True Detective season finale recap: Kiss kiss, bang bang

Should I give True Detective credit for crafting a relatively neat ending to a story that should never have been told in the first place?

Given the ludicrous number of stories left to resolve, there was absolutely no hope that the series finale would cross everything off the list. (Sorry to everyone who was desperate to hear more about the inner workings of the Panticapaeum Institute.) But at the very least, no one should be confused about where things stand at the end of "Omega Station." Two True Detectives and One True Gangster have been killed. Only Ani Bezzerides — raising the baby she had with Ray after their one-night stand, I guess — lives on to tell the true story of what happened in Vinci, California. I hope anyone who chooses to listen has a lot of time on her hands.

Last week, HBO's Michael Lombardo suggested that the season finale would satisfy even True Detective's more ardent critics — but if anything, it just highlights how messy and misbegotten this season really was. To highlight one of many, many examples: The central killer's entire motivation was revealed in an tossed-off, expositional monologue by a character we had never met before and never saw again.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Oh yeah, if you still care (though the show clearly didn't): Ben Caspere was killed by Lenny Tyler, the film set photographer we met in episode three. Lenny was one of the two children who survived that bloody, much-discussed jewelry store robbery in 1992 — a robbery that was organized in part by Ben Caspere. (Lenny, incidentally, was also the mysterious shooter in the crow's mask who blasted Ray full of rubber bullets.) When Police Chief Holloway reveals that Lenny and his sister are actually Caspere's illegitimate children, Lenny snaps, killing Holloway before dying in a blaze of police fire.

Mystery solved. Now on to what True Detective actually cares about: faux-existential blathering. The mystery may be solved, but Ray, Frank, and Ani are loose ends, and the remaining conspirators are eager to snuff them out. In practice, this means Ani spends the entire episode sitting around doing nothing while Ray and Frank go off and shoot guns at people.

As a team, Ray and Frank manage to hunt down Osip and steal the money they need to flee the country. (As a fun bonus, Frank gets to work out his residual daddy issues: "You're like my son," croaks Osip before Frank gleefully blows him away.) With the money in hand and the women dutifully waiting for them to arrive, Ray and Frank are primed to start new lives in Venezuela.

But alas, a happy ending is not meant to be. When Ray and Frank split up, they're each beset by the loose ends they didn't bother to tie up: Ray by Burris and the Black Mountain goons, and Frank by the generic Mexican gangsters whose presence True Detective never really managed to justify.

Frank's death at the hands of the gangsters is as ludicrous as it gets; after everything that happened, he finally dies because he punches a guy who has the gall to ask for his suit. Still, there's the possibility of some genuine pathos here — but right to the end, True Detective can't overcome its worst instincts. I hated Vince Vaughn's long, on-the-nose monologue about bad dads and water stains in episode two, so I was surprised to find myself affected by the hallucinatory appearance of his father as he stumbled through the desert. In the context of his abusive childhood, Frank's shambling, doomed attempt to wander out of the desert as he died from a gut wound acquired a kind of tragic nobility — a man whose life had been defined by his refusal to lay down and die when it was the obvious choice. As the scene cut away, I was content with where True Detective had decided to take Frank's story.

And then the story moved on, until True Detective suddenly cut back to Frank, being taunted by more phantoms from the past: A group of stereotypical black gangsters, sniping at him for being as tall and white as Larry Bird. Had we heard about these guys before? No. Was there anything interesting about them? No. Did they reveal anything meaningful about Frank Semyon? No. They were just an odd, unnecessary exclamation point on a sentence that True Detective had already ended rather gracefully. When Jordan finally appeared, beaming in beatific white, the show had already burned up what little goodwill remained in the Frank Semyon story.

Ray's death was a little more straightforward: gunned down in the woods by a team of trained killers. "Omega Station" frames his death almost mythologically, as he runs to meet his killers head-on (and is instantly shot at least a dozen times). But to earn the heroism of the ending, you need to understand what was accomplished by his sacrifice, and as far as I can tell, his doomed charge benefitted absolutely no one and meant absolutely nothing. (Nothing, that is, except a tally on Nic Pizzolatto's heavy-handed foreshadowing list: Ray's death scene is a direct callback to his surreal brush with death in episode three. "You step out the trees," said his dream-dad in the dream-bar. "You ain't that fast. Oh, son. They kill you. They shoot you to pieces.")

It's here that True Detective goes all Chinatown on us, as the good guys crumble against a vast and powerful conspiracy. With the help of Attorney General Geldof and the rest of his weird, orgy-loving politician buddies, Tony Chessani successfully casts his father's murder as a suicide and becomes the new mayor of Vinci. The corridor plan goes through, and the rich get richer, with pretty much no one who knows or cares about how much blood was spilled to line their pockets.

And that's the not very satisfying ending to a not very satisfying season of True Detective. HBO's Lombardo, who recently called this ending "as satisfying as any series we've done," said that the network would like to do a third season if Nic Pizzolatto is willing to return. Pizzolatto has been conspicuously quiet, eschewing the promotional circuit that usually greets a big-ticket series like this (including any interviews pegged to this finale).

So that leaves us with the most interesting question raised by this finale: Will True Detective come back for a third season — and perhaps more to the point, would that even be a good thing?

For now, I guess the answer to both questions is "It's hard to say." Pizzolatto is a writer who insists he works more efficiently on his own — though it's painfully obvious that a traditional writer's room would have sanded off some of the second season's rougher edges. In the few interviews he has given, Pizzolatto generally comes across as both intense and touchy; given the widespread criticism of True Detective's second season, it's not hard to imagine him getting irritated enough that he picks up his toys and goes home, ending True Detective on a total of one very good season and one very bad one.

Then again, the beauty of True Detective's model is that Pizzolatto gets a full reset button at the end of every season. If Pizzolatto is humble enough to learn from his mistakes this season, there's nothing preventing him from delivering a third season that lives up to True Detective's first — or even surpasses it. Despite my frustrations with this dull, ridiculous, maddeningly disappointing season, I'd be thrilled to see more True Detective. Just not this version of it.

Oh, and also:

• If you have any questions left about what exactly happened in True Detective's second season, check out Willa Paskin's extremely comprehensive breakdown of the plot, which doubles as a hilarious critique of how needlessly complicated this season turned out to be.
• Another dangling subplot resolved by the finale: Ray was his son's biological father. I guess those redhead genes are recessive.
• "You can't act for shit. Take it from me." — Jordan Semyon talking to Frank Semyon, or Kelly Reilly talking to Vince Vaughn?
• Happily, the finale managed to squeeze in one more appearance from my favorite character: Thematically Convenient Sad Guitarist, inexplicably playing a foreshadow-heavy song to an empty room. Is she psychic? Is she a ghost? We'll never know…
• With so little story, and 90 minutes to tell it, it's hard to justify the total absence of Ani's father and sister in "Omega Station." I guess the show just didn't care what happened to them, and frankly, it's hard to argue with that.
• One touch I did like: The cruel irony of the Paul Woodrugh Memorial Highway, unveiled by representatives of the same police force that orchestrated his downfall.
• Seems kind of cruel to nickname a guy "Nails" when his entire backstory is "got attacked by a dude with a nail gun."
• Best worst line of the episode, goes, as always, to Frank Semyon. "It's not gonna work, the you and me thing," he says to Jordan as he tries to convince her to leave. Come on, Frank. If you're going to Air Bud your wife of six years, you're going to need to try a little harder than that.