil that was rich with layers and allusions and subtext.

The facts, as I understood them. Errol made his home in the boonies beyond the Creole Nature Trail. He kept his dead father — another lawless lawman and corrupt Tuttle, who with other Tuttles abused him and warped him and sewed his psyche with their perverse private religion — bound and lip-tied. He kept house with his half-sister. Made “flowers” on her, too. (Ewww.) He had stacks and stacks of books, magazines and DVDs in his trashed, fly-swarmed, fetid home. (Was The King In Yellow somewhere in those stacks?) He watched a lot of TV. (That was North by Northwest on the telly.) He was a man of many voices — Andy Griffith, Slingblade, James Mason — and seemingly no fixed identity.

But the intelligence behind those masks did fancy itself something monstrous. Errol lived to make his mark on the world by abducting and raping and killing children in ritualistic fashion with the help of his low-life cousins — his “acolytes” — the Ledoux brother, and littering the landscape with devil nets, occult graffiti, a Christian woman slain and transmogrified into an art object that mocked her faith. All were ironic reminders that evil roamed the land with impunity, and no one could — or would — stop him. Certainly not God. It bothered Errol, though, that no one had detected his handiwork: “Oh, if they had eyes to see,” he said. The implication: Errol wanted to be discovered. What’s more, he wanted to expose the family that had made him, that used him, that… worshipped him? And then there was the matter of Errol’s last great project: His “ascension.” He made a reference to tying off the endless loop of his life — his own circle of violence and degradation — and checking out — “I am near the final stage. Some mornings, I can see the infernal plane.”

A toast to Cohle and Hart, who deserve to be the penultimate* final statement on an era of anti-heroism and hideous men: Here’s to the beginning of a beautiful relationship...

rest of the article is here... http://popwatch.ew.com/20...py-ending/

Who do you think should be in season 2? Suggestions?

HBO has not officially announced a second season for the anthology series, but Nic Pizzolatto has begun working on the story. "I am still fleshing it out," he shared. "The basic idea: Hard women, bad men, and the secret occult history of the U.S. transportation system. I was well on my way in the writing but there's been a lot noise and work around the end of the first season that got in the way."

Let's Cast Season 2

How do you follow Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson? Dream pairs we think could pull it off.

http://www.ew.com/ew/gall...39,00.html

Ryan Gosling and Denzel Washington

Laurence Fishburne and Samuel L. Jackson

Val Kilmer and Michael Keaton

[Edited 3/10/14 20:44pm]

Okay so I basically watched "True Detective" all Friday night and Saturday and my goodness, this show was addictive!!! Although I've always liked McConaughey, his portrayal of Rust Cohle was just brilliant. Woody Harrelson was great too because I absolutely despised him. It was hilarious to me how Marty always was saying that Cohle was arrogant, but Marty's personality was very narcisstic. As obsessive as Cohle was, I had much more respect for him than Marty. It was Cohle up day and night putting in way more hours into the case than Marty was, yet Marty was the one getting the most shine back at the precinct. I loved how Rust would just call Marty out on his bullshit without even raising an eyebrow.

Also it was never really revisited as to why Hart's daughters seemed to be a bit disturbed. The youngest one was caught drawing sexually explicit pictures in school while the oldest was caught having sex with two men in a car. Although we know that Hart was pretty much absent and shut down when it came to his family, the storyline was somewhat suggesting that maybe there was some sexual abuse happening to his daughters....as far as who would had been doing that is beyond me (I don't think it would had been Hart himself) however, the hints of that was pretty much wisked away and not further visited.

I really felt sorry for Marty's wife at first but then she ended up being a total disappointment. I loved how Rust gave her the frozen cold shoulder in the end.

That must had been some serious horror on the video tape for grown men to scream in agony while watching it. Glad they didn't show it all to the viewers.

The finale was so intense that I had to drink a few glasses of wine to get through the suspense of it.

Wonder how they will set up the next season?

[Edited 3/17/14 6:19am]

[Edited 3/17/14 6:19am]

missfee said:

Okay so I basically watched "True Detective" all Friday night and Saturday and my goodness, this show was addictive!!! Although I've always liked McConaughey, his portrayal of Rust Cohle was just brilliant. Woody Harrelson was great too because I absolutely despised him. It was hilarious to me how Marty always was saying that Cohle was arrogant, but Marty's personality was very narcisstic. As obsessive as Cohle was, I had much more respect for him than Marty. It was Cohle up day and night putting in way more hours into the case than Marty was, yet Marty was the one getting the most shine back at the precinct. I loved how Rust would just call Marty out on his bullshit without even raising an eyebrow.

