“Everything’s ending. Time to wake up.”
Somebody please tell us that was all a dream and that we really can wake up now, hopefully to a world that’s at least a little less terrible than the one we’ve been living in for the past eight weeks.
We’re also hoping that world is a little louder, because we just spent an hour and a half trying to decipher the half sentences everyone was whispering at each other. Speak up, people! You’re on TV!
OK, so we’ve got our gripes but we actually didn’t hate that finale like we thought we might. Sure, we threw up our hands and whispered, “WTF?” a few more times than we normally would during a thing we enjoy, but it wouldn’t be a True Detective episode if we didn’t do that at least once.
For most of the characters in this dang season, it took until this finale for us give any sh-ts about any of them. We were just starting to care about Paul before he was murdered last week, and things went somewhat the same way for both Ray and Frank this week. We started to care, our hearts started to break, and then they were murdered. Figures.
As for who killed Caspere, we found out pretty early on that it was Lenny, the movie set photographer, who had done the deed, with help from his sister…Eric/Laura! Turns out Lenny is the other kid orphaned in the diamond heist, and he had gone a little overboard when he discovered his working girl sister at the sex house with Caspere. But that’s not all!
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Lenny was also the guy in the bird mask who shot Ray, and now he’s after Holloway. Ray goes to intercept Lenny’s meeting with Holloway and learns some more pertinent information: Lenny’s mom was pregnant with Caspere’s kid when she was killed, and she and Caspere also had another kid, named Erica/Laura.
This set Lenny off, and started a fight that ended with both Lenny and Holloway dead, with Ray and Ani on the run.
The two lovebirds, who started off the episode with some post-coital smoking and sharing of rape-related miseries, met up with Frank in a secret room above the bar to devise a plan that involves Frank, Ray, and a whole lot of guns aimed at Osip and the Catalyst group in general.
The plan is surprisingly successful, and both Frank and Ray head out their separate ways unharmed with a lot of cash. Frank heads off to secure a few things before attempting to meet Jordan, and Ray is planning to meet Ani. Of course, however, he has to stop and see his son first.
They have a touching moment where they salute each other across a playground, and then Ray discovers a tracker on his car, meaning he can’t go back to Ani.
Frank, meanwhile, ends up being carjacked by those pesky drug dealers who aren’t so happy all his clubs burned down. They take him into the desert, stab him, and leave him to die, which he does…very slowly, and after hallucinating most of the people he’s ever known.
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Ray tries to evade Lieutenant Burris and a police force who think they’re on the hunt for a murderer (but not the murderer Ray actually is), but it doesn’t work, and they catch up to him with lots of guns. Meanwhile, Ani and cool bartender Felicia got on a boat for freedom.
So, Vince got stabbed in the desert while Ray got shot at in a forest, Ani stared at the ocean, and Paul lay surrounded by dirt or more likely a refrigerated cabinet in the morgue. Ah, nature.
A montage quickly informed us that Paul got a highway named after him, Ray was deemed responsible for his murder along with Davis’, the damn railway opened, and Tony Chessani was named the mayor of Vinci, while Ray’s ex-wife tearfully opened an envelope to discover that he was indeed that red-headed kid’s real father. Shucks!
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A year-ish later, Ani’s filling in that reporter from the Times on everything that happened. Then, she takes what appears to be her baby from Jordan (because OF COURSE both Paul and Ray were going to be fathers before they died), ties the baby to her chest, slips a knife into her boot, and the two women head out to somewhere that doesn’t appear to be a nice vacation.
And that’s that. It’s all over. We need to watch that entire season about three more times to actually understand what all happened, but we’ve never been less excited about rewatching anything, so maybe we just won’t.
Maybe we’ll just let True Detective season two be what it was: eight hours of confusion, exhaustion, and indecipherable whispering, all ending in about as satisfying a conclusion as such a chaotic fever dream could ever hope to achieve, unless you were hoping to see Paul’s poor girlfriend/baby mama again, ’cause that ain’t gonna happen.
And now we’re off to flood the hashtag for #TrueDetectiveseason3!
What did you think about that finale? Sound off in the comments!
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