'True Detective' Takes a Page from David Lynch and Finally Hints at a California Carcosa Season Two of 'True Detective' Must Be Taken on Its Own TermsWarning: light spoilers ahead.The main thing that people seem to remember from the first season of True Detective is the aphorism "Time is a flat circle." This line, delivered by Matthew 's wizened Rust Cohle in a Louisiana interrogation room, essentially posits that in the context of the greater universe, everything that will ever happen to us has already happened, and we're just perceiving it in a linear fashion. In real life, this idea is useless to us. Regardless of the alinearity of time, we perceive it as moving in one direction.
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This season's central mystery more or less falls in line with both the show's first season, as well as The Killing, an AMC show whose first season Pizzolatto helped write and is one of TD's spiritual forebears. That season involved a murder that served as a MacGuffin for exploring all of the crazy shit going on in its home city, including high-class prostitutes, crooked city officials, and a general sense the evil had infected an entire municipality. That show featured two detectives—one, Joel Kinnaman's Stephen Holder, was particularly True: a weird, philosophical recovering meth addict who smoked pot with teens and was probably in love with his partner Sarah. He was the show's proto-Rust Cohle, a fundamentally good person who seemed crushed by his horrible understanding of the nature of man.This season's basic plot also contains slivers of Alan Moore's From Hell, in which a bunch of Freemasons get together to kill a group of prostitutes who possibly might have squealed on a member of the royal family for frequenting a fancy prostitute house vis-à-vis one of them having his kid. From Hell's central character John Gull, in addition to being generally creepy and terrifying, has a Rustian sense of temporality—whenever he commits a murder, he disassociates and suddenly understands that he's simply moving through time as he perceives it, and that the totality of human history has already happened.A good murder mystery essentially asks the question, 'What happens when someone is forcibly removed from society, and what about this society mandated that this person had to be removed from it?'
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As the show's final hovers over us like a gray cloud that happens to rain extraneous plot details, True Detective has left us with more questions than it can possibly answer. Who killed Ben Caspere? What the hell's going on with the diamonds? Why did Ray shave his mustache? Who was the Rasputin-looking guy from Ani's childhood? Who was that guy wearing the bird mask back in episode two, and why? Are humans inherently evil, or has, through the fault of no one in particular, society morphed into a construct that makes us evil? And wouldn't spraying liquid MDMA into your mouth get you less high than if you just did it the normal way?It might be that I'm actually a bad viewer and these questions have already been answered, and it's very possible that Nic Pizzolatto has a four-hour season finale that will answer all these questions and more, and tie the whole show up with a nice bow. Or, and this is what seems most likely to me, it might be that many of these questions were never meant to be answered. The actual mystery of the show is why these four characters, once they've had every last sad and intimate detail of their private lives laid bare to us, have acted the way they did throughout the entire season. We know how True Detective will end: The case will be solved in some form or another. But it's the people in the show's universe, slowly getting hip to the fact that they're being manipulated by forces larger than themselves, who serve as True Detective's ultimate mystery.True Detective airs Sunday nights at 9 PM on HBO.Follow Drew on Twitter.On Motherboard: Jack the Ripper's Final Victim Is Being Exhumed