1 112 by Jonas De Ruytter

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Jason really got us started in such a perfect way, then we all wanted so badly to remain in the group and in the conversation, that respect just followed naturally, in a way not commonly seen on the internet. It was an awesome experience to be a part of it.â&#x20AC;?

Jason Shankel created the group.

I. The Long Bright Dark

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PLOT

Jason Shankel January 30 San Francisco California United States

January

II. Seeing Things

III. The Locked Room

There are two narrators, Rust Cohle and Martin Hart, narrating about a case they caught in 1995, the grisly murder of Dora Lange. Ms. Lange’s body was arranged in a tableau with animal parts, bundles of sticks and other Blair Witch type shit. Cohle describes the scene as the work of a “meta-psychotic” and quickly concludes that he will kill again. Hart says he’s jumping to conclusions. This is a cliche in crime stories: the intelligent, socially awkward expert profiler who the police hire and then proceed to completely ignore while he makes fairly obvious observations, like this being clearly not a novice killing. My first reaction was an eye roll, but then on subsequent viewing, I’ve seen how both of these men, narrating from separate rooms years after the fact, are selling cop cliches about the other. To Cohle, Hart is a typical dimwitted incurious bully cop who favors simple answers, and that’s how he comes across in Cohle’s sections of the narrative. Hart even establishes the premise that there are cop cliches (the bully, the man haunted by demons, the brain) and that any of them could be a good cop or an incompetent. Him? He’s just a “regular type guy with a big dick,” another cliche. For his part, Hart characterizes Cohle as a burned out egghead, too smart for his own good, living in an improbably under-furnished apartment, poorly medicating his grief over his dead daughter and lost marriage with alcohol, idly musing about humanity being nature’s mistake, yearning to see our species commit mass suicide and very distinctively non- or even anti-Christian in a community where Christianity is almost as popular as

football. “After a certain age, a man without a family is not a good thing.” Penetrating the narrative means correlating two unreliable narrations of the same events. It’s interesting that Rust uses the term “meta-psychotic” to describe the perpetrator, when “pattern killer” or “serial killer” would be the more common term. Metapsychosis is not a term for pattern killing. It’s the process of direct communication between two minds without an intervening medium (ie telepathy.) A near homonym of metapsychosis is metempsychosis, which refers to the transition of the soul out of the body after death and into another host, an animal or a human. Both of these words give us a clue to the solution of the final riddle: if they caught the killer in 95, how is it possible for there to be a fresh killing in 2012, complete with details from 95 that were not known to the general public? The obvious answer is that the killer was familiar with the investigation, hence the interrogation of the two men. Unless, of course, the killer has communicated with or transferred his soul to another…either supernaturally or via ordinary communication. There is also a strong religious theme. The “anti-Christian”angle is

scoffed at by both men and its advocate is presented as a glad-handing, politically connected interloper who wants to make this part of a political culture war campaign, presumably targeting the usual suspects (goth kids, metal heads, gay liberals, whatever). And yet we also see uninvestigated animal mutilations at a predominantly black church and make a strong point of Cohle being decidedly NOT Christian himself. When we look at the real history of “Satanic” crimes, including vandalism, animal mutilation and murder, the pathology is consistent. The perpetrators typically have a strong religious background from which they derive their Satanic ideation. The similarities between seemingly disparate crimes lead some to imagine that there are secretive underground groups of Satanists collaborating to commit ritual crime, when in fact it’s just that Satanic symbology is something the general public is familiar with. And so we have another mystery: is the anti-religious symbology part of the killer’s actual motive? Or is he using it as a smokescreen to hide his actual motive?

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Jason Shankel January 30 San Francisco California United States

January

Notes on True Detective: Carcosa & West Memphis Dora Lange's diary speaks of “The King in Yellow” and “Carcosa.” Cohle says it reads like fantasy. “Carcosa” is the name of a fictional city established in Ambrose Bierce's “An Inhabitant of Carcosa.” “The King in Yellow” is a collection of short horror stories by Robert Chambers that borrow a number of elements from Bierce's work, including the city of Carcosa. Chambers describes Carcosa using the kind of desolate lyrical poetry used in the show's theme song, The Handsome Family's “Far From Any Road.” You can read some excerpts from “The King in Yellow” on Wikipedia. You can almost hear the honky tonk steel guitar in the background of “Cassilda's Song.” http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/The_King_in_Yellow Chambers was much admired by HP Lovecraft, who borrowed some of Chambers' names and images in the development of the Cthulhu Mythos, which have in turn been an inspiration for countless writers to follow. The story takes place in 1995, one year after the high profile conviction of the “West Memphis Three,” (Damien Echols, Jessie Miskelley and Jason Baldwin.) Almost immediately there was criticism that the boys had been convicted based largely on a coerced confession and their goth/metal/punk images and not on the evidence. “Paradise Lost,” an HBO Undercover documentary highly critical of the case against the three aired in 1996. In this milieu, it's not surprising that both Cohle and Hart would both be gun shy about endorsing “occult” theories of the crime they're investigating. It's interesting that Cohle and Hart are being interviewed in 2012, not 2013 or 2014.

Though not fully exonerated (their ness to accept “leftovers.” Pacino convictions stand), the West Memsimilarly rationalizes his disconnectphis Three were released in late 2011, ed angst: “I need it to keep me sharp.” just a few months before the Cohle That, of course, is bullshit as is Hart's and Hart are questioned about the rationalization that he needs to drink Dora Lange case. and screw around to blow off steam. Hart's father-in-law talks to Hart Both men are simply the same kind of about “these kids today” with impulse-driven adrenalin junkies their goth makeup and black they accuse others of being, and so hair “crying about their rights.” they project that self-loathing onto Hart takes an uncharacteristithose they investigate. Of course, just cally progressive stance that old because you project evil onto somemen have been saying that kind one, doesn't mean they weren't evil to of thing about kids for generabegin with. tions, and then the old men die, And so we have, as Hart would say, the young kids grow up and the our “narrative.” Fucked up kids Earth keeps spinning on its axis. with their fucked up hairstyles Hart later rationalizes his adultery playing D&D and listening to and drinking by saying that he the Cure might murder someneeds to unwind before going one just for kicks and carve home “for the good of his Satanic symbols into the body. family,” yet we subsequently see We also see Cohle's observation him invoke the job to bully his that this isn't just fucked up wife into dropping her “poor tweaker lunacy, but a strucme whining,” which she actualtured story. As with the evoluly wasn't engaging in that we tion from Bierce to Chambers could see. Hart here expresses a to Lovecraft, we see an envelopmore conservative value that ing narrative with the very the home should be a sanctuary strong possibility that the from all the horrors he has to “occult” symbology doesn't deal with on the job and that he represent delusions in the is entitled to her support killer's mind, but rather deluwithout having to offer any of sions the killer knows are his own. already in society's collective Hart's rationalizations and his mind. wife's “poor me whining” are an If you tell me you're scared of the homage to a similar scene in Cookie Monster, I'll leave cookie Heat, where Pacino derisively crumbs at my crime scenes. dismisses his wife's unwilling‑

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PLOT

Jason Shankel January 30 San Francisco California United States

January

There is an essential contradiction to nihilism: if life truly is the hollow pursuit of meaningless and unattainable goals characterized by perpetual alienation and a dreary desire for escape…then why not embrace religion or any other comforting “delusion?” Delusions are only a bad thing if truth has meaning and life a purpose. In this episode, we see Cohle and Hart confront each other's unearned certainties. Cohle characterizes religious faith as clinging to impossible fairy tales to explain existence and suggests that it would be better to know straight up who would be a piece of shit son-of-a-bitch without the promise of divine reward. Marty suggests that Cohle's anti-religious attitude smacks of desperation, suggesting that Cohle is searching for precisely that kind of narrative comfort. But Cohle's God isn't the God of the Bible, but rather the God of Meaning. All the deaths in the DB, the symbology on the victims, Cohle's obsessive search to connect it all, validate Marty's assessment: Cohle is as invested in his narratives as the congregation in the tent is in theirs. Of course, the strong possibility remains that Dora Lange's killing was arranged precisely to lead Cohle to this conclusion. Someone with access to a backlog of mysterious killings could have arranged this one intentionally to lead investigators right where they've been led.After breaking into Lisa's apartment and assaulting her date, Marty asks Cohle…reluctantly…if he's ever thought of himself as a bad man. Cohle says the world needs bad men to keep the other bad men from the door. The only bad man who's kicked in a door this

week is, of course, Marty. In the scene where he confesses his midlife insecurities to his wife, we see the kind of master manipulator Marty is. It seems that he's accessing genuine emotions, but he expresses banal and non-specific general midlife anxieties that pretty much everyone has from time to time. We never see any evidence that he's feeling particularly overwhelmed by life or terrified by aging. But he knows his wife will buy that narrative, and so he gins himself up a pity party and she goes for it. And here we learn that Marty has been on a pity-party spiral for more than a year, not just since catching the Dora Lange case. I guess “poor me bullshit” is okay when you're the big he-man provider and not the nagging wife, eh Marty? Marty is destroying his family, detaching from his wife, getting violent with his mistress, spending multiple nights in a row drunk and away from home, all while selling himself as the rod and the staff of family values. As a general rule, anyone who has to say “I'm not a psycho” probably is. What remains to be seen is whether Marty is clever enough to have crafted an elaborate narrative trap for Cohle to fall into. When he

offered the “retard explanation” (you stay classy, Marty) that the minister's assistant paid for sex, felt shame, took it out on Dora and then tried to “redeem the act” by posing her the way he did, Cohle (despite himself) admits that it's a good theory, except the assistant has been castrated. Marty thanks him sarcastically, saying he thought it up all on his own. I wonder.

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Jason Shankel made Sion Isaacs Shankel an admin January 30

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Jason Shankel updated the group tags to True Detective, Mathew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson. January 30

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Jason Shankel updated the description. January 30

This group is dedicated to HBO’s awesome crime series ‘True Detective.’ Come on in and start asking the right f*cking questions!

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I'm planning to rewatch all three episodes, back to back, on Saturday evening. :-) I’ve already rewatched two and three twice each.

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Sion Isaacs Shankel January 31 San Francisco California United States

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I rarely ever rewatch a show…but I think I am up to four times each e on thus akready…how are the others addicts doing?

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I feel like i have to watch each episode twice, just to parse all of Cohle’s dialogue.

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Jason Shankel January 31 San Francisco California United States

No ‘True Detective’ this Sunday. HBO doesn’t want to compete with the Super Bowl, aka the ludicrous pursuit of collective achievement by proxy to a gang of mercenary avatars of senseless aggression and faux machsimo. We’ll be back next week. Hugs and Kisses, Rust Cohle

January

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AUDIO

Shayne Bowman January 31

FYI: There’s a lot of good True Detective talk on Grantland’s Hollywood Prospectus podcast with Andy Greenwald and Chris Ryan. https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/grantlandpop-culture/id642537435?mt=2

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To get it in iTunes or Sitcher, you have to subscribe to the Pop Culture podcast on Grantland, then listen to the episodes marked Hollywood Prospectus. Or you can stream direct off their site: http://grantland.com/ hollywood-prospectus/

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Oooo

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Subscribed now. Will listen later. :-)

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I think I’m listening to the wrong episode. They’re discussing The Bachelor - a lot. lol

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That podcast is a combination of 4-5 casts in one feed. So you have to find the episode marked Hollywood Prospectus to get to the True Dectective talk

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But the Girls with Hoodies had some good True Detective talk in a recent ep

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I found it now. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the podcast dated January 29th. http://pcasts.in/EcYY

January

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TEXT

Justin I’Onn February 2

Interview with Matthew McConaughey, in yesterday’s UK Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/ starsandstories/10602734/MatthewMcConaughey-exclusive-interview.html

Having lost 38lb to play Ron Woodroof, an HIV-positive cowboy, in Dallas Buyers Club, the actor formerly known as Hollywood’s Shirtless Lust Object Number One then gave a performance so powerful he is favourite to win the Oscar. How did the man with the gleaming abs achieve such a spectacular career turnaround? Matthew McConaughey is on his knees, begging me to take him back. ‘I am nothing!’ he implores, his hands clasped, rocking back and forth. ‘My life is nothing without you! If you’ll take me back I can be something!’ He is halfway through explaining the DNA of the romcom to me. We’ve already done Boy Meets Girl and Boy Loses Girl. We’ve touched on one peculiarity of the romcoms McConaughey appeared in in the 2000s, which is Boy Strips For Girl – a scenario that tested the ingenuity of screenwriters in film after film (shower scene, surf scene, a change of shirt after a sweaty commute, change of T-shirt after it is splashed by passing truck, job as a submariner). Now we’ve got to Man Chases After Girl, generally by motorbike (How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days) or moped (The Wedding Planner). We’re at the climax. The kisser. Crunch time. ‘The directors in those things always want the man to come crawling back on all fours,’ McConaughey says. ‘“I was nothing”, and so on and so forth… I was always like, what woman wants that guy? I’ve got to find a way to keep the balls on the guy. To walk back in with dignity and stand tall.’ He leaps to his feet with one bound, and starts pacing. ‘I don’t mind going, “I’m sorry I screwed up.” Say you want to give it another shot. I can do that. I can understand that. End it with a little bit of hope. But do we have to wrap it up with the guy completely emasculated going, “Take me back!” and we lived happily ever after and had eight kids. Who wants that guy?’ He upturns his palms to the heavens. Nobody, I murmur, spellbound. But this guy? The one in front of me? The 188lb of glorious, 44-year-old Texan, buff and tanned, who throws his whole body into stories, springing around the room, loosing long, cascading riffs peppered with sun-kissed

February

mysticism (‘Keep on livin’), self-development bumper stickers (‘Find your frequency’), and other assorted personal hustle-and-jive? This guy? This guy is on fire. People have been noticing, too. In the past few years McConaughey has been on an acting roll, cutting loose from the megabuck parts for a series of down-and-dirty roles – as a scuzzball defence attorney in The Lincoln Lawyer, a mangy drifter in Mud, a strip-club owner in Magic Mike, a psychopathic assassin for hire in Killer Joe, a booze-fuelled Mephistopheles in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, and now a trash-talking Aids activist in Dallas Buyers Club – that have reminded everyone why they made such a big deal of him in the first place. Having won the best actor Golden Globe for Dallas Buyers Club, McConaughey is now the front runner for the Oscar. It was ‘le comeback de l’année’, France’s TF1 News said, or as GQ termed it, the ‘McConaissance.’ McConaughey celebrates his Golden Globe for Dallas Buyers Club with his wife, Camila Alves. PHOTO: Rex Features ‘The Mer-con-nay-sonce,’ McConaughey says with a grin when I trip over the pronunciation, before slipping into the third person he sometimes uses to dramatise important points in his self-development. ‘I’m surprising people. “Jeez, you’re really emerging, McConaughey. I’m seeing you differently. Things you’re doing are sticking. You’re like wet shit,” as Ali Farka Touré would say. The African blues man. I asked him once, why don’t you play in the US and Europe more? “Because there I would be dried shit. Neither me nor my scent would stick with me,” he told me. “But here I am wet shit. Both me and my scent stick with me.” Evidently I’ve got some wet shit going on.’ The physicality of this image is entirely fitting. McConaughey is a physical actor and a physical talker, and comebacks are a physical business, as Mickey Rourke found out in The Wrestler – ‘this broken-down piece of meat’ the one thing an actor has left after everything has been stripped from him. The star having fallen, his body must be offered up in fresh sacrifice. Playing a strip-club impresario in Magic Mike, McConaughey, dressed in leather chaps, savouring the waves of female lust buffeting the stage like a violin virtuoso, stunningly deconstructed his reputation as Shirtless Lust Object Number One, cinema’s one truly objectified male. But the death blow to that image is delivered this month in Dallas Buyers Club, based on a real story, in which McConaughey plays a part-time rodeo cowboy and hard-partying sex fiend named Ron Woodroof, who, in 1985, was told he had contracted HIV and was given 30 days to live. He subsequently scoured the globe looking for alternative therapies, becoming in the process an unlikely gay-rights crusader as he established a

