The True Detective is trapped deep within a cave, and we are forced to watch its shadows play upon the wall

I've read so many rave reviews of this season I thought I was going insane. This review was cathartic.

I condone Nic taking the piss out of the new season. I think creators should derided their stuff being handed off by corporate suits to be dragged through the mud and turned into utter shit that’s out of their control.

I had to go back a re-watch season 1 to cleanse my pallet after STRUGGLING to get through season 4. The first season had such a dark, chilling, realistic feeling to it. This season feels like it tried so hard to be that, and it just completely missed the mark in every single facet. I've never been so frustratingly fascinated at such a departure in quality from such a ground breaking show.

Also, I think the episode in the first season where Rust and Marty are going back and forth telling the cover-up story about what went down when they murdered those two child traffickers is a god damn cinematic work of art IMO.

7:35 I’m glad you mentioned how two-dimensional all of the characters felt. They didn’t feel like people. They felt like they were checkmarks on a list.

This new season made me realise, True Detective Season 2 wasn't actually that bad after all.

I feel that True Detective never existed after Season 1. Nic Pizzolatto had an awesome southern gothic story to tell, growing up in the setting of Louisiana. The later anthology seasons feel like stories trying to chase that same theme of the first season, which doesn't fit so well in other settings. I do like aspects of the later seasons, but I feel Nic didn't plan for future titles under the same title.

It turned out the truest detectives are just the friends we made along the way

My favorite part was when the cleaning lady said, "Look at me - I'm the true detective, now."

It honestly feels like the entire show was written by chatGPT. Everything is so obviously shallow and childishly simplistic. So ironic given the fact that one of the goals Lopez had was to finally tackle important social issues that the previous shows apparently in her eyes avoided. Modern film makers don't understand people, they only see them as simplistic caricatures and that's how their art looks like. It's worse because this season had so much going for it. Amazing setting, competent cast, almost guaranteed creative freedom,...

I still don’t understand why they decided to keep the tongue footage in. It makes no sense, given the ultimate ending with the cleaning ladies. How did Annie Kowtok’s FRESH tongue end up in Tsalal??

On the point about Pizzolatto's behaviour, saying you don't condone it and then using the analogy you did, is kind of fucking wild. If anything justifies his behaviour it's exactly that situation. They didn't take his baby and raise it, they killed and are puppeteering its corpse.

the most egregious part of night country to me was how it was concluded. The whole theme of the earlier seasons of true detective was solving the case but still grappling with the larger unknowable social forces that create these cases in the first place. In night country the ending is too neat and sanitized. Ultimately this was an incredibly reactionary tv show whose ending serves to promote the status quo of individual good actors defeating the bad guys. annie's death being avenged rightfully by a group of aggrieved individuals, jodie fosters character covering that and the cop's death up. Them somehow managing to shut down the mine and save the town. And they all lived happily ever after. So shit

I didn’t even realize the connections to Mare of Easttown. Wow! It’s a lot alike but Mare of Easttown was waaaay better

The Dyatlov pass has an explanation: the slab avalanche - mentioned as such in the show. the problem is that the scientists do not have the same marks of crushing and you can`t have an avalanche on a flat surface.

the problem with referencing the dyatlov pass incident is that it already has the likeliest explanation called a "slab avalanche" which is caused by the slight incline in the slope where they pitched their tent. by pitching their tent in that particular incline, the winds at the time blew just enough snow downward, causing the "slab" of snow to build up right over where the tent was pitched, and that "slab" of snow literally just fell on top of the tent. they likely would have still been alive the, but they had to get out of the crushed tent and into the blizzard, where they died of the elements. their gouged out eyes / faces were likely just caused by animals. the show otoh has no meaningful explanation why the men died of cardiac arrest, as in, a sudden death and not hypothermia.

It was so bad that 5 mins in I had to check if I was watching the right show.

It may not have been the kind of childish and amateurish abomination Netflix originals are, but the fact that they ruined such amazing foundations means that Night Country is arguably WORSE than something like Emily In Paris or Sex Education. True Detective and Jodie Foster are self-explanatory. Alaska is at least the second best setting in the series. Dyatlov Pass references are really fascinating. And yet: incoherence, nonsense, noble savages and absurdly stupid, weak men.

