Another way of understanding the existential undertow of the flat circle and how it particularly drove this season’s narrative is a simple application of physics: an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. Can a subsequent generation will itself out of the inertia spun onto it by its predecessor? Perhaps it can, as the Omega Station has been reached with an answer to the series’ ongoing thesis: only the right people in our lives can alter our directed courses.

Despite the anthology’s tepid denouement, it was punctuated by tender moments and consistent character choices. Velcoro (Collin Farell) and Frank’s (Vince Vaughn) decision to embrace their culmination was heroic and self-aware, but the sequence’s design that led them to their terminus was a half-assed cop-out. Shoot up the bad guys, really? Frank and Velcoro weren’t even challenged by Osip and henchmen when they shot the place to shit and bagged the money. A more challenging confrontation would have somewhat saved the cliche.

However, the unraveling suspense in Frank and Velcoro’s demise was redeeming. We knew they weren’t going to make it to the getaway point although we hoped they would. We were gifted this hope but then we were left with only the irony because Frank and Velcoro succumbed to whom they are by the choices they made in their final moments, which made their closure much more impactful than simply being caught and executed. After sabotaging Osip, Frank and Velcoro split apart, and Velcoro couldn’t help but see his son one last time. Velcoro’s last moments with his son were touching when he finds Chad at recess, but Velcoro is sealed off from him by a fence. Velcoro tries for his attention and finally gets it, as Chad holds the police badge memento–the badge in a transparent cube that Velcoro gave to him in an earlier episode–close by. There was a pause before they saluted each other goodbye with no words spoken between them. But Velcoro comes back to his car and finds scanner rigged to it with the intention of leading the police to the trifecta’s escape point. Quietly impacted by his doom, Velcoro instructs Bez (Rachel McAdams) to move on without him as he tries to salvage his last breaths with a confessional to his son via his phone. A disappointing police chase takes his life. 

Frank doesn’t want Jordan compromised in his personal vendetta so he arranges a rendezvous point. Jordan utilizes every emotional angle she can to stay with Frank, but he knows that if she’s compromised in his revenge plot then no good will have its way. The cartel tracks him down demanding payback for burning down the clubs. Frank seems to have extricated himself from the consequence by handing over the half million dollars, but in his suit was the last of him in the cache of diamonds he pawned away that held the last remnants of his forty year career. But pride bled Frank dry as hallucinations ushered him along his final blood line.

Bez and Jordan make it to Venezula, where Bez, with the evidence of DaVinci’s corruption in tow, hands it off to a journalist. A sorry voice-over spoken by Bez about the hope for a better world follows her and Jordan as they’re engulfed by celebration and an optimistic uncertainty.  

Perhaps because we were so spoiled by season one that version 2.0 seemed so sterile. Yet, as a stand-alone police procedural, it was still a solid and idiosyncratic experiment. But too many of the mechanics that made last season so successful were abandoned in the attempt to be continually original. Fundamentally, although the same two conflicting ideologies present in last season were embedded into this iteration, the argument wasn’t as effectively manifested through this season’s characters as last years. Velcoro, Bez, Frank, and Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch) were the same character divided into four. Rust Cohle had Marty to bounce his nihilism off of, but in this anthology the characters just commiserated with one another. It’s as if the entertainment gods were so cracked out with how awesome True Detective’s concept was that they overdosed on loading up the screen with the same kind of mysterious, brooding, world-weary, alienated, and deeply wrecked romantic character as they could; but there was no antithesis to this value, no alternate extreme.

 And season two lost itself in a cumbersome plot line, which in of itself didn’t deliver as intended. The contemplative, electric prose, the mysticism, the rich grounding in literature, the academic and metaphysical tangents, the textured familial subplots, and the dystopian, haunting mood of last year’s introduction was eviscerated this time around by the destructive tendency to serve a buffet of plot at the expense of delicate character development and social inquiry. This season was not Nic Pizzolotto’s dream child–he can write, it’s evident. Trends and consumerism catheterized season two’s force. It was as if the creative team saw this season’s circle was flat to begin with so they decided to jump in the cart and coast along the circular tracks.

Cable series are a digestible, visual novel, a deeply involving, cathartic experience, and a necessary departure from the can goods we experience on the big screen. From a certain vantage point, it seems that True Detective itself is like one of its own characters fighting a deterministic redundancy. Hopefully, season three will find the good out of the bad and will continue to follow True Detective‘s own meaningful circle.