‘buyers’ club’ to supply people with HIV and Aids with medications that were not approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). McConaughey lost 38lb to play the emaciated Woodroof, staying out of the sunlight to immerse himself in a trove of diaries and tapes. When he first saw himself on screen, his first thought was, ‘F***ing hell, McConaughey, you look like a reptile!’ ‘He was sending pictures and I thought, wow,’ the film’s French-Canadian director, Jean-Marc Vallée, says. He adds that, on set, McConaughey’s insistence on silence while he got into character could be ‘hard to deal with. “Oh my God, man, relax, chill out.” But I get it. It’s Ron. He’s becoming Ron, even between takes. I’m not going to take it personally, I want to punch him but…’ The film was very much McConaughey’s baby. The script, by Melisa Wallack, was knocking around Hollywood for some 20 years, attracting the attention of first Brad Pitt then Ryan Gosling, and was turned down by studios 86 times before McConaughey’s advocacy secured the $6 million budget, which allowed for 28 days in which to make the film – a shoestring production. McConaughey remained the prime orchestrator; revising the script, suggesting new scenes, giving notes to Vallée in the editing room. ‘He was the one challenging me on set, not just on storytelling and character but directing,’ Vallée says. ‘He can be as cocky as Ron can be, and as charming in order to get what he wants. “Texas is movement,” he kept saying to me. “Texas is movement.” He was moving constantly. ‘That’s what Ron was, that’s what he is, in a way. To see Matthew talk, to see him act, it’s movement. But I must say that behind the acting it was Matthew’s humanity that made the difference. This guy has something in the face, this energy, this way of talking that within 10 minutes has you caring for him. The first audience we screened it for I could feel it, I was in the room, 250 people. I could feel the crowd behind him. The acting is something but the guy, the guy has such visceral humanity.’ Matthew McConaughey’s career is the story of what happens when a natural acting talent – easygoing, pleasure-seeking, frankly incredulous that people are giving him money for this gig – goes to work for a Hollywood machine eager to run him on the fumes of pure charisma. Emblazoned on the cover of Vanity Fair after his appearance in the all-star John Grisham fiesta A Time to Kill in 1996, McConaughey is suddenly ‘the new Paul Newman’, given choice roles in films with Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis and Ron Howard. Except those films are Amistad, Contact and EDtv – a run of bad luck at the box office that is finally reversed in 2001 when he appears opposite Jennifer

February

Lopez in The Wedding Planner, a modest hit that is followed by a bigger one, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, opposite Kate Hudson. The two click, and McConaughey’s fate is seemingly as locked as his gleaming abs in a series of films – Failure to Launch, Fool’s Gold, Ghost of Girlfriends Past – the mere thought of which would have Ryan Gosling or Leonardo DiCaprio waking in a cold sweat. But McConaughey seems almost entirely lacking the usual career anxiety, and accompanying skills of realpolitik, that propel such careers. To hear him say it, he has simply been following the sun – going where it’s warm. ‘I said, “Hey, do my good looks help me along? Absolutely. Does the fact that my body is considered good and we’re gonna have me up there in a shirtless scene help it along? Sure.” ‘I didn’t ever go, “No, no, no.” I was like, “Yeah! I get that. That’s fun. What’s the big deal?” If you go deep with the romcom you sink the ship. There’s a buoyancy to the frequency of romcoms. To be light is critically always looked down upon – it’s willowy, it’s wispy, it’s nothing. You know what? It’s f***ing not easy to do and a lot of people don’t do it well. A lot of the work in those things is to stay buoyant. To say, “Hey, get offa my cloud, man! I’m dancing between the raindrops!”’ Like so much of what comes out of McConaughey’s mouth, you really feel that to get the most out of this riff you ought to be hearing it while sitting round a campfire on a Malibu beach, passing round a joint as dawn breaks. McConaughey is his own creature, attuned to his own personal wavelength – sunny but soulful, laidback but busy, busy, busy – somewhere between a film star, a Beat poet and a beach bum. Arrested in 1999, when police knocked on his door to find him playing bongo drums naked, a bong on the table, he spent the night in jail but ended up leading his cellmates in a singalong and later had T-shirts printed that read what part of naked bongo playing don’t you understand? In 2004 he bought himself an Airstream trailer – the first of many – and whenever the fishbowl got too much for him in La La Land he would hit the road, seeking out crummy motels, or else following the trail of his favourite bluesman out to Africa, backpacking up the Niger river, or hauling out to the Sahara to attend a music festival north of Timbuktu. ‘I have to check out so I can listen to myself,’ he says. ‘For the first 10 days it’s hell. Can’t stand my company, have to shake all the demons, all the excesses, the wanting to call a friend – “Aww, I’m alone, I’m so lonely” – and then you stick with it and what happens about day nine, always day nine, a little old thing goes off. “Well, guess what, man, you’re stuck with me. There’s nothing

you can do so let’s figure out how to get along. Whatever it is I forgive you. Let’s work on this.” No matter who you’re in bed with you’re always sleeping with one person and that’s you.’ There is anger to McConaughey, too. It’s there in the romcoms, which belong at the feistier end of the genre. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days isn’t Hugh Grant hemming and hawing over the lyrics to a Partridge Family song; it’s McConaughey and Hudson vowing to make each other’s life a merry hell. McConaughey was always on the lookout for ‘a place to grow a little bit of a fang and get away with it. There’s normally about one spot in each of those romantic comedies where you can go, “Nobody’s f***ing fooled…”’ The rage is there, too, in his Ron Woodroof, railing against the FDA, and the dying of the light, in Dallas Buyers Club. ‘In each scene what’s the main emotion?’ McConaughey says. ‘Rage. Rage, man. What emotion gets more stuff done than rage? Rage is the one that makes stuff happen.’ McConaughey’s upbringing was loving but a little fierce around the edges, instilling resiliency above all else. The youngest of three boys growing up in Uvalde, Texas, he was a surprise baby, his pipe-supply salesman father, Big Jim, in his 40s when he was born, his brothers already in their teens. His mother, Kay, a kindergarten teacher, had a rule: if it’s daylight, you get outside. Don’t watch TV. Don’t go to the movies. Even if it’s raining, it’s sunny. Is the rain going to hurt you? Get out there. ‘It was a do it, do it, do it lifestyle,’ he says. Every night, they would have dinner together and tell stories. ‘A great family of bullshitters,’ he says. ‘Oh yeah. Great stories that still get rehashed every Christmas when we get together and someone puts a new tweak on ’em, just to make ’em interesting and goad the others. It’s entertainment. That’s how we entertained ourselves and how we still entertain ourselves.’ Some of the stories told in the McConaughey household weren’t so entertaining at the time although he can laugh about them now. His parents were married, divorced, remarried, divorced and married again, without any of the children finding out about it until their father died of a heart attack in 1992; they were told their mother was ‘on vacation’. Was Big Jim trying to protect his kids from the truth? ‘Or they knew that one day they’d get back together and it was a case of “Hey, just don’t bring it up in the interim, and we’ll get back together and if we don’t we’ll have to tell them but for now…”’ he says. ‘Theirs was some fierce love. They were not just flirting. They communicated and loved like this, man’ – he drives a fist into his palm – ‘it was hardcore. Talk about the drama. Talk about passion. Brrrr.’ It reminds me of the streak of misplaced gallantry to Mud, the title

February

character in Jeff Nichols’s 2012 film, which Nichols wrote specifically with McConaughey in mind: a sun-kissed drifter on the bayou whose stories are never an inch from bullshit, and whose love for his long-lost honey (Reese Witherspoon) turns out to be his downfall. In his own romantic life, McConaughey has taken some time to settle, dating a string of fellow stars – Sandra Bullock, Ashley Judd and Penélope Cruz – before falling for Camila Alves, a Brazilian model whom he met in an LA bar in 2006. He describes himself as ‘very single’ when they met, ‘meaning I was going about my business,’ he says with a knowing man-to-man intentness to his gaze. It was a year and a half before they were dating exclusively, but ‘all of a sudden I looked up and was like, this is the only woman I’ve wanted to go out with every single night since I met her, and that’s a pretty good sign. You know what I mean?’ Now his wife, Camila has borne him three children – Levi, five, Vida, four, and Livingston, one – and it was from this domestic stability, strangely, that the fruits of his recent resurgence were sown. ‘Being a father is the one thing I always knew I wanted to be,’ he says. ‘Looking around at my own life, I said to myself, “Man, what I’m doing in my own life is more interesting than my work.” I was like, “That’s OK. Better be that way than the other way around. At least you’re getting something out of life. You’re going to work and you’re enjoying it. You’re finding ways to get challenged, McConaughey.” You do the work, it pays the bills, but boy my life was vital. The way I’m loving, the way I’m expressing my anger, either I’m mad as hell or I’m laughing harder at that joke than anyone else does. ‘I was like, OK. Is there a way my career can catch up with the vitality of my own life? So I said, wait for some roles that move my floor. That shake me up a little bit. And make me go — oh, oooh, aaah.’ He wiggles his backside in his chair, as if getting the almightiest back-rub, and maybe a little something else on the side. ‘I don’t know what to do with that… That’s tasty… OK yeah…’ McConaughey has just finished shooting the new Christopher Nolan sci-fi spectacular, Interstellar, about which he is sworn to secrecy, but once the awards season is over has no plans, besides getting on the road again as soon as he can. Isn’t it more difficult with a family in tow? ‘I’ll tell you, I’m very fortunate here,’ he says. ‘When I go to work, the family comes with me. We all just say, this is part of the adventure. When we were on the Mississippi river for Mud, we decided we were all going to stay in the trailer on the Mississippi – a two-month vacation. Talk about Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. No toys, no electricity, this is going to be great, we got to do this now…

IV. Who Goes There

‘Hey, we’re going to Brazil for 11 days to see Camila’s family – guess what, let’s make a rule: everyone can only take a carry-on backpack. All five of us in one room. Oh jeez, but once we do it it’s going to be fun. You know what? There’ll be more stories to tell.’ Dallas Buyers Club is out on February 7

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VIDEO

Jason Shankel February 6 San Francisco California United States

D minus four days and counting… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JVK0-4HQTY The Monster at the end of this Book, this was my sister's favorite book as a kid… This one and “The Fat Cat”… I was playing around with some new screen capture software and captured this fro… youtube.com

LINK

The snark must flow… http://truedetectiveconversations. tumblr.com/

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POST

That awkward moment…when you wake up early on Sunday and try to go back to sleep, not because you’re tired, but because it will shorten the wait for True Detective.

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You know, cops are supposed to do ride-alongs for citizens interested in observing police work. Cohle must have some stories about doing those before he made detective.

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Jason Shankel February 8 San Francisco California United States

Jason Shankel February 9 San Francisco California United States

February

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VIDEO

Anastasia Lunea February 10 San Francisco California United States

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Jason Shankel February 10 San Francisco California United States

http://rlsbb.fr/true-detective-s01e04-hdtv-x2642hd-2/ True Detective S01E04 HDTV x264-2HD rlsbb.fr Thanks Shayne Bowman for this… http://www. vulture.com/2014/02/seitz-on-true-detectives-6minute-tracking-shot.html?mid=facebook_vulture Seitz on True Detective’s 6-Minute Tracking Shot — Vulture It’s a mistake to praise the shot simply for existing. Vulture|By Matt Zoller Seitz

The fourth episode of True Detective will forever be known as “the one with the six-minute tracking shot,” and why wouldn’t it be? It is logistically impressive: the sort of thing you notice and appreciate even if you’re a more casual moviegoer who doesn’t normally fixate on composition, shot duration, and other cinematic style choices. It’s of a piece with True Detective’s fiendishly elaborate construction. The entire show is conceived as one gigantic geographically dispersed, time-shifting puzzle, with shots answering other shots that in turn seem to pose questions to shots that haven’t appeared onscreen yet. The overall effect suggests that the past is continually in conversation with the present, a notion that’s made official whenever a past action is commented upon by a present-tense character during those office-bound interview scenes, and we hear the dialogue as voice-over before the show cuts to the speaker’s face. And because every episode of True Detective is written by Nic Pizzolatto and directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga (Jane Eyre, Sin Nombre), it has a stylistic cohesiveness that a lot of series, even great ones, lack. That makes you sit up and take notice whenever it departs from whatever norms it has established. That blowout tracking shot at the end of last night’s episode was so striking not just because it was awesome, but because it was the first such shot in the show’s run. But I think it’s important to put that tracking shot in a larger

context, and talk about what makes it work dramatically, as opposed to what makes it merely “awesome.” It’s a mistake to praise the shot simply for existing, for a couple of reasons. TV directors, whose work tends to be devalued generally, stage moments just as complex fairly often and critics don’t pat them on the backs for it. In fact, the attention paid to this one instance makes me inclined to devalue the shot just a little bit. It suggests a certain “Look at me, ma!” obviousness deployed in service of getting TV critics who don’t normally pay attention to style to notice it here. It’s a showstopper in the literal sense. While impressive in every department (camera acrobatics, choreography, lighting), that tense climactic sequence took me out of a drama that had otherwise been totally immersive. That’s not entirely a bad thing — I’ll get to why in a moment — but it might prove to be problematic, unless True Detective builds on it in an interesting way in future episodes. Second, this is far from the first elaborate tracking shot that’s been done within the context of a TV drama. In fact, E.R. and other John Wells–produced series used to do ones that were just as long and elaborate in the nineties and early aughts. Some were as long as the justly celebrated “keep it going” shots in films by Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma, and Alfonso Cuarón: three minutes, four, five. There have been, and continue to be, other examples of great, long tracking shots. Scandal has done some great ones in the last few years, and Treme used to do them regularly (traveling from character to character for as long as two or three minutes, to visually drive home the idea that ultimately everyone is connected). The best long tracking shots are so elegantly executed that the single-take approach affects you subliminally, so that you come away thinking not, “Wow, that was all done with no cuts,” but something more like, “Wow, that was emotionally affecting for some reason,” or “How clever of them to save that last big reveal for the very end of the scene,” after which you go back and watch the scene again and realize what, exactly, you were looking at. On the opposite end of the subtlety spectrum, you’ve got tracking shots like the ones in the X-Files episode “Triangle,” one of the most ambitiously directed (by creator Chris Carter) episodes of series TV I’ve ever watched. The plot unfolded, à la True Detective, in two different time frames: 1939 and 1998. Carter, who also wrote the episode, staged the past- and present-tense versions of his heroes Scully and Mulder so that they seemed to be eerily in sync, at times even passing each other like ghosts in the same haunted house. As I wrote at the time, “The greatest minute of TV this year is the scene where

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Mulder runs down a hallway of the ocean liner with the 1939 Scully in tow while in 1998, the real Scully walks down the same hallway looking for Mulder. Thanks to the wonders of split-screen — i.e., two square images placed sideby-side — Mulder and the 1939 Scully turn a corner at the same time that our Scully turns it. The two parties seem to pass each other…In a single stunning image, Carter collapses time, space and identity — and makes a funny joke, too. It’s the shot of the year.” There’s nothing in the True Detective shot that’s as conceptually rich as what Carter did in “Triangle,” but the showiness of it is very effective in its own right, because it departs from the meticulous puzzle-piece construction of the rest of the initial four episodes. The intensity and controlled wildness of the sequence — which follows Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and a gang of bigoted white bikers as they try to rob black drug dealers in a housing project, then escape before they all get killed—feels like a long-delayed eruption of deeply buried madness. In the rest of this episode and most of episode three, we’ve been watching Cohle contrive, very carefully, to “lose it,” as if willing himself to re-become the deep-cover agent he’d been several years earlier, at the expense of his family and anything resembling a stable, “normal” life. The filmmakers paved the way for this shot by showing Cohle leaving the biker bar on a boat and disappearing into darkness, as if he were Captain Willard going upriver to find and kill Colonel Kurtz. Will True Detective continue to follow this chain of association? If so, don’t be surprised if the series gets crazier and crazier and crazier as it goes along, until it disintegrates. (1)

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Oh the studying I got to do….

