S02.E01: The Western Book Of The Dead

[Petunia13]

I thought it was excellent and Rachel McAdams and Colin Farrell were spellbinding.

[paigow]

Maybe this season, all the sexual deviants are cops and the killer is just out for money / revenge.

[Desperately Random]

I thought it was excellent and Rachel McAdams and Colin Farrell were spellbinding.

I have to agree. I really enjoyed it and am looking forward to the rest. I was hooked with Colin Farrell and Rachel McAdam's characters from their first scenes. I wasn't as impressed with Vince Vaughn because there were a couple of scenes when the Russian guy (Osip?) was talking to him and VV just had a blank look on his face. I had no idea what he was doing there. If he was angry, bored, frustrated? I will say that VV was good in his scenes with CF so I am still hopeful that he will do a good job with the part. I also thought that Taylor Kitsch did nice work and am glad that the three came together by the end of the episode.

[Ottis]

So was the point of the last scene, where the three main cop characters are surrounding the body,  that 1) our different character threads have connected, or 2) that the three cops somehow know each other?

[Desperately Random]

I think it's the first. I didn't get any indication from this episode that they knew each other but I guess we could always find out otherwise.

[shapeshifter]

I know its old but honestly seeing that cop's are constantly making the news for killing unarmed black males over dumb silly shity im sorry but   i think  the deranged cop is more accurate than it ever has been

 

seriously  the level of violence  among American police is something i don't see and just about any other civilized first world country and when it is there the violence is enacted agaisnt the majority not a miniority population like in America...

I wonder if this reality informed Pizzolatto's storytelling.

 

 

If she's doing internet porn, 'Athena, goddess of wisdom' probably isn't going to get many clicks...

Hee! I'm not going to re-watch, but I wonder if there was a hint of sarcasm in the line about that being her porn name.

 

 

I like the S2 credits so much better with the S1 music.

I loved S1's credits and song, and I breathed a sigh of relief over this season's, which I thought were equally good.

[Dobian]

I just watched last night.  I'll stick with it for one more episode, but I thought the premiere was pretty horrible.  Some of the scenes and dialogues were atrocious, especially Meg McAdams' scenes with her porn sister and hippie father.  I know the first episode is just to set the table, but there was just nothing about these characters or their personal stories that grabbed me at all.  Vince Vaughn's mobster world totally bored me.  Sopranos or Ray Donovan it was not.  Colin Farrell's over-the-top front lawn assault with the ridiculous dialogue made me cringe.  The rest was meh.

Edited June 26, 2015 by Dobian

[shapeshifter]

I just watched last night.  I'll stick with it for one more episode, but I thought the premiere was pretty horrible.  Some of the scenes and dialogues were atrocious, especially Meg McAdams' scenes with her porn sister and hippie father.  I know the first episode is just to set the table, but there was just nothing about these characters or their personal stories that grabbed me at all.  Vince Vaugn's mobster world totally bored me.  Sopranos or Ray Donovan it was not.  Colin Farrell's over-the-top front lawn assault with the ridiculous dialogue made me cringe.  The rest was meh.

This post makes me wonder if I hadn't been so enamored with season one if I would still be willing to watch 2.2. I'll give the emperor another episode to get his new clothes on, if y'all know the reference.

[Dobian]

Random thoughts...

 

Athena reminded me of Debra from Dexter.

 

It looks like they are going for Ray Donovan with Vaughn's character and that whole L.A. "society gangster" motif.

 

Ray's son immediately called to mind Thurman Murman from Bad Santa, with Colin Farrell as Billy Bob Thornton's character.  Billy Bob also took care of Thurman's bully in a similar - though much funnier - way.  Methinks someone was watching Bad Santa when he drew up these characters.

Edited June 26, 2015 by Dobian

[Jack Kerouac]

I like the S2 credits so much better with the S1 music.

 

Agreed and I love Leonard Cohen. Just isn't the right fit here.

[terrymct]

Vince Vaughn is horrible. Wooden and hollow. 

 

 

Honestly, he's better than I expected him to be.   In all his movies thus far, he's essentially played variations on the same character.   I was wondering about his speech pattern, though.  In the flashback scene in the bar where he gives Colin Farrell's character the information about the man who raped his wife, Vaugh used odd sentence structure and I was expecting his character to be an immigrant maybe brought to the US while in school.  In the current day scenes, that sentence structure is gone.   Is that sloppy writing or is the character supposed to be a Russian immigrant or child of immigrants who polished up his image and accent over time?

