With news that Nic Pizzolatto’s HBO deal might someday entail a Season 03 of True Detective, I began ruminating on the show.
S01 was nigh short of a masterpiece, the season’s ending being the largest of its very few weak spots.
S02 was noting short of a disaster.
However, one of the few sequences with permanence is the ‘Frank’s Last Walk’ scene, which takes place towards the end of the season (it may be the final episode of the season; I can’t remember.) If nothing else, this sequence showed that, yes, Vince Vaughn can really act. The sequence’s cumulative ‘stream of consciousness’ effect is part of its Pizzolato’s overarching modernist technique. The potential notion of a posthumous, disembodied mind is influenced by what is widely regarded as on the greatest short stories ever written, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890) by Ambrose Bierce. (Other relatively recent examples of this technique would include Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece Brazil (1985) and the fine horror film The Descent (2005)).
