Review of True Detective Season 4

0 stars

Yes, True Detective: Night Country is terrible, please don’t watch it. I suffered two episodes to save your succumbing to the worst of modern entertainment. As a sort of meta-cuck porn it is of some interest, as newly annointed “showrunner” Issa López, a talentless amateur, systematically ruins Nic Pizzolatto’s creation (such as it was), defecates on its corpse, and salts the earth it once occupied.

I will get to ridiculing the show, and making some educated guesses as to where the plot is going, but allow me to take a moment to place True Detective’s auteur in showrunner royalty, for, despite his talents, Pizzolatto is but a pretender to a throne occupied by Vince Gilligan, who earned the crown with Breaking Bad and then proceeded to raise the bar for episodic series with the outstanding Better Call Saul.

True Detective Season 1 doesn’t hold up as well as either of Gilligan’s works. It’s too slow, and whatever vague counter-narrative message it seeks to convey is drowned in style and tone and latex age-reduction masks. Season 2 has its moments but is dragged down by Vince Vaughn trying to play a tough guy, ultimately degenerating to incoherence.

Still, Pizzolatto is royalty, a real academic, as opposed to a hedge knight like Taylor Sheridan who rudely brays approved messaging as he piles on slaughter climaxing in more slaughter.

To carry the metaphor too far: no Auteur is safe from our French Revolution; neck intact, perhaps, but penises will roll. Joss Whedon, former top auteur and sycophantic revolutionary bootlicker, was an early castrato of the new regime despite constant assurance, baked into every project, that he was a testosterone-free feminist who wanted only to tell women’s stories. A sad tale indeed, yet Joss managed to put out genius content (for Buffy The Vampire Slayer IS genius) even in thrall to the revolution, imagine what he could have achieved as a free man!

I don’t know much about Pizzolatto other than unlike Whedon, he tries to avoid the shuck and jive routine and has dared emit, in minimal syllables quickly retracted, words clearly indicating his distaste for NIGHT COUNTRY. Perhaps he still has a penis, but surely it has withered and retracted with some permanence following his treatment by the social justice warriors at HBO.

First, they ruined True Detective Season 3 by forcing an absolute vacuum of an actor into the lead role, a man whose talent is playing a rock, a man without facial animation. They did this, these revolutionary HBO producers, because their ability to understand ethics or art or most anything has been destroyed, replaced with the Marxist cudgel, the dual category which defines all: oppressor and victim. There is no such thing as talent. That bobbing head got on TV by trodding over some poor sucker, and all we can do about this sorry state of affairs is give his victim a chance to trod the trodder. White men actors like “Tom Hardy” think they’re so talented, pretending they’ve earned top billing with “method acting” and such, but they are only exercising the violence of privilege.

To prove my last paragraph, and their own bonafides, True Detective Season 3’s producers last-minute swapped Mahershala Ali - a black man who refuses to act - into the role Pizzolatto had written for a top white actor. To add insult to injury, the revolution subsequently funded a massive media campaign to imprint how fucking amazing an actor this guy is! Why, he’s so restrained! They don’t even believe in great acting, but these assholes amuse themselves by making you gush over a stroke victim with failed facial musculature.

Admit it, you are made uncomfortable by my denigration of the widely-praised bipoc with the ethnic name that you are so proud of knowing how to pronounce.

Perhaps Ali is only another puppet dancing to strings held by boomers like Bill Ayers, blithely twitching along with the sadistic final stages of clownworld revolution. Given such crudely effective tools with which to earn my fortune, I might do the same.

True Detective Season 3 might have been watchable if not for Mahershala Ali (but can you pronounce his REAL name: Mahershalalhashbaz? He changed it for you, whitey, still oppressing a black man I see). The alzheimer’s concept was interesting - if the leading man could effectively portray a pre-alzheimer’s period, before the eyes grew vacant and the words reduced to grunting.

