I think the worst thing about the “puzzle shows” is that they give certain alpha viewers a phony sense of mastery about what the story is supposed to be about. It’s fun to speculate — I enjoy doing it — but I honestly don’t care if my interpretation is correct or even accurate. It is, at the end of the day, just a television show. If the writers aren’t as clever or original as anything hypothesized on, it’s not that big a deal, as long as they don’t drop the ball completely. If The X-Files proved anything, it’s that mythology is, in the end, a dead weight waiting to happen.
HBO’s first season of True Detective is over and done with. The past two months have seen all manner of internet speculation on what the show is about. So much subtext, so many easter eggs, but on the surface it was an incredibly simple show. That, in itself was slightly disappointing given the kind of theories we all had buzzing around it. However, TD’s master mind Nic Pizzolatto did warn us to keep those in check. After all the discussion about the metafictional mind-effery had on the show, the plot in its own terms was pretty pedestrian. It’s only the effect on the characters that really elevated it to something great.
I tend to be nihilist in my thinking (nowhere near Rust’s level), and I found the ending to be tremendous. That this man, who finally looks and enters into the abyss, has it look back at him and offer only love—that was amazing. Yes, I may dislike some things in life, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a small core of me that desires for there to be happiness and love and light.
If you take the ending another way, all of Rust’s thinking is just chemical processes in his brain. His near-death experience was another, and it just shifted how he thinks. We’re all just electrical synapses at the end of the day, and his got a bit of a rewrite. It’s not unheard of, nor is it trite. Rust is HUMAN, not some robotic Nihilist Man. He’s subject to the same changes we all are.
I felt the humanization of Rust was, in effect, him “taking off his mask.” He had this strong nihilism going through the eight episodes, and in the end what he was revealed to be was a long-grieving father. Rust’s revelation doesn’t feel like a betrayal of his character as much as it feels like someone who, after a long, long time, has found a way to move beyond the tragedy that broke him. That felt…Satisfying.
I also think it would have been HORRIBLE if there had been some “big bad” at the end—it would fall into the same trope so many video games do—you’re the only one that can save the world from the ultimate evil! Evil is banal, evil is dirty, evil is inbred and ignorant and wears nasty boxer shorts around its sty of a house, evil has more powerful friends and relatives that shield it when it does what it does. Evil may set up elaborate death scenes, but those people were killed in a lonely, scary, dirty place by a man who has something broken in his brain and uses other reasons to justify what he does, and what was done to him. Evil is, at the end of the day, boring. It all comes down to those synapses again—evil is just people whose are seriously broken. No handwavium in that.
-Dagobot
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