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First I just savor a million times…

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For the Live and Learn File: It’s clear that I should have named this group “True Detective Has Warped My Fragile Little Mind.”

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Damn, over the top or not, that was the second best 58 minutes I spent today.

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Second best? I gather that you went on a personal crank-fueled drug heist through the projects before the show?;)

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Jason Shankel, I’m always more productive in the morning.

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Morning is nothing but an arbitrary ritualization of the Earth’s angular momentum masquerading as religious awe and the false promise of forgiveness and renewal that never comes.

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Jason Shankel February 11 San Francisco California United States

Christina Scannapiego February 11

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Jason Shankel via True Detective February 11 San Francisco California United States

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D day… True Detective Season 1: Episode #4 Subscribe to the HBO YouTube: http://itsh. bo/10qIqsj Watch new episodes of True Detective every Sunday at 9PM, only on HBO. Connect with True Detective: Fin…

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Lisa would be well advised to take “fuck off” for an answer. Granted, Mr. “I’m Not A Psycho” clearly is and he’s responsible for his lunatic bullshit, but that’s all the more reason to take being blown off as a blessing.

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I agree— a somewhat normal person would take the blow-off and run, but Lisa is no slouch in the lunatic bullshit department either. A thoroughly ugly relationship that would have taken a lot more ugly to finish it off if Marty had been not married.

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They say “don’t stick your dick in crazy.” ‘They’ being Cohle here. But some guys…well… some guys ain’t got a choice because crazy is all that will come within 50 feet of them.

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Jason Shankel February 11 San Francisco California United States

https://twitter.com/RustCohle_HBO

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Jason Shankel February 11 San Francisco California United States

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Jason Shankel February 12 San Francisco California United States

https://twitter.com/MartinHart_HBO Martin Hart HBO (MartinHart_HBO) on Twitter @ 5:50: steadicam operator follows Cohle and Uncle of Anarchy through yard to fence…steps on Man Sized Jib(tm), is raised over fence, planted on the other side and continues tracking without a hiccup. Because insane. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVK_scFlCHg True Detective - 6 minute tracking shot That single, unedited tracking shot from 0:38 to 6:36.

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Many Many questions. Marty is a psych case. His road runner speech (seemed desperate) to his wife and his persona with Lisa at first being handcuffed. Then his rage at Charlie in the jail (and why was Charlie chained this time and not in the first interview). Several Martys in there each in DENIAL of the other.

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Marty: “The detective’s worst mistake when you don’t see the answer when it is right under your nose.” Maybe this applies to the whole mystery here...

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Jason Shankel February 12 San Francisco California United States

Vaughn Carl Brown February 12 9:44 pm

I thought that sequence was totally cool

So what are everyone’s thoughts on “Carcosa” and “The King In Yellow?” I previous posts, I laid out my theory that this is an intentional feeding of the “Satanist” angle, designed to hook the “God botherers” with the religious angle and Cohle with the highly constructed narrative angle. My prime suspect is Marty. The dates in the show (1995, 2012) line up with important dates in the “West Memphis Three” case. If you haven’t seen “Paradise Lost,” check it out. My operating th…eory is that it’s a skeleton key for True Detective. Could be wrong. This is one of those “probably not, but I got no better idea” type of deals. But enough about me…what do you think? How does “The King In Yellow” play into this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NNdCP9z2cM HBO ParadiseLost Pt1 TheChildMurdersAtRobinHoodHills A horrific triple murder leads to an indictment and trial of three non-conformist boys based on questionable evidence. youtube.com

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Jason Shankel February 13 San Francisco California United States

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Another interesting real-life case that could have some bearing on True Detective is Henry Lee Lucas, who was fictionalized in “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.” When he was caught, Lucas confessed to something like a half billion murders and claimed to be part of a network of satanic ritual abusers. He confessed to killing Jimmy Hoffa. The cops bought every word, except maybe the Hoffa thing. They flew him around the country, gave him deluxe (for a death row inmate) a… ccommodations, good food and treated him like a celebrity to “coax” him into giving details on his killings. So now police stations all around the country were able to close cases and get on TV having “caught” a super-predator, and Henry gets to be the center of attention everywhere he goes. So what if they gave him the case files before his “confessions?” So what if they corrected any details he’d get wrong when visiting a crime scene? She was stabbed? Oh, no, the victim was male and he was strangled. Oh, that’s right, I strangled him. There’s little doubt that he was a killer, but he was only sentenced to death for one killing, an unidentified female dubbed “Orange Socks” because that’s all she was wearing. The evidence against him in this case was so dubious that Governor George W. Bush commuted his sentence to life on recommendation of the parole board. Lucas was the only death row prisoner spared by Governor Bush. Rewatching “Henry” and imagining it as a delusional fantasy a la “American Psycho” is an interesting exercise, especially the scene where Henry talks about killing his mother (which evidently the real Henry actually did) and can’t remember how he did it.

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Jason Shankel February 13 San Francisco California United States

Our “Start Asking The Right Fucking Questions” film of the week is ‘Deceiver,’ starring Tim Roth, Michael Rooker and Chris Penn. It’s an unreliablenarrator confession procedural noir thriller from the mid 90s. Not bad, though a bit ponderous and over the top at times. Rooker goes full Marty Hart in this one. Don’t mow Rooker’s lawn. Just…just let him mow it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbB_D4MbkF0 Deceiver (Liar) [1997] Full movie Storyline Textile company heir Wayland is accused of murder of a prostitute named Elizabeth, whose body was found cut in two in the park. The murder is inves… youtube.com|By Les McCann True Detective Season 1: Inside the Episode #4 (HBO) Subscribe to the HBO YouTube: http://itsh. bo/10qIqsj Watch new episodes of True Detective every Sunday at 9PM, only on HBO. Connect with True Detective: Fin… youtube.com

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Meth Damon

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Definitely have to work up a “which fictional outlaw Aryan biker gang are you?” quiz.

Jason Shankel via True Detective February 13 San Francisco California United States

“Todd’s Uncles,” circa 1995?

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Jason Shankel February 14 San Francisco California United States

“The universe is an ever expanding bubble of dust, space, time and futility spiraling outward from a violent, firey origin to the empty, lifeless void of eternal heat death which will consume everything you’ve ever known, loved, hated or feared and smother every hopeful moment you’ve ever experienced in a blanket of cold indifference.” - Rust Cohle’s “Cosmos” (ultimately, the producers decided to go with Neil DeGrasse Tyson) http://www.space.com/22058-cosmos-aspacetimes-odyssey-with-neil‑degrasse-tysonrevealed-video.html Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey With Neil deGrasse Tyson Revealed | Video Fox and National Geographic have released the first trailer for Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, an epic follow up to Carl Sagan’s widely renowned space documentary series. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson will host the new series, premiering in 2014. Credit: Fox / National Geographic

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Jason Shankel February 14 San Francisco California United States

Mr. Charisma. “Kids are all that matter, Maggie. Men, women, it’s not supposed to work out. But if you hang in there and give Marty another chance, I promise to take him on an endless chain of unhinged rogue cowboy suicide missions until one or both of us end up dead. Deal?” - Rust Cohle, Nihilist Marriage Counselor

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Jason Shankel via True Detective February 14 San Francisco California United States

Darkness touches you back. Check out the True Detective Mondo Posters.

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I love Rue Detective! Best show on BO.

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guess they focus on the street, oui?

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The B&W reminds me of Sin City.

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Jason Shankel February 15 San Francisco California United States

D minus 2 days… http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_ detailpage&v=h1KBGFPMbww True Detective 1x05 Promo “The Secret Fate of All Life” (HD) True Detective 1x05 “The Secret Fate of All Life” - Hart and Cohle celebrate a solved case; Papania and Gilbough confront the detectives with new intelligence… youtube.com

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Jason Shankel February 15 San Francisco California United States

The sun’s in the sky And so is the moon On my day off I start drinking at noon … - A Rust Cohle Valentine

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Jason Shankel February 15 San Francisco California United States

My father is dead My balls are both blue I am the Coyote So shut up and let’s screw … - A Marty Hart Valentine

This was the first time in this series that I’ve been disappointed. I was hopeful that this series wouldn’t make what I consider to be the blunder that often diminishes the hard-won tension and interest in procedurals. But they kinda did: They went too big. The plot turned on an event that was fantastic and out scope with the level of realism in the show. The ripoff of a stash house just seemed insane. The mechanics were too unlikel…y and the outcome absurd. I understand the need to bind these two detectives in a criminal act — and I like how we couldn’t really understand (but now do) what these two were hiding. But why did it have to involve a biker gang, an entire city block armed to the teeth, and an impossible getaway? These series work best when the world the characters operate in is contained. So I’m disappointed. Don’t get me wrong I’ll continue to watch. But this was just too much for me.

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Brent Ramsey you must remember, we here are hopelessly addicted to TD and we are at a big disadvantage: Cohle has seen the last 4 episodes - that’s why he’s so wise

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The last scene was able to satisfy the action geeks and keep them from jumping ship (Ha!) I don’t feel sorry for him. As they would say here down south- he’s a lyin’ sack o’ shit!

Jay Greenspan February 15

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I keep returning to the line that seems to be so central to this show: “Start asking the right fucking questions.” I previously raised the question, “what are the right fucking questions?” And there were some good answers. But what’s so interesting is that this is a question that’s worth asking. Can you think of another procedural where that’s worth pondering? In most procedurals, even something as well done as Broadchurch the answer is evident: We’re here to solve a murder a…nd explore some characters as we do it. Here I’m not quite sure. It looks as though we’re going to devote four hours — half of the runtime — to what could be described as backstory and exposition. We’re also aware of an additional murder that fits the pattern and some suspicion of Cohle. But, to me, he doesn’t seem like a full-on suspect — they’re sharing too much information and treating him too informally. In my reading, this is the mystery of the mystery. Why is Cohle there, and why are we watching him? But I’m not sure - not at all. While I know this isn’t entirely unique, I can’t think of too many shows or books that have the nerve to be vague about the central motivation for the events. Very cool

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Jason Shankel February 15 8:01 pm

Jay Greenspan February 15

There has to be some kind of connection to the church, owing to the mural. Disgruntled congregant, evil minister, someone trying to discredit the church? Sounds like one or more of the local

churches is caught up in a land deal of some sort. I keep wondering about the groundskeeper’s story. The vic was going to church. (2)

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Also possible that the vic just drew the mural in her notebook and the killer used that without knowing what it is.

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I think the church is significant to show the viewers that it’s corrupt and cannot be trusted thus it’s playing on the facts that those who are not intelligent enough to see the corruption so for that sake prey on the weak. Just my thought….

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Jackie Burgett February 15 Mountain View Arizona United States

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I think it is entirely possible that Maggie’s daughter Audrey got her ideas for her drawings from pornography which she may have found in Marty’s things. She’s just like any kid - curious. The poses in those drawings looked like things one might see in pornography. Marty has a dark, potential violent side and that is how she got the idea for the doll arrangement (a recreation of a scene she saw) I don’t think she’s the 2012 killer as someone suggested in a post.

V. The Secret Fate of All Life

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Justin I’OnnI remember when Maggie called Rust to ask about his date she set up? It kind of surfaced like this: when Maggie asked Rust: “ you guys don’t give things chances.” Rust tells Maggie “that’s because us guys know what we want, and we don’t mind being alone” - I’m convinced he deeply cares for her.

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if I correctly remember, she did ask him later did he ask Rust about him? And it was she that told him about his daughter’s accident.,.. You realize I have OCD and now must go to my DVR and look it up :) I’ll get back to you

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he chawing tobacco!

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Yeah, he sounds like he’s from Houston.

Jackie Burgett February 16 Mountain View Arizona United States

I hate to be persnickety but Marty really needs to have better voice coaching on his Louisiana accent. He’s all wrong! Now that old grizzler crabber - now he’s for real. I’ll bet he’s a native, so why couldn’t he have coached Woody? Come on now

not demons, necessarily - just a threat to their games and fun. I still think the guv is the pedo perv. It’s mainly Cohle they’re afraid will expose their enterprise because I think drugs are involved too

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Thanks Jason for adding me on!! Cheers from Calgary! Love the comments and True Detective is a breath of fresh air.. Ingenious and thought provoking scenes, unlikely thoughts of what will be plague my mind after each episode.. Cheers!!

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Jackie Burgett February 16 8:36 am

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In one of the earlier episodes I heard that Ledoux was paroled early (Atty Gen and Governor have authority for that) A theory is that he got help with that from these people in high places. Ladoux might be their fall guy. Also the the Atty Gen and Governor had access to Cohle’s folder and knew when his daughter died, so they could have an elaborate ruse to set him up also. It is called planting red herrings.

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Please, y’all - can’t we have one thing decent left in this show :)

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if Maggie was in any way involved or in a cult, I would fall over in shock and disbelief!

Jean-Anne Hawse February 16

Jackie Burgett February 16 Mountain View Arizona United States

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put your seat belt on Jean-Anne Hawse and welcome!

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Just a reminder to please not post any spam. This includes torrent links to the episode. We run a clean establishment

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Less than 8 hours away until Episode 5!!! I can’t wait y’all. Just a reminder for those of you who would otherwise forget LOL LOL LOL!

Jason Shankel February 16 San Francisco California United States

Jackie Burgett February 16 Mountain View Arizona United States

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High Mass? LOL do you get the religious experience??? :)

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Ooooh sounds like a fun site. Have just started listening to podcast. Don’t have time to listen to all of it this evening but hopefully newt weekend Thank goodness my ear tuned into English. LOL Love the y’all stuff. High mass?

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High Mass at the church of the Yellow King? located in Carcosa

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Jackie Burgett February 16 Mountain View Arizona United States

I read somewhere that the previous TD episodes are now streamed - does anyone know???

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on hbo.com…..not free.

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Hulu and bell tv if your in Canada try hbo

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watch-series.net

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Lauren Elizabeth February 16

Thanks for the add. I can’t remember the last time I loved a show so much. My FB friends are getting sick of my “True Detective Quotation of the Day” posts. BTW, very good article (PROBABLY SPOILERS) http://io9.com/the-one-literary-reference-youmust-know-to-appreciate-1523076497

Two episodes into the series, True Detective dropped a reference to one of the strangest, most compelling tales in the canon of weird fiction: Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow, a collection of short stories published in 1895. Knowing this book is key to understanding the dark mystery at the heart of this series. This collection of stories has influenced writers from H.P. Lovecraft and Raymond Chandler, to Robert Heinlein, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman and George R. R. Martin. The King in Yellow and his legendary city of Carcosa may be the most famous character and setting you’ve never heard of. In fact, the more of the show you watch, and the more carefully you pay attention, you’ll find a number of Easter eggs aimed squarely at hardcore fans of the weird fiction genre. I’ll touch on a few of the more prominent ones, but I have a feeling the rest of the series will be a bonanza for true detectives of strange fiction.

