True Detective season two has the same visage and DNA of the first, but it needs to speak up for us to hear. The intro’s graphical sleepy and haunting imagery and auditory sensations are there, only Californiacated. So is the symbolism, with the overhead shots of vapid intersecting freeways that look like rigid arteries interconnecting a vile heart of darkness with the industrial landscape fingered together like a cold computer processor. All of it I’m hoping with throttle forward with the novelty of the first series–but only time is the measure of all things truly divine.

To get this out the system, it’s necessary to understand what made season one so quantifiably addictive. Rust Cohle was the shit because through the atmospheric brume and macabre case study, you saw that he was trying to hold himself together in the beginning; he was sober until the case hooked his entrails and pulled him under. The show set up a device that premiered Cohle’s existential nihilism via a present ongoing interrogation which gave the viewer a reason to hear his monologues and crawl inside his alienated, psychotropic mind-space.

From the first episode we find out that the Yellow King case collided with the anniversary of this daughter’s death and crumbling marriage, which is why he goes on a bender when invited to Marty Hart’s home for dinner the first time–the pain is too ripe. From then on, we watch him disintegrate as the case’s details surface more grisly devilry. Cohle’s ethos is juxtaposed to Marty Hart’s, with Christianity as his divine adhesive. Marty is less self-aware despite his strong convictions, and as the show progresses, Marty crumbles apart thanks to Cohle and we see how narcissistic he is underneath the religion.

In other words, both men seem to be at an equilibrium when we’re introduced, and we begin to see two clashing ideologies thrown into the sick pit. There’s nothing like watching a character’s will eaten away by another. As for the case itself, you were addicted because it was tethered to mysticism, philosophy, religion, and literature, which refined the amnestic Louisiana clime with a grisly halo.

In season two, all characters are separate manifestations of the same existential, weltered, wandering, and fragmented psyche. This could become a visual and emotional narcotic or it could be flying the series mach five into a shit storm.

We see the patchwork father figure Colin Farrell’s Ray Velcoro is, tanked up on whiskey and even more unsympathetic as he brass-knuckles the shit out of an unsuspecting father as his punk kid watches. I don’t think there’s one father who wouldn’t want to do that, but the point is we don’t know what’s bothering him to justify what we’re watching. We want to see a damaged person, but tease us first, then throw down.

There’s the death-bending former soldier slash burn victim (Taylor Kitsch) with a head full of we don’t know but we want to know but not really because we don’t know anything about him; sexy Rachel McAdams with her own furled issues, certainly a head case I could sleep soundly with, at least for not too long; and I’m hoping more out of Vince Vaughn, love him to death, but his speech patterns don’t taste well with the brooding sauce. And there’s the quasi-stylized David Lynch-esque intro of the dead city manager that should’ve come earlier because cauterized eyes hook ours, the audience.

Everything is there for this newly fangled, westernized, neo-noir, cop trip, but I want to see the blood mix with the tears and I want to know why they’re there.

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Stay tuned for ongoing True Detective Season 2 coverage.

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