TRUE DETECTIVE Season 2 Episode 2 Review “Night Finds You”

The town of DaVinci looks like it’s day, but it’s really night–in other words, it was born in the darkness as it tries for the light. The first scene’s cold tint hangs over like the pallor of a corpse–literally, as Semyon’s (Vince Vaughn) introspection match cuts to Caspere’s melted eyes. Semyon’s abuse story isn’t just significant as a character piece, it’s the unfolding of what’s to come.

As we faintly recall, Seymon is trying to bury his criminal past into the ground of his legitimate real estate holdings. By inevitability, corrupt forces of nature raise the dead. The cellar he’s locked into is his figurative conscience, and the rat gnawing at his finger is the invitation to self-destruction. Semyon then flies into a rage ripping apart the rat into a gelatinous success story as he remains hostage to the blackness. The ceiling’s eyes with their inert gaze own him as he feels his inner monster clawing at the straw house; thus, his references to papier-mâché, because that’s his present state–a fragile lie.

But that’s not only Semyon–his open introspection parallels the other characters’ altered states as they’re all trying to be “true” detectives. Deep within the city’s shots of locking concrete arteries and beneath the languid haze, we’re now entering the dark sanctum of True Detective. Now in its second iteration, all characters are papier-mâché trying to maintain a solid infrastructure but the water damage is starting to peel them away. As the investigation’s knot unties, so will the character’s pasts.

The city’s corruption machine freezes up any corroborative evidence against it, which pimps out wasted Velcoro (Colin Farrell) as the railroad switch. Although Velcoro is now deleted, he served as the series’ tee off, and as we watch the rest of the episode, these parallels surface in every character. We see this in Antigone (Rachel McAdams)–the name of a defiant Greek heroine, which means “worthy of one’s parents”–and her ruptured past with her father and siblings whom are now dead or in jail despite father’s zen affectations. Woodrugh’s (Taylor Kitsch) desert storm is gathering with his past in a concealed black ops outfit, and even Caspere himself, a pedophile, whose depravity reinforced his self-loathing.DaVinci itself is devil child born into vice in the 1900’s proudly following its genetics into an egregious waste and toxic eden despite its efforts to cleanse itself. Not to mention, DaVinci is an ironic name because the original genius hails from the Renaissance, a historical period of significant cultural enlightenment.

And I’m hoping to be lost in dark with every one of them.

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For prior Silver Screen Riot True Detective coverage, find archive reviews below:

TRUE DETECTIVE Season 2 Episode 1 Review “The Western Book of the Dead”

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