True Detective Killed Off A Major Character, For Real This Time

Vera says that Ani put her in danger. Maybe Melisandre the Red Witch is on her way back to Castle Black to resurrect him? Ray gently turns her down, and she blames it on the drugs she was given. Not a nice message, if you ask me. Paul becomes paranoid and rushes home.

We’ll find out who did it next week, no doubt, but far more compelling is watching the fight-or-flight response thrust onto the leads. And even then it was to call his mother a kooz. This is puzzling because earlier in the episode, while speaking to his wife, he refused to let go off the corridor project.

With so few likable characters left on the show, hopefully a similar fate won’t befall Ani and Ray next week. And for the most part they’ve been right to criticise.

Meanwhile, Ani and Ray have to go into hiding together because they are fugitives, clearly bunking together because, why not? What we remember most from last year is the relationship between Rust and Marty, and the same will likely be true of the electric motel scenes between Ray and Ani in Season 2. “Three in one day”, he muses. Even when her sister reunites with her, Vera still won’t give out any more information, despite Ani pointing out that Vera may not be welcomed back into “the circuit” in the friendliest fashion.

But Frank’s over Blake’s bullshit. In the meantime Frank had to deal Gonzalez and the Cisco Kid again as he searched for Irina Ruffo (lady who pawned off some of Casper’s things possibly). Ray will “continue believing” it wasn’t Frank. He beats the hell out of him and demands info on Osip.

Osif also plans to take over Frank’s casino and nightclub operations, which are hotbeds of illegal drug sales, prostitution and money laundering. Thirty seconds later, they’re both dead, reinforcing Jerrod Carmichael’s wonderful observation that American cinema’s most beloved gay characters are the ones that “die in under an hour and forty minutes”. That wasn’t the only flawless moment-letting his wife see the dead body, turning Chessani against his son, and playing Ossip like a violin also hit the mark. That’s when the tide shifted between them. Frank shoots him in the gut and watches him die a slow, painful death. Plus, I was expecting him to make that phone call to Ray. But first, he brings Jordan into the office. Regardless of the outcome of this case that even she doesn’t want solved. She pulled off her brunette wig – a moment that you could nearly tease out for Hitchcockian resonance, if you were feeling generous. Were we ever supposed to be rooting for Frank? He tells her to pack and he will meet up with her tomorrow. And, as thrilling at it was at times, it left a lot of loose ends. In fact, he seems determined to stay until he gets vengeance. He then turns up at the casino bar, sends a very drunk Chessani home, and greets Osip when he arrives. Osip offers Frank a salaried position as a manager. Bezzerides is wanted for killing the private security guard and Seymon has no other place to go. He empties all his cash vaults and burns all his clubs. For the first time this season we finally understand how this is a guy who was on the verge of taking over a city.

Ultimately, the only perspective that people seem to be able to agree upon is the one that comes with the finality of death and destruction. Katherine Davis (Michael Hyatt), is murdered while sitting in her vehicle. He has to stop and hide to re-load his gun. Burris killed Paul because he possessed incriminating evidence against him, and had to pay the proverbial iron price for his sins.

But as we learned with Detective Velcoro way back when, you can’t count Paul out just yet. Ani and Ray recognize one of the girls from the party photos as Caspere’s secretary from the movie set. And Laura was the name of one of the orphans from the 1992 robbery. In doing so, he helped to regenerate the season too, adding a sense of depth to the emergent structure even as some of the finer details remained tantalisingly obscure.

While they wait for Paul to return, Bezzerides and Velcoro stare at each other, drink and then have sex. A way to get him into a situation where he could be blackmailed. Paul plays along at first, but suddenly takes Holloway hostage before running off alone, leading to a deadly game of cat-and-mouse through dark subterranean corridors.

OK, so Ani did get a little bit of work done in the midst of her realizations. Paul assures Holloway that he doesn’t care about Ray or Ani. Paul responds: “Room service”. He eventually kills all the guys, including Colter, who he uses as a human shield. But his plan, it seems, was to skip town with millions. Seriously, I don’t know if Paul had to raise his voice past an exhausted mumble a couple of times. This leads to a deadly underground shoot out that Paul escapes, showing some Jack Bauer-esque moves in the process.

This was a really good episode.

And just like that, the final few answers are revealed.

This week’s episode of True Detective was absolutely rife with desperation.

Let’s start with the plot, which has always been one of the least-discussed elements of this show. “I have, and I think it’s enormously satisfying”. It worries me, though, that he is defending a finale that the public has not seen yet. I’d completely forgotten that the cop who demanded the contracts from Woodrugh in the tunnel was in fact a cop and that we’d seen him before. Viola. She was one of the orphaned L.A Riot children, in Vinci, with the blue diamonds or a candlestick, who knows there’s another episode the whole thing might be one big MacGuffin at this point.