True Detective Recap: The Age Of Aquarius Is Over And Your Aura Is Covered In Blood

This is a recap of the fourth episode of True Detective’s second season. Spoilers.

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Woah, check out the aura on this episode!

For those of you who are hate-watching True Detective this year* (mazel tov, your tweets have been sublime) it’s episodes like this that remind you that it’s not just men staring at each other for an uncomfortably long time. Well, not always. Once in a Vinci smog moon you get a scene like the adrenaline-infused conclusion to ‘Down Will Come’ — I mean, this episode literally started with two people watching a car being lowered from a jack in real time! I don’t find ultraviolence particularly enjoyable, but this week actually had stakes. It reminds you why you bothered watching in the first place and sends your scalp flying right off ya head.

Speaking of, pour one out for Drunk Cop. I’ll miss your binoculars and ill-fitting pants.

We’re halfway through the season now (in the same place as Rust Cohle’s epic bikie scene) and it feels like the show has found its feet. Ani’s doomed police raid on the pimp they suspected in Caspere’s murder taught us a few things.

Firstly, Ray is not so bad at this police jam. In fact he’s pretty good! I half expected his lungs to explode from all that running, but those little cowboy boots were shuffling quicker than you could say “Columbo!”. Frank is right: Ray’s no muscle, but he’s pretty smart. Secondly, apparently gangsters in Vinci just shoot at everyone indiscriminately, despite the fact that they were in their own neighborhood. They are also always immigrants. Nice one, Pizzo!

Thirdly, despite Ani’s tough talk it’s very likely she doesn’t know what the fuck she’s doing. How did they not realise that place was a meth lab? And girl, why are you chasing a van full of machine-toting racial stereotypes by yourself, with a single handgun and a can-do attitude? Also, what did you plan on doing with that knife!?

If the Karate Kid freeze-frame at the end of this episode tells us anything, it’s that Ani, Ray and Paul will definitely be closing ranks from here on in. They may have had different objectives to start out with, but this week they began to show something resembling solidarity. Ani makes sure the PD knows Ray saved her life and is allowing him to capture glimpses of her sad childhood. Ray is gently warning Ani that the Mayor will stop at nothing to take her badge. They’re supposed to be keeping an eye on each other, but they’re both aware that they’re being used as pawns.

I can’t recall if Paul and Ray had even had a conversation before this week, but Ray was the one Paul called when his motorbike was stolen after he blacked out, and reporters were waiting at his hotel asking about trivial things like ‘war crimes’ and ‘abuse against women’.

I guess Paul just assumed Ani aka Judge Judy would ask him too many questions, but he and Ray have quickly developed a pretty father-son relationship. And boy do they hate bloodsucking, terrible journalists for asking them questions. What a bunch of S.O.Bs! Good one Pizzo, tell us what you really think! Ray takes one look at Paul and says “glove box”, like a friendly boss who suggests straight vodka when work gets you down. Huh, I guess police work kinda is like journalism.

Ray comforts Paul, tells him he’s a survivor and dismisses his tearful admission that he did whatever the army, then the PD, told him to regardless of the consequences. This would all be very sweet if Paul wasn’t being accused of FUCKING WAR CRIMES. Ani, Ray and Paul don’t know how to exist in the world, but they know how to cover each other’s asses.

The backdrop for this Now and Then-style bonding session, and really the focus of the season, is the great California: land of promise, wealth, clean living and New Age philosophies, all gone to seed. Teenagers smoke hookahs in places that look like temples and bemoan their “very bad” fathers (ten bucks Betty Chessani has ‘Fast Car’ by Tracey Chapman on her iPhone), the mentally ill are sent to ‘wellness’ retreats and end up hanging themselves, and creepy old gurus are more concerned with the size of people’s auras than the mental instability of their knife-toting daughters. Ani’s dad Eliot actually knew Dr. Pitlor, Caspere and Mayor Chessani back in the ‘80s – they used to go swimming, talk about spirituality and be hairy together! What a totally NBD coincidence! “Well, a lot of spiritual movements cross-pollenated in these parts,” Eliot says. It’s just a total coincidence that he still keeps photos of these totally casual former acquaintances!

My mood ring says: SUSPICIOUS.

California’s Age of Aquarius has been soured: free love now comes with a price tag, if you’re lucky enough to get into Frank’s exclusive Eastern European prostitute club. Ani sleeps with a subordinate and now her sexual history is being thrown back in her face. Paul’s ‘war buddy’, dreamy, waffle-making Miguel, tells him to “be who you want to be, it ain’t bad,” but Paul feels so conflicted about it that he practically leaps at the opportunity to marry his pregnant ex-girlfriend. “I love you too… I guess?” she says, in impotence-inducing apathy.

The EPA tells Ani and Ray that nothing can grow in the decaying soil, the pioneer days of California’s rich and prosperous earth are finished. Not even avocados! We get it Pizzolatto, the Semyon’s garden is as barren as they are, but it doesn’t make any difference: Frank only wants a kid so he can pass something onto them like great Californian dynasties of the past.

California is now a place of degradation and dirty deals, crime and corruption. All Vince Vaughn did in this episode is visit different racial minorities and try to move in on their drug trade, in between warning people about snakes and asking what MDMA is. Who is this guy? Frank may have never had a cavity, but that doesn’t stop everything else around him rotting. Vinci is proof: nothing stays sweet forever.

When Frank tells Ray that the town is already gone to waste and that “sometimes your worst self is your best self” he’s once again the antithesis of the wholesome settler history he was trying to forge for himself. California dreamin’ ain’t what it used to be, that’s for sure. After the pointless shootout that wasted cops and civilians, Ray drops to the ground quivering. Paul stays upright because he’s seen things, man (also: robots often don’t have bendable limbs). Ani looks around desperately at the dead protestors on the ground, victims of the degradation of their city and you know, literal bullets. Well, at least people won’t be complaining about the buses anymore?

These three are now tied together by the shared experience of witnessing something terrible, a dust they won’t be able to blink out. Hopefully there’s actually narrative consequences for this pretty gnarly use of gratuitous splatter. Were they set up? Was there a reason that Ray’s bosses asked if the amount of cops were “necessary” and the Mayor said in a mocking tone, “Be careful out there”? Egads. I hope Ani has more than one e-cig in her ankle holster.

*Fun fact: the director of this episode Jeremy Podeswa was also responsible for that episode of Game of Thrones we all hated earlier this year.

Most confusing line of the episode: “Those moments, they stare back at you. You don’t remember them. They remember you.”

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True Detective airs on Foxtel’s Showcase every Monday at 3.30pm (express from the US), before being re-broadcast at 7.30pm.

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Sinead Stubbins is a writer from Melbourne who’s been published in Yen, frankie, Smith Journal and Elle. She tweets from @sineadstubbins