verushka70

I literally do not know what I just saw. That "Jordan and Ani (+bebbeh) with sidekick!Nails" ending was a doozy. #Stillprocessingit.

I agree, pretty much. I was pretty much okay with the Jordan and Ani and sidekick!Nails (or protector!Nails) thing; it wasn't the ending I was rooting for (like you, I was rooting for the legitimacy-seeking!gangster/helluva!dame pair), but it was an ending that was (1) very noir and (2) I could live with. I guess I just had a kneejerk reaction to the bebbeh. In a way, it's cool Velcoro now has two sons. (I was rooting for him to be the bio!dad of his kid from the moment it was made clear he might not be.) But... I still find the bebbeh thing kind of 'meh'.

It's funny because I kept wishing so fucking hard that I'd be wrong and that, in a twisty ending, Jordan and Frank would be hanging out in Venezuela. The amount of rooting/cheering on I did for those two kids was fairly epic throughout this last episode.

I was rooting for them more and more as this season progressed. Especially after the whole "well, now I'm me, and you're you, and here we are" scene in 2x5 or 2x6. They were very epic. *sniff*

The appearance of all the figures from his past while Frank was stumbling through the desert was killing me, in both bad and good ways. I was like, oh-noooos, it's his shit of a dad, who wants that to be the last thing you think of while you're dying (and I knew he was dying and wasn't going to make it). I was so glad it ended with Jordan though, that he got to his dame-in-a-white-dress, even if it was only just right before he died.

Even though I did feel terrible that Ray died, I also had this darker wish that he wouldn't. His last convo with Ani was...very off-putting. He was very mushy (or, at least, mushy for Velcoro).

Wait, are you saying that you had a darker wish that he had lived? Yes, that convo seemed ...uncharacteristic. For both of them. In a way they were both unpacking their deepest darkest secrets. I wasn't sure if what Pizzolatto did was have two hard-ass people expose their sins and vulnerabilities to each other as post-coital pillow talk... or if it was supposed to be that they had some kind of "breakthrough" via their coupling (and of course Ani's realization/remembering of what happened to her while on X at the hooker party she infiltrated). I could see it both ways.

In a way, it felt like they were edging towards trusting each other more and more in the final 3-4 eps. But still, compared to the characters we'd seen up until they got together, it seemed like a very uncharacteristic conversation for the two of them to have... and I was sort of like, would a woman who was kidnapped and likely molested/violated *want* to unpack her victimization with a guy she just had sex with? But then, she had already decided (and said) that he wasn't a bad man, so why not? And maybe knowing about his wife's rape was, I don't know, a way for Ani to connect across multiple perspective, like as both damaged/collateral!damaged people (Velcoro being the latter vis a vis his wife's rape), but also as *cops*, as detectives, unpacking what was both experience and what was or could be like evidence.

I was also annoyed that, during his last conversation with Ani, he lied (even though they both knew he wasn't going to make it) and then turned around and told the other lady the truth (that, yeah, he wasn't going to make it). Ani's an adult and hella tough. She didn't need to be lied to.

I see your point, and I agree with you from that perspective. But at first I just thought he meant, "I'm going to be late, I'm going to miss the boat." And then when I realized that was not going to happen and he wasn't going to be able to dodge the tails because of the transponder, my perspective changed again to thinking that he told Ani what he wanted to be true not in order to protect her from the truth by lying, but because connecting with Ani had allowed him to hope for better things with himself and them together... so what he was saying was not a lie, it was what he truly wanted and intended and he needed her to believe (that he was coming with her) (even though in reality he knew his chances were slim to none of making it).

I had several moments throughout, even up until she got Ani on the boat, of wondering if there was going to be some double-cross by the barmaid -- because I had the sense throughout the series that she had a thing for Velcoro, and she was seriously bummed that when she'd been under Velcoro's nose for years, quietly longing for him and making herself available, he'd kind of suddenly taken up with Ani.

I'm glad that, at least, some of the big bads got killed. That Burris has to be part cat because he's survived a lot of assassination attempts!

I know, right? What a fuckin' snake. I would have loved a more detailed and explicit denouement showing everyone being taken down by the writer from the times and all the documentation Ani gave him. But Frank's street justice worked fine for me, because, really what would have happened to all those scumbags (including McCandless, who I hated way more than Osip for some reason) if they were truly caught was Club Fed, probably some bullshit slaps on the wrist. Frank's version of justice was way better because it was *just*.

The whole baby thing...I'm going to call it a fail. That whole idea that Ani's "fine" now because she's a mother doesn't make sense.

Right? It was the implication that really bugged me. But then, I'm one of those people who just avoids mpreg and kidfic like the plague. I've never understood it.

I do get the sense that Pizzolatto is kind of working out his own shit with True Detective. Which, I guess, everyone who writes kind of does. But I got a very strong feeling Frank Semyon was the most Gary Sue of the characters for Pizzolatto. I have no idea -- it's just a guess -- but I wonder if Pizzolatto has gone through these kind of fertility issues. Or someone close to him has.