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The King in Yellow: Act I, Scene 2 Camilla: You, sir, should unmask. Stranger: Indeed? Cassilda: Indeed it’s time. We all have laid aside disguise but you. Stranger: I wear no mask. Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask! The King in Yellow is a fictional play within a collection of short stories—a metafictional dramatic work that brings despair, depravity, and insanity to anyone who reads it or sees it performed. Chambers inserts only a few selected scenes from the play into his story collection, and all of them are from the first act. This act, we are told, is a bit of a honeypot, luring readers into the cursed text. If they read even the first few words of Act II they are driven insane by the revelation of horrible, decadent, incomprehensible truths about the universe. Anyone familiar with Lovecraft’s “cosmic horrors” should see the thematic similarity. For his unfortunate protagonists, the ultimate truths of the universe are too much for their overloaded minds to handle. It should not be surprising that Lovecraft incorporated Chambers’s The King in Yellow into his overarching Cthulhu mythos, embellishing the elements of the story and adding the fictitious play to his growing bookshelf of equally fictional mythos tomes. Cassilda’s Song in The King in Yellow, Act I, Scene II Songs that the Hyades shall sing, Where flap the tatters of the King, Must die unheard in Dim Carcosa. For many fans of weird fiction, the surprising appearance of this madness-inducing play into what ostensibly appeared to be just another police procedural was a bolt of lightning. Suddenly, the tone of the show changed completely, signaling the descent into a particular brand of horror rarely (if ever) seen on television. The first mention of the play comes in episode two when Rust Cohle, the cynical, nihilistic detective played by Matthew McConaughey, finds the journal of a young former prostitute, Dora Lange, who has been ritualistically murdered.

“I closed my eyes and saw the King in Yellow moving through the forest,” Cohle reads aloud from her journal. “The King’s children are marked. They became his angels.” The journal pages flash briefly on the screen. Lines from Chambers’s play have been copied verbatim into the notebook. The King in Yellow, Act I, Scene II Along the shore the cloud waves break, The twin suns sink behind the lake, The shadows lengthen In Carcosa Strange is the night where the black stars rise, And strange moons circle through the skies, But stranger still is Lost Carcosa Note the black stars, which become recurring symbols in the series. Black stars also appear as tattoos on the neck of the character of Carla, who first alerts Cohle and Hart to Dori’s involvement with a strange “church.” But the weirdness gets even thicker in episode three. A revivalist tent preacher has the unusual name of Joel Theriot, which is one letter away from the name claimed by famed occultist Aleister Crowley, who referred to himself as Master Therion, aka The Beast 666. And I had to pause the show when I watched Theriot lower his head and make the sign of the cross on his chest— because he does it backwards (right to left, instead of left to right). Given the meticulous layering of clues and symbols throughout the other episodes, my guess is that was intentional. Later in the episode, our detectives interrogate a convict named Charlie in a bare, concrete room, attempting to get information about their prime suspect, Reggie Ledoux, aka The Tall Man. Charlie had been a former cellmate of Ledoux’s. Charlie was privy to some of the Tall Man’s peculiar stories, which he relates to the detectives: He said that there’s this place down south where all these rich men go to, uh, devil worship. He said that, uh, they—they sacrifice kids and whatnot. Women and children all got—all got murdered there and, um, something about someplace called Carcosa and the Yellow King. He said there’s all these, like, old stones out in the woods, people go to, like, worship. He said there’s

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just so much good killin’ down there. Reggie’s got this brand on his back, like a spiral. He says that’s their sign. The spiral was found painted (tattooed?) on the murdered Dora’s back, as well as on another victim Cohle discovered in the police archives. And in a recursive layering of clues, we’ve seen the spiral in another unusual sequence in episode two. As Cohle observes a group of birds outside of a burned church, they swirl and coalesce into the identical spiral formation before flying away. It’s a chilling moment that has already been dissected by many viewers. The idea of ancient standing stones as the scene of bizarre pagan rites and atavistic sacrifices is a common trope of weird fiction, too, and was employed by authors as far back as Arthur Machen and Lovecraft (“The Dunwich Horror”), up through Stephen King (in his short story “N”). I used such a scene in my own novel, Blackwater Lights. And those are only a few of the Easter eggs and symbols embedded in this clever and meticulously constructed television drama. Take note, for instance, of the regular use of yellow—in Cohle’s dim, depressing apartment and the smoky haze at the illegal warehouse rave. Yellow is visually linked to insanity, mental collapse, and decadence—another explicit echo of Chambers’s iconic mythology. But where, one might wonder, is this all going? Is this just writer Nic Pizzolatto dropping nods to his favorite authors and their fans? Some critics have dismissed the idea that the show is moving into the realm of the supernatural, but I have little doubt that it is going to only get much weirder and much, much darker. The clues are all there for those with eyes to see. Why The King in Yellow? I think it’s obvious, and I’ll go out on a limb and say the season will continue with detectives Cohle and Hart edging closer to the abyss of what Lovecraft termed “cosmic fear,” which he defined as: A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces... a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space. In a revealing interview with the The Wall Street Journal, Pizzolatto discusses his love of existential horror and its most prominent authors, from Chambers and Lovecraft to modern masters of the weird Laird Barron and Thomas Ligotti:

Their fictional visions of cosmic despair were articulating the same things as certain nihilist and pessimist philosophers, but with more poetry and art and vision... It’s important for us to confront the potential of the true abyss.... Clearly, the present-day Cohle, with his glazed, vacant eyes and brutally nihilistic philosophy, is someone who has experienced the chaos and daemons lurking just over the edge of the interminable abyss. He explains his philosophy in his interview with the two current-day detectives: You, yourself, this whole big drama, it was never anything but a jerry-rig of presumption and dumb will and you could just let go, finally know that you didn’t have to hold on so tight. To realize that all your life, you know, all you love, all you hate, all your memory, all your pain—it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream, a dream you had inside a locked room, a dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams... there’s a monster at the end of it. (1)

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Maggie Smith called it “the crème de la crème” I’m feeling cute today

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I know! I love all of you already. Now my first home is The Cult of Robyn Hitchcock, but you guys are already running a close second. (BTW, as a member of The Cult of RH, I should have already read The King in Yellow and all of Lovecraft, but I’m lame.)

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I am in sore need of catching up on sone reading now too!

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Jason Shankel February 16 San Francisco California United States

Roses are red Life is a joke Let’s break into Evidence And steal some coke … - A Rust Cohle Valentine

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Jason, just an aside here. The Rave in the Barn reminded me of the bridge scene in Apocalypse Now. All the fireworks.

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Yeah, I made that same connection. I kept expecting to see Lance Johnson tripping balls :)

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Jason Shankel February 16 San Francisco California United States

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Okay before we get into tonight, a recap: Dora Lange was found murdered. Her husband, Charlie Lange, did time with one Reginald Ledoux, who is at large having skipped parole. Reginald Ledoux is a mad man chemist who can turn raisins and bleach into any kind of magic carpet ride you’d like to take. According to Charlie, his alleged clients include a secretive group of rich devil worshippers. Working KA’s on Ledoux turns up a connection to the Iron Crusaders, a basic Sons-O…f-Anarchy class outlaw biker gang who Cohle just happens to have deep cover with. Seems like…well, quite the co-inky-dink, no? Our guy just happens to be cooking for the gang that you went uncover investigating? And that cover is still good? Clearly, they’re setting up the idea that Cohle manufactured this whole thing, framing people he was close to, people he knew he could frame. They’re telegraphing that so hard that it’s almost certainly a red herring. But, assuming for the moment that Cohle isn’t the guy, are we just going to be living with that fairly massive coincidence? Marty walks into a bar, shakes a guy down, the guy gives up Iron Crusaders, just like that? Not Iron Crusaders and a half dozen other gangs who

Cohle didn’t know? Might as well have said “Rust’s dad did it!” Or has this whole thing been arranged for Cohle’s benefit? Is he the one being led by the nose, not doing the leading?

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It will be interesting if there’s a meta story, sure. But crucial coincidences in a TV show? Gosh. Plus there’s the anthropic thing: the more probable KA results produce no leads so no arrest so no interview years later so no show.

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Jason, the author said that everything we need to know is in the first episode. I got a strong feeling after rewatching it that Cohle is the killer. We don’t need to rehash it here, just sayin’

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They’re telegraphing Cohle very strongly as the killer. I think it’s a red herring, but there’s definitely a lot of clues pointing in that direction. I think Cohle is being set up.

Hey, did y’all know that show True Detective comes on tonight?

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LOL

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Awesome! I’m down to stems and seeds on the first four episodes…time to score.

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Camilla: You, sir, should unmask. Stranger: Indeed? Cassilda: Indeed it’s time. We all have laid aside disguise but you. Stranger: I wear no mask. Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!…

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http://www.gutenberg.org/files/8492/8492h/8492-h.htm

Julie Dalley February 17

Angela Aiello February 17

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers. (1)

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http://books.google.com books?id=qHgKEq jdywC&oe=UTF-8

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Mary Furlong Coomer February 17

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Thanks for letting me in Jason.

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Jason Shankel February 17 San Francisco California United States

Woody Harrelson has a long history of defending the sovereignty of lawns. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DN4jqynmLs Roger Clemens being a SKIDMARK! The WORST pitcher of all time plays Himself (Skidmark) in the funniest movie of all time!!!! KINGPIN!!! Enjoy and Oh yeah * PHUCK the Yankees!!! youtube.com

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Thanks Jason. Looking forward to the discussion. Just finished watching E5 and Wow

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Next week’s preview: *Interrogators are telling Maggie “something went real wrong with Rust” - She replies she knows Rust to be a “real good man.”

Jennifer Shannon February 17 Nashville Tennessee United States

Jackie Burgett February 17 Mountain View Arizona United States

*The 2 interrogators are telling Marty that Rust has been there in Louisiana all this time: HE NEVER LEFT! (so maybe he is working DEEP undercover) … *Rust goes to see the Governor. Gov. asks Rust “what’s this all about?” and Rust replies: “dead women and children” *We see Marty standing over a table full of antlers(Rust’s storage room raided?) *Rust is throwing Laurie/or Maggie out of his apartment yelling at her *Marty is sitting in front of a computer screen looking very upset *Marty visit one of the guys who was with Audrey in his prison cell (with murder in his eyes)

*A girl goes to see Rust at office and says “a man with the scars - he made me watch” and Rust looks shocked Open Thread for Ep. 5: The Secret Fate of All Life.

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Angela Aiello Rust told Marty that he left Ginger “wrapped up in a ditch.” If Ginger is smart, he’ll scramble out of there to another state or go hide out somewhere. He’d be killed if he went to his biker gang.

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John Devennie Sr. those 2 officers on duty were Childress and Mahoney

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Jason Shankel, that may not have been Reggie - records can be altered to fit situation (probably an office insider) May the nice coffee lady? :)

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Shayne Bowman February 17

Jackie Burgett February 17 Mountain View Arizona United States

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I’m fighting the urge to re-watch an episode. How do I overcome it?

http://io9.com/the-oneliterary-reference-youmust-know…

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Oh my Lord, I have watched them all like ten times at least - well. on tonight’s I am only up to three because I had to wedge DOWNTON ABBEY in there too.

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Jason Shankel can you come up with an app or program that organizes our chores around our tv watching?

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hahahaha

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this is where I saw this doctored picture! This is what I get for not watching BB - I feel left out :)

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I actually wondered why Rust would walk in tall grass without his pants at the risk of getting poison oak, tick or chigger or snake bite. Rust should know better!

Jason Shankel via Natter Cast February 17 San Francisco California United States

Say my name… #breakingbad #truedetective http://i.imgur.com/7UH0L5r.png

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Barbara Richard February 17

I know this will be picking fly shit out of pepper HOWEVER Reggie LaDoux is wearing a jock and not ‘tighty whities’. Thank you. That is all p.s. thanks for accepting my request!

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All you need is Netflix, HBO on The Go, Hulu and a iPad or iPhone and you are in TV and film watching and discussion heaven..No DVDs, no driving to stores, no TV or cable

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i came here thinking this was a 12-step program for TDAnonymous

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it can be…

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About to watch ep 5… I can’t recall a time I have been this excited and into a show

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New theory (based on nattering with Sion Isaacs Shankel): Reginald Ledoux was supplying drugs and kids to rich ass crazy fuckers. He starts babbling about crazy shit, including talking to his cell mate about their activities, and so outlives his usefulness. But he is disappeared. So rich ass crazy fuckers put Rust Cohle in Louisiana because he’s connected to Ledoux’s new clients, the IC MC. Then they set up a killing that they know will lead to Ledoux. Marty is in on it,… told to make sure Ledoux doesn’t survive the arrest. That’s why Marty

Shonna VL February 17

Jason Shankel February 17 San Francisco California United States

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refused to go back and call in reinforcements in the Ledoux raid. And the guy behind it all is the Gov’s cousin. He’s the guy, or he’s the guy who knows the guy. Who knows the guy. Thoughts?

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Still think Marty’s in on it. Cohle was the one who was doing all the investigating. And, the reason he went to the school is because the previous visit he was interrupted with that R & I call.

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Edie Sexwitch maybe to appear as a sympathetic character but Rust isn’t buying it.

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yes, jackie. marty’s daughter has something to do with this hell. remember in episode 2 she was caught doing sexually explicit stuff with her dolls - like she was recreating something she once saw. and marty actually did nothing about it didn’t tell his wife. odd behavior for a guy so protective of his “family”

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Angela Aiello February 17

http://www.thedailybeast.com/ articles/2014/02/16/true-detective-episode-5review-the-secret-fate-of-all-life-is-the-bestepisode-yet.html ‘True Detective’ Episode 5 Review: ‘The Secret Fate of All Life’ is the Best Episode Yet Things get metaphysical in one of the most masterful hours of television since ‘Breaking Bad.’ Spoiler alert!

Things get metaphysical in one of the most masterful hours of television since ‘Breaking Bad.’ The HBO series’ creator explains the secrets behind the episode. Spoiler alert! Earlier this month, I interviewed True Detective creator and writer Nic Pizzolatto. At that point, only three episodes of Pizzolatto’s gripping crime drama had aired on HBO. But the guy couldn’t help himself. He was excited about what was to come—especially in Episode 5. “They’re like children,” he told me. “I love them all for different reasons. But for me, Episode 5 is the most special of the children.” Fast forward a few weeks. On Sunday night, “The Secret Fate of All Life”—a.k.a. Pizzolatto’s beloved Episode 5—finally premiered on HBO. It turns out Pizzolatto wasn’t exaggerating: “Secret Fate” was the best installment of True Detective yet. In fact, it might have been the most masterful hour of television I’ve encountered since the series finale of Breaking Bad —and one of the most thought-provoking since, well, ever. Consider where the episode started and where it ended up. We open in 1995. Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) has survived a firefight and taken his bald, bearded biker contact Ginger hostage, forcing him to set up a meeting with a meth cook who could lead them to satanic murder suspect Reggie Ledoux. By the time the credits roll, we’ve seen Cohle and Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson) catch and kill Ledoux; we’ve discovered that, in the years since Ledoux’s death, someone else has continued to rape, pose, and slaughter young girls in the same manner; and we’ve learned that Papania and Gilbough, the cops who are interviewing Hart and Cohle in 2012 about the Ledoux case, think that Cohle fixed the outcome of the 1995 investigation to conceal his own involvement.