And it had Pizzolatto, who probably got suckered into a euphemized, academicized, version of revolutionary motivation I outlined above, because he committed hard to kissing Ali’s ass, as hard as any NPC critic would go:

Now, seeing Pizzolatto all but claims Ali browbeat him into the role, and Ali’s first film credit is for something called “Making Revolution”, we could paint glorious interracial cuckoldry imagery, were we so inclined.

But the struggle session that is Season 3 failed to diminish Pizzolatto’s masculinity to the satisfaction of the Equity Commission, so it was decreed his show be turned over to the ladies, who had some really clever ideas!

Clever like: Jodie Foster plays a typical cranky uptight hollywood christian, she’s sort of a racist because she doesn’t believe in the ancient gaea spirit like the natives, but she has her technology and fingerprints and such and she’s sort of like Scully from x-files crossed with Archie Bunker.

She has her own song, a bluesy riff sadly reminiscent of The Wire, with lyrics reminiscent of 70’s porn literally describing the character as she works the case: “I got my state of the art technology, my wires all crossed, thanks to the Lord above” is but a sampling of the sort of lyrics lovingly composed by Issa Lopez herself in two minutes after a couple bong rips.

DId I mention Jodie Foster can still fuck the testosterone right out of a man?

Jodie Foster’s partner, Queen Latifah (de-aged), is super native but doesnt believe in gaea around her people, only around Jodie Foster. Something of a schizo really. She too sucks the masculinity from her prey as she takes her pleasure - consent not required:

It’s necessary this hapless pair - when not fucking the pain away - vomit misdirection as if to attempt doing a man’s detective work, Issa Lopez desperately trying to keep us from drawing the inevitable conclusion that evil capitalist miners (who are literally poisoning AND enslaving the natives, but are of zero interest in a multiple homicide of the very saintly multinational volunteers who they loathe and detest and would murder in a heartbeat) did it. Spoiler alert, though I haven’t got there yet.

Truly, the show spoils itself in an early scene setting up the soon-to-be-killed arctic outpost NGO do-gooders (with a lot of stolen The Thing ‘82 valor to try and make it interesting). Gaea is hardly going to kill this bunch of NON-AMERICANS?

They even have that one flag hanging from the ceiling there that the yokels are free to MISTAKE for a US flag.

We are supposed to take the hint that the Native Spirit god or whatever is doing all this evil shit, until maybe episode 6, and everyone is gonna be real coy and just drop hints about HER SCARINESS HAS AWAKENED and BUT MORE SEX

Plenty of non-sequitur upending the patriarchy moments by these Uberfraulein.

The detectives are distracted by their addiction to draining the lifeforce from men by sexual congress, to harvest testosterone or adrenochrome or something. Queen Latifah in particular can destroy any multiple of men while in a roid rage, which is built up by draining Jason Momoa, then unleashed upon the scores of toughs who dare to spew misogyny at the bar. There is no time for “investigation of a multiple homicide”.

Eventually we will meander our way thus to a shocking and life-changing revelation that it was the MINER BOSS, along with the COMPROMISED ACADEMIC WHO EVEN JODIE FOSTER WOULDNT FUCK AND HE STANDS IN FRONT OF A FUCKING US FLAG WOULD YOU BELIEVE IT, who perverted gaea’s secretions into a nasty poison the better to genocide eskimos with, but in the words of Tool: Mom’s gonna fix it all soon … mom’s coming round to put it back the way it ought to be! EARTH MOTHER THAT IS AND FRANKLY YOU DON’T QUITE GET IT, MAYNARD J. KEENAN, BEING A MAN.

Oh, I tease, but TD:NC is so much edgier than I describe because gaea is gonna make these villains look like amateurs when she comes at them. There may even be collateral damage as earth mother blows out the bloodiest period you ever saw.

Or perhaps there are multiple interpretations and Issa Lopez cannot be pinned to such simplistic thinking. That’s why the True Detectives will learn nothing and just gape jadedly at gaea’s final blood orgy marking the winter solstice or whatever, and walk away shaking their heads. Too many interpretations to even bother oneself with, so Lopezian!

The true detective, detects nothing.