What little I know of Pizzolatto (from, um, Wikipedia? /fail, I guess), it sounds like he grew up incredibly poor (like Frank) and rough (like Frank) and considering he is (according to Wikipedia) estranged from his family of origin, it just seems like Frank Semyon was the Pizzolatto stand-in. Especially some of the stuff Frank said about class, and fighting his way up, and achieving legitimacy.

I'm going to say that I do like the unexpected f/f of Jordan/Ani (it could be seen as gen, but I like to think that they do eventually become a couple).

Yeah, that totally ran through my mind at the end. I thought, oh, wow, here comes an explosion of Ani/Jordan fanfic, lol -- which I could totally see. In a way it's like a dame version of the ending of Casablanca. Two same sex pals thrown together by circumstance and affinity.

Do you feel like True Detective S2 has the rewatchable-ness of S1?

I do. Even though it took at least 2 episodes to get going, the majority of the characters were interesting in their own ways. Also, I think that viewers can watch it from different perspectives without missing out on the general plot. The fact that it's linear (vs. Season 1) also helps. In truth, I think that the rewatchability degree falls on how much someone likes this season.

Yeah, I'm planning on rewatching the whole season myself. I haven't had the time to rewatch the finale but I'm planning to do so in the next few days (being 90 minutes w/o commercials, it's a bigger chunk of time than I've found available the last few days). And then I think I'll rewatch the whole series.

I think the difference -- for me, maybe/probably me alone -- between this season and S1 is that in S1 I hung on virtually every word Cohle said because he was prone to philosophical rants and I was freaking out that a fictional prime time TV character was articulating and saying things I'd been thinking morosely (and sometimes telling friends) for years. It was so incredibly validating (probably in a bad way, lol, given how damaged Cohle appears to be...).

That didn't happen for me this season, although from what I've read about the possible plagiarism, that just means I apparently need to read Thomas Liggotti :-( because evidently that's where Pizzolatto got it...

This season was much more sprawling because there were more main characters and they were more disparate. And it was much less philosophical/meta than S1. S2, I feel, was more straightforwardly noir. But in a way S2 had fewer/no red herrings like the supernatural element of S1... and I liked that about S2.

(That always bothered me about S1 because I never bought into the supernatural thing -- I was always team human!evil, if you will -- but a lot of people did, including a friend of mine, and I was like, C'mon, guys, really? Up until Cohle sees that vortex while he's in Carcosa, it seemed to me that Pizzolatto was equating the supernatural with religion and all the evils that human beings have perpetrated in the name of religion as were similarly perpetrated in the name of Carcosa/him-who-eats-time while, underneath it all, it was just the same old human evil. Which in itself is more gothic than noir, I guess.

Considering it ended yesterday, I need a bit more space and time to go revisit Season 2. That said, I fully intend to do that. What do you think?

Yep, me too. First I'm going to catch up on Hannibal (which I missed this past Saturday -- the only show, besides True Detective, that I watch when it is broadcast, although that became more difficult when they announced Hannibal's cancellation and moved it from Thursday nights to Saturday nights).

And then I'm going to rewatch the 90 minute True Detective S2 finale. And then I'm going to rewatch the entire S2. I might have to DL them... after I subscribe to a VPN so Comcast doesn't send me any more notices of copyright violation...
;)

(At least until it's available on DVD. I DLed True Detective last season -- my HBO subscription is not in HD, whereas of course the DL eps were, and I love me some great high def TV and movies on my big screen HD TV which isn't that big anymore -- only 37", lol, *small* compared to what they're pushing these days, but then it's like 10 years old and I let my ex have the good 43" HD TV I bought us.

But then I bought the DVD set of S1 of True Detective when it came out -- which included free digital copies of all the episodes so I can stream it, yay. HBO is one of the few major networks which has an unofficial but more or less known policy of not pursuing copyright cases against DLers because when they ran the numbers, they discovered that piracy actually increased DVD and subscription sales... which is totally true in my case, at least as far True Blood and True Detective are concerned.)

(But the last few seasons of True Blood were so silly, I didn't bother to either DL *or* buy them... even the eye candy factor didn't motivate me, heh...)

I guess time will tell whether the more rewatchable season of True Detective is S1 or S2. If I had to guess, I'd say S1 is more rewatchable for general audiences. I remember reading (after the fact) some complaints that S1 was hard for people to get into due to the shifting present/past narratives, whereas this season was much more linear as you point out. For me, personally, I'm not sure yet, but my hunch is I'll still find S1 more rewatchable, only because I particularly love disjointed/interrupted narratives and the way they are more difficult to predict and pin down.

I haven't read any critical commentary on S2 yet. Have you? What are they saying (if you have)?