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In other words, the entire premise of the series—watch Hart and Cohle nab Dora Lange’s killer in 1995 while recounting the experience in 2012—has been upended. Most whodunits would have saved their monster for the season finale; True Detective disposed of him at the halfway mark. Ledoux wasn’t the end of the story. Cohle is now hunter and hunted. The interrogations are over. And the investigation is suddenly shifting into the present tense. It’s a testament to Pizzolatto’s skill as a storyteller that he was able to include so many pivot points in a single episode without calling attention to the narrative pyrotechnics on display. The shifts were seamless. In retrospect, they feel inevitable. But that’s not exactly why Pizzolatto was so proud of “Secret Fate” when we spoke—nor is it why I’m going to go back and rewatch the episode as soon as I finish writing this post. The real achievement of Sunday’s True Detective didn’t have anything to do with plot. Or character. Or chronology. About halfway through “Secret Fate,” Cohle—the mustachioed, ponytailed Cohle speaking to Papania and Gilbough in 2012—launches into one of his metaphysical monologues. “This is a world where nothing is solved,” he intones. “Someone once told me time is a flat circle. Everything we’ve ever done or will do we’re gonna do over and over and over again.” That “someone,” of course, was Reggie Ledoux. As soon as Cohle and Hart captured and cuffed their killer back in 1995, he started to talk. “You’ll do this again,” Ledoux told Cohle. “Time is a flat circle.” Initially, Cohle dismissed Ledoux’s prediction. “What is that, Nietzsche?” he shouted. “Shut the fuck up.” But he seems to have given the idea a lot of thought in the 17 years since encountering Ledoux—and, back in 2012, he proceeds to share his conclusions with Papania and Gilbough. Rust Cohle in episode 5 of True Detective “You ever heard of something called membrane theory, detectives?” Cohle asks. “No,” Papania says. “That’s over my head.” And so Professor Cohle begins to hold forth. “It’s like, in this universe, we process time linearly,” he says. “Forward. But outside of our space-time, from what would be a fourth-dimensional perspective, time wouldn’t exist. And from that vantage, could we attain it, we’d see”—he crushes a can of Lone Star between his palms—”our space-time look flattened, like a seamless sculpture. Matter in a super-position—every place it ever occupied. Our sentience just

cycling through our lives like carts on a track. See, everything outside our dimension—that’s eternity. Eternity looking down on us. Now, to us, it’s a sphere. But to them, it’s a circle.” Needless to say, Papania and Gilbough are utterly baffled by Cohle’s lecture, and I would have been, too—if Pizzolatto hadn’t already told me what he was up to. “You could see Cohle as Job crying out to an unhearing God,” he explained. “Or you could see him as something else.” “Like what?” I asked. “Cohle describes the possibility of other dimensions existing, and he says that’s what eternity is,” Pizzolatto continued. “He says that if somehow you existed outside of time, you’d be able to see the whole of our dimension as one superstructure with matter superimposed at every position it had ever occupied. He says that the nature of the universe is your consciousness, and it just keeps cycling along the same point in that superstructure: when you die, you’re reborn into yourself again, and you just keep living the same life over and over. He also explains that from a higher mathematical vantage point, our dimension would seem less dimensional. It would look flattened, almost.” Pizzolatto took a bite of his branzino. “Now, think about all the things Cohle is talking about,” he said as he finished chewing. “Is he a man railing against an uncaring god? Or is he a character in a TV show railing against his audience? Aren’t we the creatures of that higher dimension? The creatures who can see the totality of his world? After all, we get to see all eight episodes of his life. On a flat screen. And we can watch him live that same life over and over again, the exact same way.” The thought was dizzying. Sure, True Detective is a page-turning crime yarn. But at least according to its creator, it’s also a meta-page-turning crime yarn—a story about storytelling. Pizzolatto had transformed m-theory into a metaphor for television—and television, perhaps, into a metaphor for existence itself. The important thing about the Yellow King and Carcosa isn’t what they signify to Reggie Ledoux. It’s what they signify to us. The more I think about it, the more I think this might be the ultimate “meaning” of the series: that at some indivisible level, life is story. Much ado has been made online about all the references on True Detective to the Yellow King and Carcosa, as if they were aspects of a coherent satanic theology to which Ledoux & Co. subscribed—a puzzle to be unraveled eventually. But it’s telling that the Yellow King is a reference to The King in Yellow, an 1895 collection of horror stories by Robert W. Chambers that itself references a forbidden

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play called “The King in Yellow”—a play that in turn “induces despair or madness in those who read it.” It’s also telling that Chambers borrowed the name “Carcosa” from Ambrose Bierce, and that H.P. Lovecraft later borrowed it from Chambers. In other words, the important thing about the Yellow King and Carcosa isn’t what they signify to Reggie Ledoux. It’s what they signify to us. They call attention to the story-ness of the story we’re watching. They tell us, as Pizzolatto put it to me, that Dora Lange is “meant to stand in for the universal victim for this type of show”; that Ledoux, with his comically archetypal 666, pentagram, and swastika tattoos, is the universal serial killer; and that True Detective is a form of metafiction. Watch the first five episodes again, and you’ll notice how often Pizzolatto circles back to storytelling as a theme. It’s the engine that drives investigation. It’s the motivation behind religion—a “fairy tale,” as Cohle puts it, designed to “get us through the day.” When asked about his so-called shootout with Ledoux, Hart says, “I tell it the same way I told the shooting board and every cop bar between Houston and Biloxi. And you know why? Because the story’s always the same, 17 years gone. Because it only went down the one way.” But as we soon see, it didn’t go down that way at all. Hart’s story is just that—a story. Underneath it all—the spooky imagery and quantum physics—that’s the simple but serious claim Pizzolatto seems to be making: that everything is a story. “This doesn’t work if it’s not a tale well told,” he explained near the end of our interview. “But if you want to keep going, that’s, like, the fourth layer of understanding. You don’t have to. Nobody needs to think about that. But I’m not just using the genre while saying “Haha, we’re better than genre.” Not at all. I love the genre. But a genre doesn’t ever have to be limited by what’s been done before.” •

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Angela Aiello February 17

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/02/16/ true-detective-season-1-episode-5-the-secretfate-of-all-life-tv-recap/ ‘True Detective,’ Season 1, Episode 5, ‘The Secret Fate of All Life’: TV Recap - Speakeasy - WSJ Here’s our recap of the latest “True Detective.” blogs.wsj.com|By Marshall Crook

“I’ll tell you about The Yellow King,” the man said. And it all came undone. Throughout “True Detective,” Marty Hart has harped on the detective’s curse, that the solution to the mystery is often right under your nose but you still can’t see it. By the end of “The Secret Fate of All Life,” as Detective Rust Cohle creeps through the abandoned husk of Light of the Way Christian Academy, where he finds hieroglyphs of dead children and a thicket of dusty devil’s traps, we have to wonder if he knows he let the answer slip away. How might Hart and Cohle’s story have played out had Rust continued questioning the lawnmower man two episodes ago? What if Marty hadn’t honked the car horn and sent he and Rust careening to the bayou compound of Reggie Ledoux and, instead, searched the school together? Tonight’s episode began with the conclusion of one mystery and ended with the beginning of another. Or, more specifically, Rust Cohle returned to his own place of origin: The murder of Dora Lange. “Time is a circle,” says Reggie Ledoux to Rust Cohle just moments before Marty Hart blows his brains out. Seventeen years later Cohle quotes Reggie to detectives Patpania and Gilbough. The meaning? That time is not linear but circular. Life ends and is reborn on the same path it is always on. That the “secret fate of all life,” according to Rust, is we are all trapped in an unwavering pattern. So, by delving back into the mystery of Dora Lange years later, is he simply following his fixed path? But, to get to that point, Hart and Cohle had to solve the case for the first time. In the aftermath of the extended stash house shootout, Rust uses Ginger to find Reggie’s cooking partner who, in turn, leads him and Marty to Ledoux. The discrepancies between what Rust and Marty tell Papania and Gilbough continue as both men arrive at Ledoux’s place. Hart and Cohle don’t tell the truth – in 1995 and 2012 – but their story is tight: They claim to have found Ledoux through a confidential informant. On the scene, they came under heavy fire from Reggie Ledoux wielding an AK-47. Ladoux was eventually killed by Marty who snuck around behind him. Ledoux’ associate was killed by one of his own booby traps while fleeing the scene. But we know the truth: Marty and Rust lie to cover up for Rust’s underworld dalliances, and they stage a firefight to hide Marty’s murder of captured Reggie Ladoux. Marty kills Ledoux in a moment of rage after discovering two children – a dead boy and a catatonic girl – wrapped in rags and imprisoned behind a steel door.

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Marty and Rust are victorious to anyone looking in from the outside. They have their hero shot: Two men carrying the bodies of children from the dark woods. Based on evidence found at Ledoux’s compound – devil’s traps and LSD – it is agreed that Hart and Cohle got their man. Both are rewarded with some version of tranquility. They continue as partners. Rust becomes the best interrogation man in the state. Marty and Maggie reconcile and continue raising Audrey and Masie together. And Rust begins a relationship with an attractive doctor, complete with double dates and nights spend zoning out in front of the television. But Rust has a demon on him, and so does Marty. These are men incapable of rest. They are the bad men in the door. “I can see your soul at the edges of your eyes, it’s corrosive, like acid. You’ve got a demon, little man,” says Reggie Ledoux’s partner to Rust, who reacts much in the same way as when he and Marty listened to the preacher. At that time, Marty called him on his own hypocrisies: That Cohle’s search for answers is the same as any Sunday churchgoer. Whether working a case, posing as a junkie, or a man trying to pretend he’s enjoying watching TV, Rust is exactly as his name implies: A man in a state of willing decomposition. He has researched the words that fit the mood is his mind and body, but all exteriority is pretense. Rust can’t hide his true self from the world. Ironically, it is Reggie Ledoux who gives him an answer for his nagging spiritual malaise: If time is circular and life is fixed then what is there to care about? If, as Cohle says in 2012, those children were always in that room and will be there again and again, then why trouble yourself with hope? Cohle hides himself from the world as Marty tries to deflect the world from his life. As the Ledoux murder fades and Marty carries on as husband and father, he seems more preoccupied with his thinning hair than his family. Time scours the body and Marty feels every scrape. His narcissism is like a nerve agent. It leaves him fearful of the future and oblivious to the present. By 2012, when he actually has lost his wife and, possibly, his children, Marty has realized his greatest fault is inattention. But back in 2002, Marty is the father of two teenage daughters and only one of them makes sense to him. His older daughter Audrey wears black, twists her hair at odd angles seems poised to dive into a thrash metal mosh pit. The younger Masie is the child he can grasp: Cheerleader, hair like Maggie, and delicate manners. Earlier, we were given a florid scene of the two girls fighting on their front lawn. Audrey ignores Masie’s pleas and takes her sister’s tiara, throwing it into a tree where it is captured by the branches.

For all his assertions that his life is “solid,” that things are “even keeled,” Marty has sowed a dysfunctional household. He brings Audrey home one night after the local police discovered her having sex with two older boys in a car. Audrey is willing to talk to him as they sit in the car but he cuts her off and later calls her a slut. She screams “F___ you” and he slaps her in front of Maggie. Audrey then runs upstairs and slaps Masie on the way to her bedroom. Afterward he can’t look Maggie in the eye and is left alone as he listens to his wife trying to coax Adurey out of her room. Marty Hart’s gift is his ability to self-forgive. It is the narcissist’s escape hatch. His own desire for “something wild” is something he, at times, has understood as a necessity. But once he realizes Audrey has the same impulses, “something wild” becomes an aberration, an affront to his well-calibrated ideal of life and fatherhood. Marty possesses enough self-awareness to validate his own needs, but not enough wisdom to recognize what he has passed onto his child. And, consequently, he determines that his daughter doesn’t deserve the same forgiveness he grants himself. Marty has been guilty of negligence and willful ignorance since the beginning of the series. Let’s do the math on the times he could have been a present father: When saw his daughters playing “crime scene?” Yeah, probably a good one to address. When Audrey cried on his shoulder after getting in trouble for sexual drawings? Might one to turn off the television for that one, Marty. Remember the time Audrey and Masie sat adrift in that small boat? That is how he raised them, bobbling alone in a lake. And now he’s reaping. Last week I wrote that Gilbough and Papania have secrets and that, at some point, they would unleash them. Many viewers have written to me, theorizing that Cohle is a suspect in the 2012 Lake Charles murders. Turns out you are correct. According to Gilbough and Papania, Cohle has spent time in and out of the state. That he was off the grid for a long stretch after the 2002 falling out. He returned to Louisiana in 2010 and sometime later Billy Lee Tuttle died from “mixed medications.” But, recently, a man fitting his description has been spotted multiple times near the Lake Charles murder scene. They believe Rust steered the case to Reggie Ledoux, that he “traveled in the same circles” as Ledoux. When they ask to investigate his storage unit, Rust refuses. They also turn the heat on Marty, giving him “a lot to absorb” about Rust. After their presentation Marty seems willing to question everything he ever thought about Cohle and whether it is possible he is a killer. But, again, the audience knows more than Hart, Gilbough and Papania. We’re with Rust in the interrogation room when he is offered info on the

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Yellow King. We’re with him when he goes back to the site of Dora Lange’s murder only to find a circular shrine made of sticks. And we’re with him when he makes the discovery of devil’s traps in Billy Lee Tuttle’s old school. It is 2002 and Cohle is no longer sure Reggie Ledoux is the guy. If time is a circle, it has finished a revolution and left Rust Cohle back where he started. In 2012, Cohle asks Gilbough and Papania how the Lake Charles murder has remained out of the press: Do they “have friends in high places?” By now, Cohle knows this goes up to the top. I imagine that since 2002 Cohle has been on the hunt for the Yellow King. As for what is in his storage unit, possibly all the evidence he’s accumulated over that time. But it also appears that Rust’s version of things has ended. He walks out of his discussion with Papania and Gilbough, who now lean on Marty to fill in the gaps on Rust Cohle. So here’s a question: Can we trust Marty with the truth? As for Rust, I find it interesting that his nature is both at odds with and empowered by his philosophy. If he is a true pessimist who believes in the futility of human endeavor and the tyranny of unalterable time and destiny then why, after enduring all he has, does he keep pursuing the case? Why fight the bad guys at all? Why bother fighting if you can never stop death, pain and rooms of stolen and exploited children? His philosophy tells him to step aside, but his true self sends him back into the doorway every time. Please leave a comment or follow me on Twitter: @MarshallCrook

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Jackie Burgett February 17 Mountain View Arizona United States

Just had a light bulb moment! That former LSU football player whose niece was “taken” by her natural father? I believe the reason he had a stroke is because “they” kidnapped his niece to use in their ritual - they gave him a lethal dose of drugs that caused his present condition. Barbara Richard that might be difficult to pull off. Who would dose him repeatedly? I think they wanted to kill him but left him paralyzed instead. He seemed very agitated

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You are probably right, nice catch

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nice

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Jason Shankel February 17 San Francisco California United States

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So, I’m very intrigued as to what happens next here. In 2012, both men are still sticking with “Cohle took some personal time because his dad was dying,” which means they were never tied to the raid in the projects. That suggests that they’re not going to be bringing Ginger in for booking and questioning. Gotta believe this isn’t Ginger’s first rodeo, so he will smell something fishy if the arresting officers take him to a safe house and start interrogating him without b…ackup or access to counsel. At this point, we have been led to believe that Reggie Ladoux is ultimately arrested for the Dora Lange killing, but I don’t think that’s explicitly been said. Assuming for a moment that Ginger leads to Ladoux leads to closing Dora Lange, the boys have to find a way to get to Ladoux without telling anyone about Ginger. Or they have to find a way to get Ginger into the system without revealing that they were involved in the raid. But either way, there has to be some reason Ginger doesn’t tell the authorities about Cohle and Marty’s extra-curricular activity. The only way I see that happening is dead Ginger. Or deeply, deeply blackmailed Ginger.

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A gas mask won’t protect you if you mix the wrong stuff and have an explosion or boil over. It isn’t that hard but you need an apron as well. Cooking in your underwear will also keep the meth smell out of your clothes. Source(s): Breaking Bad

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I think Ginger won’t be a problem. Ginger knows if he goes to bikers they’ll kill him for trusting Cohle on a raid - so Ginger’s on his own.

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is ginger alive in “the ditch?” or still in the back seat of chole’s car awaiting another circle of fate?

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possible…it has to be Marty or Grandpa

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correct, mary

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money would be on grandpa possibly

Angela Aiello February 18

Ok - what about audrey - marty’s good girl gone bad? remember back in episode 2 (i think) marty found her playing with her dolls in a very sexually explicit way? hmmmmmmmm.

this may be a stupid question, but why did Marty go into the bikie club?

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Anyone watch SOA? cos that biker gang looked way more like bikers Kurt is gonna be pissed!

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Apparently they did that 6 minute run 7 times, awesome show.

