now I’m watching a lil making of for True Detective but I’m basically done with this season. It was interesting for sure, I liked it. There’s something missing from it that I don’t know.

women with character development and agency for one thing

True, they were all there as male servicing figures (wives, concubines) and achievements to be earned (same but add daughters).

On another note Rust Really carried the whole show and really, really didn’t need Marty. I thought he might need him for his resources and occasionally that was true. He didn’t even need to have him watch his back as he had a sniper out of the blue.

I missed that part too, was the sniper supposed to be his dad??

son I don’t even REMEMBER the sniper

Well, Rust needed Marty as a foil. Marty’s bewildered, irritated presence keeps the audience grounded in the show’s commonplace and reminds us what odd shit Rust really is saying, while at the same time the show lets us see that Rust has a point about some things. So we don’t get sucked too far into Rust’s reality to think about it critically, but we also have some acknowledgement that Rust’s reality is not complete bullshit, which is necessary for the premise of the show to succeed. Marty also serves the useful purpose of being someone for Rust to talk to about what he thinks is going on, rather than Rust having to explain his ideas directly to the audience in a voiceover or something like that.

Plus there’s just the reality that police detectives work in partnered pairs; you can’t have a police detective story without using that device. If Rust weren’t a police detective he wouldn’t have access to the resources he does to investigate the case (and we also need Marty’s string-pulling as a former detective who still has helpful connections because, unlike Rust who burned all his bridges, he has some useful social skills). And Marty is a target of the show’s social criticism, a man who’s supposed to uphold the law but is dishonest and sleazy in his personal life, and complicit in lies and injustice in his professional life, in part because of the police culture of toxic masculinity. True Detective doesn’t give women enough to say or do, but it’s critical of toxic masculinity and that’s a point in its favour for me. 

There are a lot of strange loose ends. For example, there’s a scene that’s supposed to disturb us, in which Marty finds that one of his daughters has set up some dolls in a tableau reminiscent of a gang rape (the first time I watched it I didn’t notice the male doll kneeling in front of the prone female doll with his pants down - I interpreted the tableau of standing male figures round a prone female figure as detectives standing around a murder victim, representing the child knowing too much about what her father’s job involves and dwelling on it morbidly, which at least makes sense). We never found out what the hell that was about. Where did the little girl get the idea? From a movie she shouldn’t have watched, from schoolyard gossip, from something she’d actually witnessed? Was some malign entity acting through the little girl, similar to how Regan begins using swear words her mother is sure she didn’t know before in The Exorcist? It was there to be a disturbing shot that didn’t actually have a background, so far as I could tell.

Right I got that Harrelson had the thankless task of being the straight man to McConna-HEY’s Outer Space Trip. His story kind of bored me but it’s true that it does point a light on toxic masculinity.

Yes the disturbing dolls, I think it was mean to be a “these people experience weirdness and growing pains and things we can’t imagine and yet here they are by dad’s bedside all grown up and looking "normal”“

The sniper’s at the beginning of the last episode with the Sheriff off the boat, telling him all that’s gonna happen if they get hurt, Sheriff doesn’t believe them till the sniper puts a few bullets in his expensive car, really surprising Marty. The sniper is covered in fake leaves and has raggedy long hair and mustache (hence I assumed Rust’s dad but could be the barkeep?)

uh this guy:

Barkeep? Dad? The Stranger from The Big Lebowski?

now I’m watching a lil making of for True Detective but I’m basically done with this season. It was interesting for sure, I liked it. There’s something missing from it that I don’t know.

women with character development and agency for one thing

True, they were all there as male servicing figures (wives, concubines) and achievements to be earned (same but add daughters).

On another note Rust Really carried the whole show and really, really didn’t need Marty. I thought he might need him for his resources and occasionally that was true. He didn’t even need to have him watch his back as he had a sniper out of the blue.

I missed that part too, was the sniper supposed to be his dad??