True Detective Conference Room (SPOILERS- GO AWAY)

Disgustipater wrote: I obviously don't find the evils of men as compelling.

In summary, I felt duped into watching the show and I'm just bitter.

This comes down to whether you believe there really is a war between light and dark that mere mortals cannot perceive or comprehend as Cohle suggests, or you subscribe to his early nihilistic view that everything is a cosmic accident and everything is random. I choose to believe in light and hope over cosmic mishap so in turn the resolution to Cohle's journey resonates with me.

Hello, everybody.
Sorry I’m a bit late, had a terrible time… All sort of things cropping up at the last moment. How are we for time? Umm -

Wow.

Powered through this over the weekend, and I was absolutely enamored. I can't stop thinking about it. I can comfortably say this is among my favorite shows of all time, sitting next to Breaking Bad and The Wire. Writing, directing, acting, all unbelievably great.

I really enjoyed the vagueness of the plot, leaving things open to interpretation (such as the gate to Carcosa). The whole Lovecraft undertones really dug its hooks into me and pulled me into the show, even if that wasn't what it was about.

That comment about dragging Se7en out to 8 episodes and it being better than this? Bullshit. That's a fantastic movie, but Pitt and Freeman's collisions over apathy and man's degradation would have not been as compelling as True Detective's unrelenting nihilism versus fettered hope and confusion. The conspiracy of Se7en also doesn't have the same gravitas as the wide-reaching untouchable cult.

Thanks for this thread and everyone's contributions, just devoured the whole thing as I don't want to stop thinking about TD.

For me, Game of Thrones might be a little better than TD, but not by much. When TD was on, I'd watch each episode three or four times, usually with one of them being with the subtitles on to get past the figures of speech and/or all the Cajun. "Did he just say 'psycho's fear' or 'psychosphere'?"

I really enjoyed the show at first, but the more I think about it I don’t feel it is as strong as I first thought.

I think the season had great performances and a strong beginning and middle but a rather disappointing finish.

I got interested because when I was at episode 4, I guess, I learned that the second season would be set at another location with different characters, etc. At that point, and with the flashbacks, it seemed that we either would get some great arc about occult organizations, cults, etc., all intertwined geographically (Tatters of the King) across the seasons with maybe a big payout in the last one, or we would get a deeply personal journey of redemption/descent.

In several instances the show promises something great but don’t deliver. Thwarting a cult? Nope. Madness inducing Carcosa? Nope. Real consequences to the characters act? Nope. Redemption against an inbred who works alone? Color me unimpressed.

In the end it feels like the last meeting of a really fun Call of Cthulhu group. The keeper had to rush the scenario and show only glimpses of the awesomeness he had planned because two of the players are moving across the country but only had him know about it a few days ago.

And I didn’t like the way Carcosa was portrayed either.

I just finished this up over the weekend as well!

First of all, what I liked. The best part of it was the atmosphere. The Lovecraftian horror element was done to perfection, especially at the end. I like that we essentially got a southern-fried film noir story, and I had no idea that Matthew McConnaughey had those kinds of acting chops.

This might just be because I burned through the series in a couple of weeks, but at no point did I get the impression that the actual murder was really the point. It didn't invite the wild mass-guessing that was unavoidable on the internet while the show was airing. Even as we approached the end game it was only interesting inasmuch as it described the leads, not as an end to itself. I was frankly a little surprised by this, given how feverish the conversation was leading into the finale. I'm not disappointed however. Theories don't hold my interest in shows like this anyway, so I'm glad it came down the way it did.

That said, I got the impression that the mystery itself got a little shortchanged down the stretch. Episode seven had a lot of good stuff to say about Hart and Cole, but the actual solving of the mystery felt awfully slapdash. Rust found everything he needed in Tuttle's house, including just what the thing that would convince Marty. I would have preferred there to be just more ambiguity about the case itself, rather than give them just the stuff they needed to figure things out. I mean, I know that it didn't exactly fall in their laps. It might just have been the constraints of having to show all of that in just one episode.

Still, an impressive piece of TV. No detective show has ever approached The Wire, but this one does a lot of impressive stuff with atmosphere and character.