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5 is the best so far, by far

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Shonna VL February 18

link

Angela Aiello February 18

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horned_deity Horned deity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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see above for some interesting interpretations:

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“Why antlers?”

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Edward Theosevis February 18 Lennon City Florida United States

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Ok I been thinking all night… Somehow I think Marty’s daughter and Rust might be connected in the “past life”. If this has already happened then possibly Marty’s daughter dies in the end… The drawings? The eye contact between them at one point. Her arrest makes her a target now. I’m reaching possibly. This is the best show ever!

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yes, edward. and don’t forget the sexually explicit “play” the kid was participating in back in episode 2. it’s all connected and now she is a target.

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too deep perhaps? or on to something… Horned God in psychology[edit] Jungian analysis[edit]..

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Jason Shankel February 18 San Francisco California United States

Alan Sepinwall’s review of “The Secret Fate of All Life.” http://www.hitfix.com/whats-alan-watching/ review-true-detective-the-secret-fate-of-all-lifecapain-america-to-the-rescue Review: ‘True Detective’ - ‘The Secret Fate of All Life’ HitFixs Alan Sepinwall reviews The Secret Fate of All Life, the February 16 episode of HBOs True Detective, in which Cohle and Hart close in on Reggie Ledoux, while the 2012 cops have tough questions for Cohle. HitFix Entertainment News

“The Secret Fate of All Life” is a major turning point in the story of Rust Cohle and Marty Hart. It brings us to the end of the Dora Lange investigation, and the deaths of Reggie Ledoux and his partner. It introduces a new time period into the story, as we jump ahead to 2002, which is when we know that the partnership will end. And it finally makes overt what’s been implied for a while: that the cops of 2012 suspect Cohle not only of being the killer in their current case, but for some or all of the killings from the 1995 investigation.

And you can understand how they came to this conclusion. They don’t know as much as we do — a good chunk of this episode, in fact, is devoted to differentiating the fantasy from the reality of the “gunfight” that killed Ledoux — and so are free to look at the obvious holes in the 1995 story, Cohle’s presence at the 2012 crime scene and the cupful of crazy he displayed in their interview and assume that they are staring at a meta psychotic, or someone who knows how to draw a paraphilic love map, the monster in the locked room, or any of Cohle’s other dark theories brought to grim, mustachioed life. Knowing what we know, though, it’s reasonably safe to assume that Cohle isn’t the killer — and events here also strongly suggest that Hart isn’t — not only because we know much more about his movements in 1995 (that he was undercover with the bikers, for instance, during the period where he claimed to be visiting his father), but because we’ve seen that this was an investigation filled with men every bit as mysterious, dangerous and hard to read as Rust Cohle. “The Secret Fate of All Life” opens with Cohle and Ginger the biker meeting with Ledoux’s partner DeWall, who seems to share Cohle’s gift for both psychological profiling and colorful dialogue. “I can see the soul at the edges of your eyes,” he tells him. “It’s corrosive, like acid. You got a demon, little man, and I don’t like your face. It makes me want to do things to it.” He may not detect that Cohle is a cop, but he knows he’s trouble and walks away. And when our complicated heroes arrive at the cook site — in a sequence beautifully joined with the 2012 interviews so we are hearing one version of events at the exact moment we are seeing something very different — and get the drop on Reggie Ledoux, he also demonstrates a verbose quality, suggesting that Cohle is from Carcosa(*) and offering up the “time is a flat circle” theory that Cohle will incorporate into his own elaborate personal philosophy years down the line. (*) That’s a reference to both Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” and to Robert Chambers’ horror story collection “The King in Yellow,” which borrows from the Bierce tale, and whose title no doubt influenced this story’s Yellow King. Ledoux happens to be saying this as Cohle is having a tense standoff with DeWall, with Hart nowhere in sight, and it is both oddly amusing and completely true to character that Cohle stops for just a moment to identify this as a paraphrase of Nietzsche. Cohle is complicated and unknowable in so many ways, but consistent in so many others, including his ability to segregate his emotions from the task at hand when necessary. Marty Hart doesn’t have that skill. The tragedies in Cohle’s past have cauterized so many of his emotional

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nerve endings, so that he only feels things under extraordinary circumstances (like the discovery in 2002 that he and Hart completely missed the real killer). Hart, on the other hand, feels everything too strongly. It’s why he was so insanely jealous when Lisa was dating another man, why in 2002 he’s so cruel and, eventually, violent to his daughter Audrey. And it’s why in 1995, upon seeing the two children (one dead, one just barely alive) who were being kept prisoner by Ledoux and DeWall, he breaks so thoroughly that the only response his mind and body can offer is to march right up to Ledoux and put a bullet in his head(**). (**) Again, Matthew McConaughey is getting the bulk of the acclaim and will likely win the bulk of the awards (especially if the two leading men compete in the same category), but Woody Harrelson has been extraordinary in his own right, just in a less flashy (and, relative to prior roles, less surprising) way. Look at the expression on his face as Hart emerges from the house ready to kill Ledoux. That is a man who has just witnessed the absolute worst of humanity, and who is now being governed by a single, unshakable directive: to kill the sonuvabitch responsible. Good ol’ boy Marty has been sent to the showers in that moment, replaced by something hollow and angry and unshakable.

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Jason Shankel via True Detective February 18 San Francisco California United States

Jason Shankel February 18 San Francisco California United States

True Detective Season 1: Inside the Episode #5 - The Yellow King (HBO) Subscribe to the HBO YouTube: http://itsh. bo/10qIqsj Watch new episodes of True Detective every Sunday at 9PM, only on HBO. Connect with True Detective: Fin… youtube.com Reginald Ledoux’s lines: It’s time isn’t? The black stars. Black stars rise. [Cohle: why the antlers? No answer] I know what happens next. I saw you in my dream. You’re in Carcosa now, with me. He sees you. You’ll do this again. Time is a flat circle. <inaudible> black stars <inaudible.>

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Anthony Dix I don’t know im afraid, Im curious as to everything thats been said here, but wish I started it at the same time, I just watched 5 episodes in 2 days and I feel I missed some buts and some dialogue that I could not quite make out. Great show tho, nice we have some bright ppl to explain bits to me :P Its a top Radiohead song tho!

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The “black stars” are mentioned in ‘Cassilda’s Song,’ which is part of “The King in Yellow.” http://fairfieldproject. wikidot.com/carcosa

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“Why antlers”…..look into horned deities for your answer!

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Lauren Elizabeth February 18

[True Detective Quotation of the Day] Dewall to Rust: I can see your soul at the edges of your eyes. It’s corrosive. Like acid. You got a demon. little man. And I don’t like your face. It makes me want to do things to it. There’s a shadow in you, son.

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Sion Isaacs Shankel February 18 San Francisco California United States

‘True Detective’: Who The Hell Is The Yellow King? - Music, Celebrity, Artist News | MTV. com The mystery of Dora Lange’s death only gets more complex in this week’s episode.

First of all, to all of those excited for the big gunfight between Rust and Marty and Reggie Ledoux, sorry you were let down. The teased confrontation between our detectives and the number-one suspect in the murder of Dora Lange turned out to be anything but true. The cover-up constructed for the authorities did more than hide Marty’s execution of Reggie. It also took the drug cook’s echoing of phrases like “black star” and “the Yellow King” — mysterious ramblings we heard in the premiere — off the record. “It’s time, isn’t it?” Reggie says while in handcuffs. “The black stars rise. I know what happens next. I saw you in a dream. You’re in Carcosa now with me. He sees you. You’ll do this again. Time is a flat circle.” Pretty ominous, huh? If you’ve been a faithful “True Detective” viewer, you know that this imagery has been mentioned with growing frequency since it was first mentioned in Dora Lange’s diary and in a drugged-out phone call to her ex, Charlie. Evidence showed up this week, thanks to the late Guy Leonard Francis, to suggest that the Yellow King is the real menace and still on the loose, killing people. So what’s the deal with the Yellow King? We presumably won’t know the specifics of how he’s connected to Dora Lange until the next episodes air, but there are already clues outside the confines of your TV about what it all might mean. Jeff Jensen from Entertainment Weekly noticed back in the first episode that both “black stars” and “Yellow King” were references to author Robert W. Chambers and his influential collection of short stories called “The King in Yellow,” which opens with this excerpt from the titular fictional play. Along the shore the cloud waves break, The twin suns sink beneath the lake, The shadows lengthen In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise, And strange moons circle through the skies But stranger still is Lost Carcosa. Songs that the Hyades shall sing, Where flap the tatters of the King, Must die unheard in Dim Carcosa. Song of my soul, my voice is dead; Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed Shall dry and die in Lost Carcosa. Pretty ominous, huh? “The King in Yellow” is a collection of interconnected short stories, some of which mention a play of the same name that will drive anyone who reads it entirety mad. The king referenced in the title is a supernatural being that is essentially an embodiment of death. “I pray God will curse the writer,” the narrator states, “as the writer has cursed the world with this beautiful, stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth — a world which now trembles before the King in Yellow.” So what does it all mean? The clues we’re given in the latest episode suggest that there is an actual person called in the Yellow King in the world of “True Detective,” and while it’s highly unlikely that there is anything supernatural about him, he is very powerful and still claiming victims. The episode ended with 2002 Cohle, who we now know is a suspect in 2012, entering Reanne Olivier’s old school, which was funded by Reverend Tuttle’s foundation. Tuttle’s name, like the Yellow King, has cropped up more and more as the case progresses, so it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that Cohle finds a stick sculpture in the abandoned school. Though Reggie Ledoux is no more, the case is still very much alive and moving in the direction of Tuttle and the Yellow King.

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First observation; The interrogators told Marty that Rust had a storage unit. evidence I expect false evidence to be planted next Episode 6. During the meth lab raid, Marty is wearing a creepy t-shirt with 2 pumpkin-like heads facing each other. Those religious statues were standing around that abandoned school, as if they are on watch Rust already thinks of the interrogators are “company men” he trusts no one.

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Exactly! The cap was lame too!…maybe I’m over-thinking it, but my perception was, they’re showing us Marty has no where near the sophisticated brain or scope that Rust has!

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when Marty is telling about making their way to the meth house on that little path, notice those huge gnarly white downed trees near a creek, (giant antlers?) Then, all that work Cohle did to get the job done, and what did he get? a commendation for bravery!

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You know what was really lame, looking for his friend who is 20 years sober, as though the biker bouncer gives a sh#$!

Jackie Burgett February 18 Mountain View Arizona United States

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Shane Bowman February 18 Flowery Branch Georgia United States

He does have good taste in TV shows. http://television.mxdwn.com/news/true-detectivepresident-obamas-new-favorite-tv-show/ ‘True Detective’ President Obama’s New Favorite TV Show - mxdwn Television The President of the United States has a new favorite TV show and plans on binge watching the DVDs during President’s Day weekend. According to The New television.mxdwn.com

According to The New York Times, President Obama’s new favorite TV show is HBO’s True Detective starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. During the state dinner for France, President Obama approached HBO’s chief executive Richard Plepler with a request. “Where is my True Detective and Game of Thrones?” President Obama asked Plepler. The President hinted that this coming weekend would be a good time to have the DVDs. The President called over one of his aides to give Plepler information needed so the DVDs make it through White House security and into the President’s hands. The President being a fan of True Detective should come as no surprise; he has liked past dark dramas such as Breaking Bad (AMC) and The Wire (HBO). He is also a fan of House of Cards (Netflix). True Detective centers on McConaughey and Harrelson’s characters of investigators searching for a serial killer in Louisiana. There is a complex plot, multiple timelines and flashbacks. HBO’s Game of Thrones will premiere a fourth season soon and focuses on medieval battles from George R. R. Martin’s fictional Seven Kingdoms. President Obama will spend the three-day weekend in Sunnylands, the history Annenberg estate in Rancho Mirage, CA.

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So he’s the one behind all this! I knew it! Glenn Beck was right all along…

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LOL…

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I agree. I read in the NYT article that he enjoys shows that veer towards dark and edgy.

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The tent revivalist says: “The face you wear is not your own.” http://www.darknessbecomesyou.com/episode-3

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I just ran Rust Cohle through an anagram generator, since the spelling of the name Cohle was odd, and I found some interesting results. Retch Soul Cruel Host CULTS HERO

Fanny Peyton February 18

Jim Bounassi February 18 Manasquan New Jersey United States

… Marty or Martin Hart did not generate anything interesting. I haven’t been this enveloped in the easter eggs of a series, well, ever. I thought Lost would be like this, but they got away from that. TD is riddled with them, I love it. Hooked. (1)

Agree. Best thing on TV and Matthew Is one of the best actors of our times. I watch each episode 3 times and pick up on something new each time.

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Shonna VL February 18

And cults hero could refer to him as the “Yellah King” or (the way I’m leaning) the hero of the oppressed by the cult. you guys might already know about this… https://www.facebook.com/pages/NicPizzolatto/118824384827896 Nic Pizzolatto Product/Service 3,324 Likes 436 talking about this

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I follow him on Twitter, but hadn’t found his fb page. Thanks for posting!

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np guys… this shit just gets more interesting! :D

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He’s next on my reading list after I finish The King in Yellow.

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Angela Aiello February 18

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promise_Keepers Promise Keepers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Maggie doesn’t seem to me to be the type that would be impressed by a low rent organization like the PKs.

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It’s like saying you’re going to spiritual Amway meetings.

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I remember when thousands of Promise Keepers ( men ) converged on D.C. / they were in the news alot some years ago.. I havent heard much recently about them in the news…

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Kathleen Snarey February 18

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Debra Duncan February 18

I cant stop watching this show again and again…… and again. and again and again and again The files that Cole looks up on the computer that say MADE IN ERROR, go back to the 70s…..someone who had access to the computer to hide reports…missing persons? murders? the girl on the billboard was only 14 and it happened earlier, back in the 80’s I think and the name was different ( cant remember it ) and we dont know how she died …. Kardish is the latest one, the reason they are questioning rust and marty …

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That fits, Patricia. I know the D.O.B. on the form was 1992.

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Stacy Gerhart age 14… was on the billboard… someone posted a photo of it above…. and date on billboard was 1987…

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I cant stop watching this show again and again…… and again.

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When rust returns to the scene of the lange crime, he sees a shrine made of twigs…it’s a circle - flat of course - significance anyone?

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Kathleen Snarey February 18

Angela Aiello February 18

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I think it’s a sphere flattened into a circle. I think part of the answer is going to be how the two-dimensional projections of the devil catchers appear when light shone through them.

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Gotcha. If you noticed, as the final scene was closing and the camera was pulling out of the window, there were shadow projections on the wall to the left and right of the window, of what might have been the devil catchers. And an asterisk on the

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broken glass; this show and every little detail had become an obsession! Until tomorrow, get some rest!; ) (3)

Hehe, this was my impression of that huge bird nest Cohle visits. It is placed low to the ground making it easy for predation, and all the eggs are gone! The eggs representing the lives which have been taken. I guess itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s all in how we interpret.

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Barbara Richard February 18

LeDoux Haiku Talking Gibberish Kneeling In Your Underpants Soon You’ll Have No Head

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You guys have my brain hurting - beginning to think that I did it :)

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Haha I hear you John …I’m so freaking confused now

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Funny example of Haiku poetry! Rust Cohle would have appreciated that poem :)

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Marty Qualls February 18

Along the shore the cloud waves break, The twin suns sink beneath the lake, The shadows lengthen In Carcosa. … Strange is the night where black stars rise, And strange moons circle through the skies But stranger still is Lost Carcosa. Songs that the Hyades shall sing, Where flap the tatters of the King, Must die unheard in Dim Carcosa. Song of my soul, my voice is dead; Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed Shall dry and die in Lost Carcosa.

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Shonna VL February 18

Another fb page I found detailing The Yellow King https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-King-inYellow/104011342969199# The King in Yellow Book 3,873 Likes 48 talking about this

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I came across this- on IMDB somebody noted that drinking renders Cohles entire statement invalid from a legal perspective. interesting….

