∞HBO: "True Detective: Night Country" (Late 2023)...Season 4 Set in Alaska…Starring Jodie Foster…Barry Jenkins Producing∞

JJs07 said:

HTTB - if you never watched season 1, do you think your opinion of season 2 would be different?

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AlBooBoo5 said:

 
Rachel McAdams is so ******* sexy. The opening scene from this episode was awesome! Not as good as last season but entertaining none the less.

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JJs07 said:

HTTB - if you never watched season 1, do you think your opinion of season 2 would be different?

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Mr Marcus said:

JJs07 said:

HTTB - if you never watched season 1, do you think your opinion of season 2 would be different?

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no

the mystery behind season 1 would've been behind this one because folks were acting like Nic was breaking some wall....or w/e weird **** that was going around every forum 

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Rolaholic said:

There were almost no positive reviews in here during the first 2-3 episodes though   .

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SFN 155 said:

 

Rolaholic said:

There were almost no positive reviews in here during the first 2-3 episodes though 

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Lol what

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af1 1982 said:

I swear I would expect a lot of yall to be professional critics the way yall analyze everything

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StillIn729 said:

I really like this season but I understand why people don't like it

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youngin33 said:

 

StillIn729 said:

I really like this season but I understand why people don't like it

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This. Most of my friends have given up on it, I'm in the minority that is actually enjoying it and continuing to watch because of that. I can see their points, but it's still better than almost anything out there now.

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Osh Kosh Bosh said:

I find this season to be just as overwritten and and non-nonsensical as the last, just less artfully directed and with Vince Vaugh and Kelly Reilly acting like they took shots of codine and sprite before every scene together.


I like this season more because I've come to terms with Nic Pizolotto's writing.

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It’s just broad—it’s so broad it’s just one really big marker, and the marker is black, and it represents the road, the car, the people in it, just one long streak. Some of the scenes are beautifully staged—the sex workers lined up to enter the party, backlit by blue; the sudden flashes of light as the wooden chair, sticky with blood, is photographed; even the mundane drama of the kitchen table, as Ray and Frank face off. But there isn’t a beat to this that feels surprising, interesting, relevant, even upsetting. The orgy is a Hollywood stock orgy, borrowing from Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” and a healthy dose of male fantasy. The drug gang drama follows on the heels of the last story line involving a “cartel”—let’s make a bloc of Mexicans the bad guys and see if anyone notices!—with the added joy of cutting another woman up. Ray’s cocaine/liquor/smashing things relapse is par for the course.

And even Ani’s drugging seems to borrow from every silly misconception of how drugs work. Maybe the woman next to Ani who told her the spray was molly (a pure form of MDMA, also known as ecstasy) was mistaken. But in that case, the other women at that house were on a really different drug than Ani, because they all seem to be having a great time, which would line up more with molly than something more sedative, like GHB. Annoyingly, Ani’s trip is visually and experientially both really unlike what ecstasy does (according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse: “It produces feelings of increased energy, euphoria, emotional warmth and empathy toward others, and distortions in sensory and time perception”) and also incredibly boring; oh, you’re going to depict an altered state with blurry vision and a flashback? How entirely original! We live in a world where “Mad Men” depicted LSD with incredible clarity of vision and “Breaking Bad” explored heroin’s effects with cinematic gymnastics. We expect better. Never mind that Ani forcing herself to vomit would not rid herself of a drug that was sprayed into her mouth, and would have therefore made it to her bloodstream through her saliva, bypassing the stomach entirely. I know that “True Detective” is fiction, but come on; this is HBO in an era of some of the best television ever made. Surely you can fact-check.

The orgy, in general, is really bothering me. It’s the most active 15 minutes of the episode, and I’ve been so excited to see Ani take center stage that I was looking forward to this adventure since last week. Orgies are interesting; I don’t deny curiosity. Rachel McAdams’ pure presence in this episode is also remarkable enough that in spaces that could be voyeuristic or titillating, you instead feel her fear and anxiety. The camera shows her incredible awareness that men are looking at her and sizing her up; the close-ups on her face reveal her torment, even as the women around her seem more comfortable cutting loose. She’s experiencing post-traumatic stress, which would follow for someone with that kind of trauma. And even the systematic drugging had eerie, upsetting overtones of every Quaalude-tinged rape scandal that has made headlines in the last few months, even if it made no sense otherwise.

But somehow the scene felt entirely too sanitized, otherwise. I kept wondering about the other women at the party. Why were they so carefree, so able to enjoy it? Surely, it couldn’t entirely be drugs; they would be compensated well. The orgy of “True Detective” is one where everyone seems fine except Ani and the one woman she is looking for, who is passed out in a bathroom. Why were the rest of the women OK? Why wasn’t the woman with the spray bottle handing out GHB instead of ecstasy? Where was the rest of the horror?

I think that somehow the show just can’t see it—beyond Ani, the sole female character it has pledged to make human. Athena is barely a character, Ray’s ex-wife is alternately shrill and withholding, and Jordan barely gets in a line per episode. Ani’s fear is real, but no one else’s is; her story makes sense, but no one else’s does. And honestly? It doesn’t make that much sense. She goes undercover as a human transponder, so she can get Paul and Ray to the house. There maybe could have been a few other ways to do that, logistically.

It is satisfying that this episode finally took the season in a direction. But I don’t like the direction. Nothing is pushing hard enough against the constraints of this world, whether that’s characters’ values, beliefs or livelihoods. I’m even having trouble locating the wrongdoing—collusion, I suppose, but buried under a whole lot of sex that is potentially transgressive only because prostitution is illegal. I don’t know what the rest of this season will bring, but after a few episodes of filler and a few of promise, “Church in Ruins” is disappointingly sloppy.

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Nelson999 said:

i hated it

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As poor as the dialogue has been this season, this episode had some great moments.

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