With Its Fourth Episode, "Who Goes There", True Detective Grew More Straightforward While Retaining Its Moody Artistry
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One of the many things that I love about the first season of True Detective, the masterpiece that single-handedly elevated television into the realm of high art, is that it is a moody, atmospheric arthouse exploration of life’s surreal absurdity and relentless sadism first and foremost and a cop show about detectives investigating a case a distant second.
“Who Goes There”, the fourth episode of the first season of True Detective marks the first time the show has felt like a police procedural rather than a moody mind-fuck about the saddest, strangest, smartest man in the world and his irritated partner.
It’s long on action and short on intricately worded monologues rich in nihilism and apocalyptic philosophical musings. In otherwise it’s uncharacteristically straightforward for a show that’s all weird angles, odd tangents and purposeful digressions.
Things get off to a bracingly conventional start with Rusty (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty (Woody Harrelson) visiting prison to pay a visit to a scuzzy criminal associate of Reggie Ledoux, the drug dealer, murderer and all-around scumbag they’re after.
The creep points them in the direction of the Iron Crusaders, a meth-loving White Supremacist biker gang that Rusty worked with during his four years as an undercover narcotics officer.
According to True Detective at least undercover agents generally do not work beats longer than a year. It’s a limitation designed to protect the mental health of cops for whom pretending to be someone else for an extended period time is undoubtedly a traumatic and deeply disorienting experience.
The price of failing as an undercover agent couldn’t be higher. With his trademark spooky absence of emotion Rusty details the elaborate torture methods that drug cartels employ when they uncover a narc.
It prominently involves making the guilty party eat their own face. It only gets worse from there. Early in the episode the jailhouse snitch says that Reggie told him of sinister ceremonies where women and children are sacrificed to someone known only as The Yellow King.
True Detective veers unmistakably into QAnon territory in its grisly, over-the-top violence and brutality but it’s worth noting that the season aired years before the election of Donald Trump.
QAnon consequently borrowed from the lurid sensationalism of pulp entertainment like True Detective rather than the other way around. Only cultists see these ghoulish conspiracies as the secret truth rather than far-fetched fiction.
Undercover work does a number on your psyche and sense of self. So Rusty’s four years undercover help explain why he is a broken man devoid of hope and convinced, not without reason, of the inherently sinful and unforgivable nature of humanity.
Rusty’s partner Marty might think of himself as a good cop and decent family man, albeit with pronounced taste for a little strange on the side but his personal life continues to spiral out of control here.
When his much younger stenographer mistress Lisa (Alexandra Daddario) confronts him at the courthouse about storming into her home and threatening her date in a drunken, jealous rage he turns ice cold and ends a relationship he never should have begun.
An angry Lisa gets revenge by informing Marty’s wife Maggie (Michelle Monaghan) about her husband’s shameless philandering. Because Maggie is played by Michelle Monaghan she is smart and savvy, albeit willing to put up with a lot of her husband’s weaknesses and compulsions for the sake of keeping family together.
But when she is confronted with unmistakable evidence that her husband has been having a sordid affair with a woman young enough to be his daughter she’s had enough.
This, friends, is what you call misce en scene
There’s a great moment where Marty comes home and reads the letter his presumably soon to be ex-wife left him explaining why he’s being kicked out of the house and the family.
A lesser show would have Marty read the words aloud, something that people never actually do in real life, or relayed its contents through voiceover. True Detective respects its audience enough to forego those tropes and instead indirectly convey the content of the letter and its shattering emotional impact exclusively through Harrelson’s anguished response and body language. It’s a quintessential illustration of the old dictum to show rather than tell.
Marty is reduced to sharing an apartment with a partner he gets closer to this episode, both personally and professionally, but that he also still very much seems to hate.
There’s a funny shot of them both in their underwear that made me pine for a sitcom spin-off in the Odd Couple vein where they’re forced to share a small apartment after Marty’s ball and chain gives him the old heave ho and Rusty’s marriage disintegrates in the aftermath of their daughter’s death. Yes, there’s laughter and fun to be had every Tuesday night on Rusty & Marty!
Rusty even talks to Lisa in an attempt to get her to at least consider a reconciliation, something that she finds both deeply unconvincing and disappointing in what it reveals about Rusty’s character and willingness to protect even colleagues he mostly despises.
But the focus in “Who Goes There” is on action. The biker gang Rusty dealt with during his undercover days think that he died in a raid so his cover was never blown. All he has to explain is why and how he seemed to have come back from the dead.
Rusty has to go back to living the life, if only for a little bit and for a very specific purpose but it’s not as is the darkness ever left him or his soul. Things go sideways when the bikers decide to rob a stash house disguised as police officers. This puts Rusty in the strange position of being a police officer pretending to be a drug dealer pretending to be a police officer.
The scene where shit goes down, bullets start flying and bodies start piling up is an exhilarating and adrenaline-pumping virtuoso display of visual style. It’s not surprising that Cary Joji Fukunaga, who directed every episode of the first season, won the Emmy for Best Director for this specific episode.
Rusty and Marty still need to track down Reggie Ledoux so they save Ginger (Joseph Sikora), Rusty’s primary contact within the gang, for the sole purpose of making him take them to their elusive prey.
It’s a shame that the plot finally kicked in hardcore in this episode ofTrue Detective and a show that previously never showed much of an interest in delivering the genre goods starts to feel like a detective show, albeit of the extraordinarily artful and profound variety.
This is crackerjack entertainment as well as timeless, enduring art.
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