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This is a must read, Guys. Beautifully written, and gives you options of what you think is going on, in a way that you’ve been having a hard time verbalizing or internalizing. Great Read.

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Patricia Darlene Kennedy February 18

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Does anyone know if the name of the series True Detective is from the old True Detective magazines back in the 50’s & 60’s! My mom always read them and would hide them under her bed and my sister & I would always find them….

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I shared a link on one of the threads earlier that talked about the creator/writer and where the name/story came from. I don’t think the two are related, but who knows?

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Ahhh, my aunt had them, too. I loved babysitting for her. Once the kiddos were tucked in, I had a reading frenzy of trashy stories.

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I loved reading those! My mother always confiscated the True Confessions but left the True Detectives alone! Had she not done that, I’d be a hopeless romantic. And that’s why maybe I relate to Cohle so well. :)

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Pranay Sharma February 18

Meanwhile,this :’) http://imgur.com/r/TrueDetective/r67tRz2 Covering for his partner. - Imgur Imgur is home to the web’s most popular image content, curated in real time by a dedicated community through commenting, voting and sharing. By Imgur

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Dimitris InChains February 18

This book is very influential to Cohle s pessimistic manifest: “Should the human race voluntarily put an end to its existence? Do we even know what it means to be human? And what if we are nothing like we suppose ourselves to be? In this challenging philosophical work, celebrated supernatural writer Thomas Ligotti broaches these and other issues in an unflinching and penetrating manner that brings to mind some of his own imperishable horror fiction. For Ligotti, there is no refuge from our existence as conscious beings who must suppress their awareness of what horrors life holds in store for them. Yet try as we may, our consciousness may at any time rise up against our defenses against it, whispering to us things we would rather not hear: Religion is a transparent fantasy, optimism an exercise in delusional wishfulfillment, and even the quest for pleasure an ultimately doomed enterprise.” The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror amazon.com

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Jason Shankel February 18 San Francisco California United States

Rust Cohle’s FB page… https://www.facebook.com/true.detective.rust. cohle Rust Cohle Fictional Character

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Rewatched the episode last night and so many questions…first, any background on Southern Fried and what happen to his face?

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I just looked up All Around Cowboy… It’s a Church!!! That’s Marty’s belt buckle. http://allaroundcowboychurch.com/

Jesse M George February 18

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Has anyone else noticed if Marty has a gold ring on his right hand as well as Rev Tuttle? I believe they both have rings one both hands.

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Cole did not seem to suspect or even have second thoughts about Marty shooting Ledoux. For a guy who has never shot his gun, all Cole has to say is that he is glad Marty committed to something for a change.

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Yea Jesse M George I noticed when I rewatched last night the same thing. It’s out of character or is that his real character. Also he said he had to double back to look for the exit… Something strange about that.

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Jonas De Ruytter February 18

Hi my name is Jonas and I’m a 22y/o graphic design student based in Ghent (Belgium) For my courses publication & visual identity, i’m working about true detective. For this i’m looking for more internetfora/groups where people discuss true detective and it’s plotpoints/characters! anybody here who knows more interesting groups/boards?

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Eden Hazard ROCKS..! :P

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Eden Hazard fan?

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Yup

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28 minutes into episode 5 the camera cuts to the large tree with the crown hanging from a limb and very clearly there is a spiral thing clearly hanging down on the branch, like a “sentinel” because it was there when the crown got stuck on it years before.

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There’s not much: Maggie works at hospital, Laurie got fixed up on a date, she became chief of Lafayette Hospital. Things started changing

Jackie Burgett February 18 Mountain View Arizona United States

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I want to share an observation I have made about Cohle while being interrogated: when he gets asked a question that he is guarded about he hesitates, moves his head toward the right very slowly as he’s processing his answer before he answers it with carefully couched words. Otherwise he keeps his eyes straight and answers spontaneously. Is this a sign that I’m watching too many episodes?

early on in 2002 (which was 10 years prior to the present) I believe Cohle got bored with domestic life… (3)

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Lee Ann Mielke you’re exactly right! He seems to temporarily turn to stone like he’s getting zapped by an electrical charge. I believe that is a “tell” when he suppressed an urge to react.

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Jason Shankel February 18 San Francisco California United States

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane_theory Brane - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org

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I wonder how close Nic will get to the theory of everything? I feel like his writing sees into our collective conscience, why we all love the show so much.

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Jason, great video…the robot with the lamps on his head sounds like Jermaine from Flight Of The Concords!

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Okay guys, SPOILER ALERT…introducing Brane theory and String

Theory had my head spinning till last night. I read comments on and io9.com review of the last episode. The message board is what is interesting, the circular theory is discussed and the explanation blew my mind and I did finally have a good night sleep!=) I will post if you folks are interested. Let’s not forget the young “catatonic” girl they carried from the meth shack…fast forward to 2012 and she is a grown woman…who may have suddenly come forth and talked.

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Was this in the previews? I missed it.

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Something BIG has brought the 2 back in 2012 under investigation…Has to go back to the killing of Ledoux…the secret that is the underlying theme of Cohle and Marty’s

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Yeah, I’m fairly certain that the woman at the end of preview for Ep6 (…he made me watch) is the catatonic girl grown up. I find Cohle’s line to Marty “without me,

Debra Duncan February 19

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there is no you” very interesting. As if he holds the cards over Marty’s involvement.

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Jason Shankel February 19 San Francisco California United States

Onion AV Club review of “The Secret Fate of All Life.” http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/truedetective-the-secret-fate-of-all-life-201175 True Detective: “The Secret Fate Of All Life” The A.V. Club

True Detective “The Secret Fate Of All Life” Season 1, Episode 5 If you felt like the big raid at the end of “Who Goes There” was a turning point for True Detective, good work—here’s a special commendation from the Louisiana State Police. If you felt like True Detective couldn’t get any better than that—maybe you’re investing too much in an artfully executed piece of filmmaking. (Don’t worry, you’re in good company there, with myself and approximately 95 percent of the Internet.) “The Secret Fate Of All Life” matches a season high with another season high, boldly taking Reggie Ledoux out of the picture and forging ahead into the murky depths of season one’s third act. The obvious reference point here is Twin Peaks’ “Lonely Souls,” another expertly handled hour in which a killer is identified and dispatched sooner than the audience expected. In this case, however, I have a hunch we won’t be treated to a secondary character’s momentary flirtation with a career in pop music. This is the series’ nimblest balance yet of “It’s not about the case”/“It is about the case.” Sixteen minutes into “The Secret Fate Of All Life,” Reggie Ledoux is dead and Dora Lange’s murder is ostensibly solved. A series of domestic and workplace dramas follows, but not really: Rust, and True Detective, can’t let go of that central mystery. There’s evidence mounting that suggests the murders

go beyond Ledoux—and the only person who could corroborate such suspicion had his brains scrambled by Detective Hart (if they weren’t already permanently scrambled by various chemical agents). True Detective is wading into dangerously Killing-like territory, responding to its biggest question mark with even more question marks—but it’s better constructed than all that. These twists and trapdoors organically flow from what Nic Pizzolatto laid out in previous scripts. To that end: If you doubted the veracity of what Rust told Gilbough and Papania in previous episodes, that doubt is substantiated as soon as Hart and Cohle descend upon the Ledoux compound undetected. There’s some fine work of juxtaposition via editing in these sequences, as Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson provide battlefield narration for what turns out to be a stealthy and uneventful operation. But Pizzolatto has shown his work in previous episodes, so it goes off like gangbusters. “Who Goes There” demonstrated Rust’s habit of building narratives for himself. In his boozing and philandering, Marty shows that he has a complicated relationship with honesty. Characters only telling half of the story is fundamental to True Detective. This isn’t a show that fabricates tension out of waiting for the other shoe to drop; the tension in True Detective comes from knowing that there’s a bigger monster lurking in the shadow of the monster that just fell. Because even though the killer is found, he never truly goes away. That’s the logic of Ledoux and his Carcosan cronies, the core of the theoretical-physics lecture Rust gives to Gilbough and Papania, and the seed of doubt that “The Secret Fate Of All Life” plants in the viewer’s mind. It’s also how True Detective gets away with poking at universal truths within a story of such narrow scope. It’s all there in M-theory babble Rust is just now drunk enough to lay out: It’s this circular view of existence, where everything that will ever happen has already happened—and will happen again, for eternity. I don’t think True Detective adheres to this train of thought precisely, but there are patterns that repeat within the show, cycles of birth, bloom, stasis, decay, and death that ensnare these characters. If Reggie Ledoux is no longer around to perpetrate his kind of evil, there’s someone else out their ready to pick up the slack—and the crown of the yellow king. Reinforcing this notion, Cary Fukunaga and Adam Arkapaw pack the frames of “The Secret Fate Of All Life” with circular imagery: Rust’s ring of can men, that big knot in the tree, the magazine of Ledoux’s tommy gun, the crown that the Hart girls fight over. And then there’s that telltale swirl, Rust and Marty’s presumed key to finding their man— which now looks more like a map of Detective Cohle’s impending decline. “The Secret Fate Of All Life” marks another pinnacle of daring for True Detec-

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tive, and it’s a daring that has to make way for some hiccups in momentum. Twin Peaks echoes go beyond “Lonely Souls”; in the space of 20 minutes, it goes through all the awkward throes, fits, and starts that David Lynch and Mark Frost encountered after they revealed Laura Palmer’s killer. (That’s mostly in the middle section devoted to establishing the 2002 portion of the season’s timeline, but even that is in engrossing in the way the show temporarily transforms into a family drama about putting the pieces together after a separation.) But “The Secret Fate Of All Life” also barrels forward with the force of last week’s bravura finale, its last 10 or 15 minutes puling the show forward with a determination that Twin Peaks didn’t find until Agent Cooper followed Windom Earle into the woods. But Rustin Cohle is no Dale Cooper, and he now finds himself the primary suspect in an investigation of his own making. “The Secret Fate Of All Life” renews the energy of True Detective by shifting the focus to “Rust the killer”—a storytelling path that’s been there from the start, but now has all of the brush cleared away from it. This would be a hacky direction to take were it not for the scenes in “The Secret Fate Of All Life” that find Rust or Marty contradicting the official version of the Ledoux situation. Everyone but Rust, Marty, and the viewer knows Ledoux’s death as a siege gone wrong; we understand it as two guys covering their own asses after emotion gets the best of them. And so the seeds of doubt are planted: How far is Rust willing to go to cover himself? Is this the only time he’s restaged a crime scene? Why is he studying the stick sculptures so intently—and to what end? Suddenly, thrillingly, he’s trapped in his own pattern: When you find heroism in a lie, it’s hard to get the truth to work for you down the line. Because in True Detective’s mind, it’s not a line—it’s a loop. I skimmed over the time jump to 2002, but I suspect that’ll be a bigger part of next week’s episode—so we can discuss it in detail there. In brief, I think the transition was handled elegantly enough, though it yields some on-the-nose imagery about the passage of time. (Beer bellies and thinning hair and whatnot.) The actual transition point is pretty fascinating: In light of Marty’s narration, I watched the sequence with balled fists, anxious about some sort of tragedy befalling Audrey and Maisie. Though it now seems inevitable that something terrible is going to happen to Audrey, Mistress Of The Dark in the next three weeks…

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good point^.

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Cohle carrying the dead boy instantly made me think of the Pieta pose, ie…

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Sally Knepper Jechura February 19 Chicago Illinois United States

I do have another detail to throw out there. What about the mysterious phone call & death of the Pharmacy Murderer in Eps. 5? Is it significant? Who called him? How exactly did he die, and why?

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I wouldn’t say it is the middle of nowhere…in the background you can see a factory…do we know who runs the factory?

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Rust was the one that wanted fingerprints done on that pay phone … if he was the one that used it, he probably wouldnt have suggested this being done unless he knew they wouldnt find his,,, guess he could have been wearing gloves….

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Jason Shankel February 19 San Francisco California United States

Read the first story of “The King in Yellow.” It’s called “The Repairer of Reputations.” It’s about a guy who reads the King In Yellow and goes insane. It’s told from his point of view, like a Poe or Lovecraft story. It’s not scary so much as funny. He’s a guy living in New York after suffering an injury and spending some time in an asylum. After reading the King in Yellow, he begins wearing costume jewelry and plotting to “retake the throne.” Interesting bits: … In the story, the government has legalized suicide and opened a suicide clinic in New York, like the suicide clinics in “Soylent Green.” But this “Government Lethal Chamber” is located “on the south side of Washington Square, between Wooster and 5th street.” The building is described as “harshly classical.” This location is actually the campus of New York University, not a governmentrun suicide clinic. So we have a connection between Cohle’s notion of mankind voluntarily killing ourselves off and higher education The main character wants to “retake the throne” from his cousin, who is marrying a woman the main character is infatuated with. It’s not clear if he has a crush or is just fixated on her as part of his delusion. The main character acts confused when his cousin imagines that his “crown” is nothing but brass and paste theater jewelry, and that he seems to think the “safe” he keeps it in is just a biscuit tin.

So we have the idea that symbols that have great meaning to one man are nothing but paste jewels to another, and that a crown isn’t always a crown. The main character spends time with an old man who he in turn describes as “mad.” This man has made his “fortune” by “repairing reputations.” The main character is eventually committed and dies in an asylum shouting “I am the King!” •

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Sally Piccillo February 19

Seems like hints are crammed into every episode. In #5, there was a black star on Marty’s younger daughter’s bedroom door. What did it mean? It’s a game, as in a novel. Some clues are important to the plot, most are meant to keep us excited and coming back for more. It seems to be working well

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I have GOT to stop playing CandyCrush Saga while I am “watching” this show.

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Yes there were black stars on the neck of Dora’s friend in the form of tats and they did look like stars falling..

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Hints and Red Herrings

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Patricia Darlene Kennedy February 19

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Avinash Yadav February 19

The heavy set guy driving the lawnmover at the abandoned school had alot of scars on his face …. and the true detective internet site someone posted a link to earlier ( which I cant locate ) shows the main characters and one of them was the lawmover man at the school and I can’t remember his name …..so we only saw him once for a minute when Russ asks him about the school, so why would the site consider him an important character! when others who have spent longer in the show are not even listed as important characters….? As he ‘works for the parish’ he knows about what went on at the school - why it was closed down (he claims due to Hur. Andrew…). The big question is why at that moment was he told to include it in his rounds? Why 3 years later? It is too obvious for rust to be killer…and the way he lets himself get photographed! There are some interesting vintage Mardi Gras pix here: ( note the one from 1972, man on horseback). http://allmyeyes. blogspot.com/2012/02/ more-vintage-mardigras.html

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Ok here’s a thought. I don’t think Marty is involved with his daughter in an appropriate way despite the sex play with dolls. I think it’s her grandfather! Audrey witnessed something at the lake….sex rituals I guess. And the grandfather is key to the story! we will see more if him no doubt!

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The Mardi Gras parades have all ready started in some places in southern Alabama …and the big one in NO must be pretty soon… Have never been to the Mardi Gras but if I had would definately remember these guys in the pointed hats on horses…

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Sion Isaacs Shankel February 19 San Francisco California United States

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Okay, I have a new idea…..the whole deal here about the Yellow King is that who reads “the play” in it will go mad. I suggest that the criminal(s) are making their own script to fool/control people. The evidence trail is their script…and they ( The Yellow King) manipulates it to tell lies and truths that will in combination make people so mad and destroyed by it all. Rust seeking out his own investigation and gathering it is being made crazy from it, he is metaphorically reading the play. Its multigenerational and all about the Tuttles “there is a real war going on here”.

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No, it is supposed to drive you mad….and I am closing in on madness already from seeing what a shoddy viewer I am.