Also it was never really revisited as to why Hart's daughters seemed to be a bit disturbed. The youngest one was caught drawing sexually explicit pictures in school while the oldest was caught having sex with two men in a car. Although we know that Hart was pretty much absent and shut down when it came to his family, the storyline was somewhat suggesting that maybe there was some sexual abuse happening to his daughters....as far as who would had been doing that is beyond me (I don't think it would had been Hart himself) however, the hints of that was pretty much wisked away and not further visited.

I really felt sorry for Marty's wife at first but then she ended up being a total disappointment. I loved how Rust gave her the frozen cold shoulder in the end.

That must had been some serious horror on the video tape for grown men to scream in agony while watching it. Glad they didn't show it all to the viewers.

The finale was so intense that I had to drink a few glasses of wine to get through the suspense of it.

Wonder how they will set up the next season?

it's been suggested it's Maggie's father.

He brought the girls home in one of the eariler episodes.

The older one threw the crown into the tree in the first (?) episode which a lot of people took to mean that she wanted to protect her little sister from what she herself had gone through.

ZombieKitten said:

missfee said:

Okay so I basically watched "True Detective" all Friday night and Saturday and my goodness, this show was addictive!!! Although I've always liked McConaughey, his portrayal of Rust Cohle was just brilliant. Woody Harrelson was great too because I absolutely despised him. It was hilarious to me how Marty always was saying that Cohle was arrogant, but Marty's personality was very narcisstic. As obsessive as Cohle was, I had much more respect for him than Marty. It was Cohle up day and night putting in way more hours into the case than Marty was, yet Marty was the one getting the most shine back at the precinct. I loved how Rust would just call Marty out on his bullshit without even raising an eyebrow.

Also it was never really revisited as to why Hart's daughters seemed to be a bit disturbed. The youngest one was caught drawing sexually explicit pictures in school while the oldest was caught having sex with two men in a car. Although we know that Hart was pretty much absent and shut down when it came to his family, the storyline was somewhat suggesting that maybe there was some sexual abuse happening to his daughters....as far as who would had been doing that is beyond me (I don't think it would had been Hart himself) however, the hints of that was pretty much wisked away and not further visited.

I really felt sorry for Marty's wife at first but then she ended up being a total disappointment. I loved how Rust gave her the frozen cold shoulder in the end.

That must had been some serious horror on the video tape for grown men to scream in agony while watching it. Glad they didn't show it all to the viewers.

The finale was so intense that I had to drink a few glasses of wine to get through the suspense of it.

Wonder how they will set up the next season?

it's been suggested it's Maggie's father.

He brought the girls home in one of the eariler episodes.

The older one threw the crown into the tree in the first (?) episode which a lot of people took to mean that she wanted to protect her little sister from what she herself had gone through.

I didn't even catch that. Looks like I'll have to do a re-watch.

[Edited 3/18/14 5:34am]

missfee said:

ZombieKitten said:

it's been suggested it's Maggie's father.

He brought the girls home in one of the eariler episodes.

The older one threw the crown into the tree in the first (?) episode which a lot of people took to mean that she wanted to protect her little sister from what she herself had gone through.

I didn't even catch that. Looks like I'll have to do a re-watch.

[Edited 3/18/14 5:34am]

Here's director Fukunaga talking about the finale: http://www.vulture.com/20...rview.html

According to him, it's about the behaviour of Marty. But I'd say that fits her making out with the two guys but the whole "rape" scene with the puppets...? I don't know.

.

"Looking at the comments on several reviews of the finale, there’s a particularly heavy obsession, borderline insanity, with why the “clues” about Marty’s daughter Audrey (the drawings, dolls, and crown) were never addressed.
I never read into what she was doing as having any relation to the crimes or the cult. I read Audrey’s behavior as being the direct result of an inattentive father. Seeking male attention in other places, or even seeking to get into trouble, perhaps, to get the attention of her father; it was not related to the killings or anyone around them. I don’t even remember seeing the spiral in her room. The general chatter around those things is great, but it’s probably the kind of chatter that wouldn’t have happened had all those episodes been released at once. The anticipation-speculation that comes with a weekly schedule is a double-edged sword. Because people have more time to talk about things, some crazy ideas get a lot of attention."