'True Detective': 3 Good and 2 Bad Things About This Week's Episode

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This week’s True Detective was, overall, the best episode of the second season to date. It moved its murder plot along nicely. It gave Vince Vaughn a fight scene. Rachel McAdams had a good workplace-non-romance break-up moment. Warning: Spoilers follow for Sunday night’s True Detective. Here are three especially good things about this week’s episode:

1. That opening sequence, a dream Colin Farrell’s Ray has — oh, yeah, right: Ray survived that shotgun blast from last week — while he also recalled words of bitter advice from his father (the wonderful Fred Ward, essentially playing an old version of Hoke Moseley from the great 1990 George Armitage film Miami Blues).

I assume the guy we saw performing onscreen was lip-synching to this Conway Twitty version of “The Rose,” and that show creator Nic Pizzolatto left script instructions to director Janus Metz Pedersen to mimic this album cover as well:

(Also, do we agree that the movie Fred Ward was watching on TV was 1951’s Detective Story?)

2. The male hooker who calls out Paul “I like the bike” Woodrugh on “this angsty cop drama you’re rollin.’” This is actually the subtitle that should appear on every mention of the show this season. HBO should have called it True Detective: This Angsty Cop Drama You’re Rollin’.

3. Doctor to Ray: “Can I ask how much you drink in an average week?” “All I can.”

Now for the two bad things about the episode:

1. Doctor to Ray: “Do you want to live?” Ray stares blankly for a couple of seconds, then there’s a cut to a new scene. When one of your protagonists can’t answer this question, you know you’re tempting the gods of Boring Existential Despair.

Related: ‘True Detective’ Recap: Die Another Day, Ray

2. There was a marked uptick in pretentious dialogue from Frank this week. “There is no part of my life that is not overwrought with live-or-die importance.” “There’s a certain stridency at work here.” And, talking to an understandably puzzled underling, suggesting violence “prefiguring Caspere, in a causal sense.”

Come on, Pizzolatto: This is David Mamet crossed with Michael Mann stuff, glazed with horse manure. Knock it off.

True Detective airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.