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See the top - Sion said that in the beginning

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What will drive you mad id re-watching and looking for the clues Mary Furlong Coomer

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Donielle Monique Equité February 19 San Jose California United States

I know SOME of you will get off on this….I am calling Shayne Bowman out for sure!! http://www.buzzfeed.com/ lincolnmichel/a-true-detective-reading-list A ‘True Detective’ Reading List A list of dark, ghoulish, and southern gothic books that every fan of HBO’s True Detective should read. BuzzFeed|By Lincoln Michel

Unless you’ve been watching TV under a rock, you probably know that HBO’s dark and gritty True Detective is the best show airing. The series, which may be the most gorgeously shot TV show of all time, follows detectives Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson) as they try to solve a case of brutal murders with occult overtones in Louisiana. The show is fairly unique in having only one director (Cary Joji Fukunaga) and one writer (Nic Pizzolatto). This has allowed the show to be more stylistically daring than even other great HBO shows, and has allowed Pizzolatto to infuse his Southern gothic noir narrative with two literary traditions that rarely make it to the mainstream: weird fiction and pessimistic existentialist philosophy.

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Viewers and critics have been puzzling about the strange references to “Carcosa,” “the yellow king,” and “black stars,” as well as Cohle’s rambling depressing comments about the horror of existence and the aberration that is humanity. The former are direct references to a book called The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers that was a huge influence on writers like H. P. Lovecraft. The latter are not, as some critics have said, incoherent freshman dorm-room nonsense. Instead, Cohle’s comments are infused with a strain of existentialist philosophy that runs from Friedrich Nietzsche to E.M. Cioran to Thomas Ligotti. Below, I recommend readings to understand the mythology and philosophy of True Detective, as well as some other works in the Southern gothic, noir, and/or weird fiction vein that fans might enjoy. The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers This cult classic of supernatural horror is the source of the cult references on the show. The interlinked stories circle around a fictional play, titled The King in Yellow, which drives its readers insane. There is also a creepy supernatural entity referred to as the King in Yellow and references to the mysterious city of Carcosa. Attentive True Detective fans will recognize those names from the show. Ledoux’s rambling comments about “black stars” and “twin suns” are also taken from the fictional play. The crooked spiral tattooed on the back of the murdered Dora Lange is likely an interpretation of the “yellow sign” of the King in Yellow. This is the center of the weird fiction mythos that haunts the edges of True Detective. (For longer literary analysis of how The King in Yellow relates to True Detective, check out these essays on io9 and ThinkProgress.) The Complete Short Stories by Ambrose Bierce Chambers himself borrowed elements from the great American satirist (The Devil’s Dictionary) and story writer (“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”) Ambrose Bierce. Specifically, he borrowed the names Carcosa and Hastur from his haunting “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” which you can read online. It is really only that one story that ties into Chambers’ mythology, but Bierce’s fiction is well worth your time. H. P. Lovecraft: Tales by H. P. Lovecraft

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As Chambers borrowed from Bierce, Lovecraft borrowed from both. Lovecraft’s famous Cthulhu mythos was heavily influenced by Chambers. If you are unfamiliar with Lovecraft, he is the central figure in the genres of cosmic horror and weird fiction. He wrote tales of horrific alien gods, demented cults, insanity, and the horror of the cosmos. (BuzzFeed published an essay on his influence, and his troubling racism, recently.) Although not terribly famous in his life, his influence has grown to cosmic proportions in the greater genre of horror fiction. Everyone from Neil Gaiman to Stephen King counts him as a major influence. King called him “the 20th century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.” If you have any interest in the genre, Lovecraft is a must. The Imago Sequence & Other Stories by Laird Barron Lovecraft’s cosmic horror has been kept alive by a whole school of writers. One of the best, whom Nic Pizzolatto frequently cites in interviews, is Laird Barron. Barron’s dark and haunting fiction also frequently draws on the tradition of hard-boiled detectives and noir that are clear influences on True Detective. The Imago Sequence, his first collection, is a great place to start. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti Thomas Ligotti is the bridge between weird fiction and Rust Cohle’s existential philosophy. Ligotti writes both Lovecraftian horror and existential pessimistic philosophy. As I said above, Cohle’s aphorisms are not random ramblings but references to actual philosophers and thinkers, especially Ligotti. At one point, Cohl says, “We became too self-aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law.” Compare that to Ligotti in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: “We know that nature has veered into the supernatural by fabricating a creature that cannot and should not exist by natural law, and yet does.” Pizzolatto has talked openly about the influence of Ligotti on Cohle, and noted that, “Next to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Mickey Spillane seems about as hard-boiled as bubble gum.” The Temptation to Exist by E. M. Cioran For my tastes, the finest writer of pessimistic philosophy is the great Romanian thinker E. M. Cioran. His aphorisms could easily come out of the mouth

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of Cohle, such as his famous question “Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?” Cioran viewed existence as fundamentally pointless and urged us to resist the “temptation to exist.” At the same time, Cioran’s writing is very funny and treats life as humorously absurd. Allegedly Cioran’s mother once told him she would have aborted him if she’d known he would have such depressing views, which prompted Cioran to take the attitude that “I’m simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?” Here’s True Detective’s Nic Pizzolatto on Cioran: “I’d already been reading E.M. Cioran for years and consider him one of my all-time favorite and, oddly, most nourishing writers. As an aphorist, Cioran has no rivals other than perhaps Nietzsche, and many of his philosophies are echoed by Ligotti.” Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche You can’t really talk about existential philosophy without talking about Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was a major influence on Cioran and one of the most important philosophers of the 19th century. His philosophical novel Thus Spake Zarathustra contains a lot of elements that seem to influence True Detective. The central concept of this work is “eternal recurrence,” the idea that existence occurs over and over again and we will be forced to make the same decisions and suffer the same fates for all eternity. Rust Cohle paraphrases this exact idea in the series’ fifth episode. Galveston by Nic Pizzolatto If you are looking for fiction similar to True Detective, Pizzolatto’s own novel seems like the right place to start. Pizzolatto employs a similar dual past-present narrative to True Detective in this noir-influenced novel. Mystic River author Dennis Lehane called it “the best roman noir I’ve read in a decade.” The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler A classic work of hard-boiled detective fiction. Chandler totally changed the crime writing world with his Philip Marlowe. And the film version with Humphrey Bogart is pretty great too. Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson

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Pizzolatto has called Jonnson one of his all-time favorites, and Jesus’ Son is his masterpiece. This series of interlinked short stories about a heroin user (the title is a reference to the Velvet Underground song “Heroin”) is written in dreamy, surrealistic prose that might recall the beautiful landscapes and dreamy Rust Cohle hallucinations on True Detective. I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down by William Gay If you like your Southern gothic tales as dark and thick as molasses, you can’t do better than the late William Gay. “The Paperhanger” in particular is one of the greatest and darkest short stories ever written. The Vanishers by Heidi Julavits Last year’s The Vanishers is a great detective novel with supernatural overtones. Karen Russell called it “One of the best novels I’ve ever read, delivering all the immediate pleasures of mystery, horror, and satire while exploring grief in language that is as shocking for its originality as its precision.” Swamplandia! by Karen Russell Speaking of Karen Russell, her novel Swamplandia! is a good choice for readers interested in contemporary Southern gothic with supernatural aspects. The story follows the journey of a 12-year-old gator wrestler searching for her lost sister. While hardly as dark as the bleak world of True Detective, it shares a swampy setting and Southern gothic sensibility. Big Machine by Victor LaValle Big Machine, LaValle’s fantastic second novel, follows an injured junkie ex-cultist who gets sucked into a supernatural investigation. Publishers Weekly compared him to Haruki Murakami, John Kennedy Toole, and Edgar Allan Poe. Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor O’Connor is the grandmother and unsurpassed master of American Southern gothic fiction. She is probably the greatest American short story writer ever, but her first novel — about false prophets, twisted religion, a blind preacher, and a gorilla costume — is also essential.

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2666 by Roberto Bolaño Bolaño’s posthumous masterpiece contains a lot of things: a mysterious German novelist, romantic literary critics, a murderous ex-boyfriend, and people who hear voices. However, the heart of the novel is a cataloguing of the brutal murders of female factory workers along the U.S.–Mexico border that is as bleak and nightmarish as anything on TV. The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson Few writers have the gift for bringing terror out of everyday life like Shirley Jackson. Like O’Connor, she is a master of the grotesque. The titular story, “The Lottery,” caused a huge scandal when it was published and over 60 years later is still one of the most anthologized short stories in American letters. Last Days by Brian Evenson Brian Evenson is another writer who combines noir, horror, and philosophy. I could list a lot of his books here, but his great novel Last Days seems most appropriate. It follows a disfigured detective who investigates a murder in a bizarre religious cult that views amputation as a means to enlightenment. Child of God by Cormac McCarthy Rust Cohle’s monologues also remind me of the dense, biblical lyricism of early Cormac McCarthy. While most famous for Blood Meridian and The Road, Child of God’s dark and twisted tale of Appalachian necrophile Lester Ballard is closest in feel to the show.

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Times I wish I were unemployed.

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Reading “The King in Yellow” now, then straight on to “Galveston.”

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My mother’s copy of Lovecraft just about wrecked my childhood. Fascinating, horrific and scary stories. Wonder, if I reread them today, would I react the way I did at 10?

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Jason Shankel February 19 San Francisco California United States

This isn’t Cohle’s first time covering up crimes for his partner… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQNKhY7ws48 Tropic Thunder (7/10) Movie CLIP - I Killed a Panda (2008) HD Tropic Thunder Movie Clip - watch all clips http://j.mp/z8iy2p click to subscribe http://j. mp/sNDUs5 Tugg (Ben Stiller) goes mad in the jungle and kills a pa… ROTFL…

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Jim Bounassi look from the arms upwards :)

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Ok. I think I see what you’re seeing. The body is the head, the darkened area under each arm could be the

Jackie Burgett February 19

Observation 3: Ep 2 - 35 mins into it Cohle’s is looking at the yellow flyer - the rendered drawing of Christ shows arms spread out and the folds of his sleeves look like antlers. A large globe behind him shows images of heads below with a being rising up above them.

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eyes, and the arms are the antlers??? Eh, kind of a reach. I think Yellow is the only significance here, IMHO. But I do not see other thing regarding the sphere and the people at all, unless the photo is incomplete(?) •

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Jackie Burgett February 19

I love love love this forum y’all! My grey matter is getting replenished with endorphins from T D Mania. Keep my supply going

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I LOVE THIS GROUP so many great thinkers!!!

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Sion Isaacs Shankel February 19 San Francisco California United States

Edward Theosevis February 19 Lemon City Florida United States

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Jonas De Ruytter February 19

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“If the only the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward then brother that person is a piece of shit.” - Rustin Cohle One of my favorite lines. One of mine too, heard it before. A side note, probably a stupid one, but there are a gigantic amount of crosses depicted in every episode, can’t wait to see one that’s upside down!

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I was surprised Clark Peters had such a small part (Black Church pastor) maybe he will be back - he was huge in Treme and The Wire

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Originally, the upside down cross was chosen by Peter because he felt unworthy to die like Christ did. It became a sign of humility to Christians. These days, the upside down cross is often a symbol of anti-Christian sentiments. Also a symbol in Satanic cults.

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Off topic a little, but did anyone notice that Marty’s oldest daughter is Lizzie from The Walking Dead?

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Jim Bounassi February 19 Manasquan New Jersey United States

The woman at the end of the Ep6 trailer (whom most likely is the catatonic girl from the LoDeux compound) says “the man with the scar made me watch”. Forgive me for going backwards, as I need to re watch 1,2 and 3, but have we seen anyone with scars on their face, yet? I really can’t recall. The dude on the lawnmower has scars too.

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Jim Bounassi read my comments in the above post by Sion Isaacs Shankel

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Hey jim - fried pharmacy guy has terrible scars on his face

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Here is my thought chole is still distraught because somebody ran over his daughter. I believe it was rust who accidently killed his daughter and he has never forgiven himself for it. remember, we were never told “who” did it…and rust is a haunted (read: hunted) man.

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When not under the covers Cohle wears plaid shirts, cowboy boots and attends services in his local synagogue!!! :) Justin I’Onn

Sion Isaacs Shankel February 19 San Francisco California United States

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New idea….we all don’t want Rust to be the killer… that has been instilled in us by the writing and acting….now if it is him how awesome that would be for mindfuck us? Who really knows how his wife and daughter left his life?

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Pearls For-swines February 19 Liège Belgium

Interesting : http://blogs.indiewire.com/ criticwire/why-does-true-detective-referencethe-work-of-a-self-published-poet Why Does ‘True Detective’ Repeatedly Overlap With the Work of a Self-Published Poet? Here’s a mystery not even Rust Cohle can solve. blogs.indiewire.com|By Criticwire

Michael M. Hughes wrote a fascinating post for io9 detailing the references to Robert Chambers’ The King in Yellow salted throughout the four episodes of HBO’s True Detective that have been broadcast so far. In addition to the title of Chambers’ short-story collection (and the most recent Dead Milkmen album), The King in Yellow is, as Hughes describes it, “a fictional play within a collection of short stories — a metafictional dramatic work that brings despair, depravity, and insanity to anyone who reads it or sees it performed.” The references to Chambers’ book, as well as the invocation of Satanic worship and the occultist Aleister Crowley, indicate that Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson’s detectives are on the trail of something much bigger — more evil, more elemental — than a simple or even serial murderer. But there’s another reference in the episode that airs tonight, “The Secret Fate of All Life,” that’s even harder to explain. (Don’t worry: No spoilers.) In one of the present-day segments, McConaughey’s Rust Cohle tells his interrogators, “This is a world where nothing is solved. You know, someone once told me time is a flat circle. Everything we’ve every done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again.” Compare that to the poem that writer Dennis McHale published on his website on December 14 of last year, titled “This World”: Your love, your hate it’s all the same thing it gathers me in the same web entangling me with empty promises.

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and like a lot of dreams it made a monster at the end of it. This is a world where nothing is solved where time is a flat circle and everything we ever do, or have ever done, we do over and over and over again. Where you touch darkness and darkness touches you back. True Detective writer Nic Pizzolatto’s dialogue tracks McHale’s poem almost exactly, right down to the “over and over and over again.” Not only that, but the end of the first stanza also overlaps with the dialogue at the end of episode three, “The Locked Room”: “All your life, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain, it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream, a dream that you had inside a locked room — a dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams, it had a monster at the end of it.” (In fact, if you listen closely, McConaughey’s swallowed “had” could well be “made.”) Even stranger, True Detective has been advertised with the slogan “Touch darkness and darkness touches you back,” although that line does not appear in any of the seven episodes made available to critics so far. What does this mean? Why would True Detective writer Nic Pizzolatto build in repeated references to the work of a self-published poet? (And if he did, why isn’t McHale credited?) Conversely, how could a poem published last December borrow multiple elements from episodes of a show that hadn’t been broadcast yet — and, as of this writing, still hasn’t, although the “time is a flat circle” line was apparently included in a making-of featurette released before True Detective’s premiere? Neither McHale nor HBO have returned requests for comment — this post will, of course, be updated if they do — so for now it remains a mystery that not even detectives Cohle and Hart can solve. (1)

Interesting, but I don’t think it’s too crazy of a coincidence that two people would write similar lines based on Nietszche. Part of the point of Cohle’s nihilism is that it is trite.

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Yeah the same for me, it’s interesting to see the number of really interesting references that grows almost everyday with this show. Nihilistic, yeah definitely but not only.

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He made 5 little beer can men and flattened the 6th…..the daughters made a crime scene with 5 men and a girl…. the pic in the house - 5 KKK-isn’t men and a girl.

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John Devennie Sr. February 19

This show combined with this Forum has really enhanced this True Detective experience. Makes me think ‘what am I watching/seeing’. Very challenging and enjoyable in its depth.

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I think Rust is still undercover

Debra Duncan February 19 Moreno Valley California United States

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