[atleastitsanethos]

I can't decide if this is doubly as pretentious as S1, or just that Woody and MM were better actors and could pull off some of this dialogue.

McAdams and CF are doing well, but they're going to have to flesh these characters out a lot more if this is going to live up to S1 (which, IMO, had a lot of potential but fell off the cliff at the end). VV can't deliver these lines, and a lot of exposition and convenient coincidence in this first episode. The CF "we were trying a long time" to VV's IVF tale, McAdams just happening to bust her sister's webcam house and then end up meeting her culty dad for another investigation. I wouldn't call this a slow burn - seemed like NP et al spit out the entire backstory on everyone while trying to make it seem dark and full of potent. I rolled my eyes for about half of this.

I'm going to give it a few episodes to see if they do better once they're in the story/mystery.

[MyPeopleAreNordic]

Antigone and Athena's surname is Bezzerides, which I believe is a shout-out to film noir writer and novelist A.I. Bezzerides. https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=A._I._Bezzerides

 

Also, I assume that Vinci is supposed to be something like Vernon, CA, which is a tiny industrial city that had a huge corruption scandal that was uncovered by the LA Times a few years ago.

 

Is Ben Caspere's name, and the Maltese Falcon-like object that was in the car with him, a shout-out to Kasper Gutman?

Good catches, J-Man.

[Jextella]

Last season was AMAZING .. right up until the killer was revealed. OMG.  They sent the two detectives on a riveting manhunt and dropped what was more than reasonable to assume were clues in that direction.  In the end, not an iota of anything we'd seen prior mattered.  Nic said in interviews that the show was not as much a mystery as it was a story about the personal lives and stories of the detectives themselves.  But that was talking out of both sides of his mouth.  If not a mystery, then why the endless parade of "clues" and "references", etc.?  Don't give us that if you don't want us to focus on that.  I was hoping for 1+2=3 and Nic gave us 1+2=apple.  It made no sense.

 

I enjoyed the show enough all the way until the end to tune in this season, but if the ending mimics that of S1, then what might be construed as clues, has no meaning whatsoever, e.g. raven in the front seat, raven mask on the guy who killed Collin Farrell's character, etc. 

 

Having said all this, I do enjoy references to the real world...here is an article that indicates he's going with a Greek theme and primarily, an Oedipus Rex thing.  I won't read clues into any of it, but it is entertaining.

 

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/06/colin-farrell-dead-true-detective

 

"The article points out that “he described the new season as a detective story in the manner of Oedipus Rex, in which ’the detective is searching and searching and searching, and the culprit is him.’” We see echoes of the Oedipus myth in the blinded murder victim Ben Caspar or, in this week’s episode, in the inappropriate relationship between Paul Woodrugh and his mother. Ani’s full name, Antigone, is a reference to the play that precedes Oedipus Rex in Sophocles’ Thebes trilogy. (Antigone, for the record, also features a famous blind character.) And, finally, there’s Ani’s father’s Panticapaeum Institute near Guerneville. Named after an ancient Greek city, the coastal commune is bound to crop up again given that in tonight’s episode Ani found out that the missing girl had more ties to Guerneville. So, likely, we haven’t seen the last of David Morse and ridiculous Rust Cohle-esque lines like “This is how we must live now, in the final age of man.”"

Edited July 5, 2015 by Jextella

[nara]

Did we have to be treated to a discussion of risque sex in Ani's first scene? C'mon, there are more interesting ways to introduce a troubled female detective.

I thought it might eventually to Caspar's kinky interests.

 

I was feeling bad for Ray potentially losing his son...until that scene in which he yells at the boy. 

 

Thanks for the many ideas on Athena, goddess of love.  That was bugging me, but I am willing to buy that it's the sister's mistake, not the writers'.

[Nanrad]

I don't mind Ani's introduction because I didn't see sex as a focus, despite that being the conversation. I wondered what they did, but I was really focused more on her treatment of the guy and general behavior. IMO, the sex doesn't indicate that she's troubled or have any other implication, Ani's disinterest and dismissiveness showed that she's "troubled", for the lack of a better term.