‘True Detective’ Season Finale Recap: Daze of Glory
The moment the phrase “90-minute season finale” flashed on screen last week, it was all over for True Detective but the shooting. A shoddy second season had by then partially redeemed itself with a pair of tight, tense episodes that made up in muscle what they lacked in depth. But just when it seemed like the series was putting together the pieces and cranking up the pace after weeks of floundering, boom — a movie-length meditation on failure. “Omega Station,” the eighth and final installment of TD 2.0, could not have more effectively shut down the show’s progress if it dressed up like a cholo, drove it out to the desert, stabbed it, and left if for dead.
Which is as good a place as any to start taking a stab at what went wrong here. The lonesome death of Frank Semyon capped off a pretty decent last-stand arc for the guy, in which he exacted payback against everyone who wronged him, only to be undone at the last second by foes he failed to see coming. Why it took eight episodes to put this plotline together is a bit baffling, but hey, if you think of it as The Extremely Long Good Friday and ignore his painful heart-to-hearts with his wife Jordan (played as always by Kelly Reilly as if she just woke up a minute before the cameras started rolling), it’s not a half bad gangster yarn.
Until we get to that absurd, forced final confrontation with the Mexican Stereotype Mafia, whom he goaded into killing him by refusing to give up his suit. Yes, after voluntarily torching everything he owned and handing his enemies a suitcase full of $1 million in cash, the King of Vinci decided an extra trip to the Men’s Wearhouse was worth dying over. The only reason this happened was because the story needed it to. Sigh. And the less said about his hallucinatory Five People You Meet in Heaven walk to his final resting place — during which, like all hard men, he dreams of a good woman, his daddy issues, and mean black dudes — the better.
Ray Velcoro also ended up in the big Conway Twitty cosplay karaoke bar in the sky, though he was granted a bit more dignity on his way out. On a metaphorical level, the truth of his detecting is borne out by the can-do spirit of his sperm. His ex tearfully opens her paternity-test results and discovers he was indeed the father of their child. That’ll teach you to distrust the abusive alcoholic murderer who was just looking out for you, lady! And as is custom for characters in incredibly corny stories who make the mistake of having sex with a guy even once, Ani Bezzerides gets knocked up from the single time she and Ray get it on, winding up with a little Velcoro of her own down in Venezuela. Thus his legacy of…uh…kinda bumbling through life and doing all kinds of immoral shit, then killing a bunch of even worse people right before getting killed himself…lives on? Don’t ask us, we just work here.
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