"Well acted". If every character was meant to be unlikeable.

Fiona Shaw was wasted, that’s certain.

I fully back seasons 1-3. Season for is just true defective. Critic reviews tend to be rage bait shitting on "white men" who say anything against it when there's plenty of non white non men who call it outright ass

It was - at best - okay? But what really pi**ed me off were the "I clapped"-moments and references to the much better season one, like the swirl motive or talk about the Yellow King and flat circles. That said: True detective is, as you said, at its best, when it doesn't explain its mysteries. This is why I love the ending of season two when Rust describes his near death experience, when he felt that his daughter was there, calling for him. The scene is VERY ambiguous. I never felt comfort in what Rust described. I was frightened. I thought: What if there actually IS something out there that just waits for us getting closer to death and then deceives us to follow it into the "light", something like a Cthulhu-flytrap for us pesky humans. Lopez is the wrong showrunner for another season. True Detective is dead to me after this abomination.

Ive already mourned this series seeing as Issa Lopez is reportedly coming back for season 5

In my mind, there is no true detective save for season one. The other seasons are entirely separate shows and entities. Season one got out all of the things the show was trying to say because that's how it was intended originally. HBO just insisted that they make more seasons because they have a new smash hit critical darling to farm. It's fine if you enjoy or get something out of the other seasons but let's quit pretending that it'll ever hit the highs of season 1.

certain is a lot of police corruption and incompetence...spoilers: .they either are killing people themselves and hiding the bodies, assaulting civilians over simply being flipped off, or letting people get away murder and assault based on the criminals' race, gender, political beliefs, and sexual orientation. Then for their investigation skills, they don't even bother until much later to get finger prints.....which rather quickly solved the whole dumb thing besides the whole letting criminals go, included being perfectly fine with what amounts to an underage teenager creating child pornography.

"Season one was just lightning in a bottle". I think that sums it up. Maybe HBO should stop making True Detective and spend their time and money on something new. All we have today are sequels, prequels and remakes. No one wants to do anything original. I am sure you are right, and Issa López had a script with no connection to the True Detective story. Sadly the a holes at HBO are cowards and can't risk anything on something new. We live in sad times.

The premise, setting and Jodie Foster had me so excited for this. I turned it off halfway through episode 3. The magical realism is laughable, the ghosty scares hacky, shallow characters, clunky exposition, ect ect. Not to mention the shit student film lighting makes it look like a backlot green screen most of the time, completely wasting the fact that they all froze their asses off on location! The whole execution was bad without even factoring in the idea that it’s True Detective.

jodie foster's performance made this season watchable. but in retrospect, i am never going to re-watch this. such a terrible ending with terrible execution. it's only 6 eps, so the showrunner and writers should have trimmed down significantly on the subplots. better yet, it should have just been its own show called "night country" with no connection to true detectve. all the freaking spirals amounted to pretty much nothing. had it been its own show, they could have gone 100% on the direction of cosmic horror without having to be obligated to have a "rational" true detective ending.

The show really should have just been a limited mini series and that's it. I tried with season 4 and just felt like I was watching X-Files

I'm sure someone else has already said this somewhere but the Dyatlov Pass Incident has been (somewhat recently) forensically "solved," and they actually directly reference this on the show. The cause of the real-life incident was a slab avalanche-the same thing that is cited as the cause of death for the researchers in the show.

I enjoyed your critique as much as anything I recall watching in recent times. Your delivery is wonderful, if I may say so - insightful and measured but never unkind. I came across your channel only today but am newly subscribed, etc. I have even clicked on notifications. Thank you. ps I couldn’t agree more with your analysis. (For anyone familiar with the pudding dish, I myself think that “True Detective: Half-Baked Alaska” more aptly describes this non-hot mess.)

Can a piece of fiction be considered a sequel if it doesn't have any narrative relation to the original?

Great review mate, just subscribed to your channel!

Just watched one episode of it and switched off ..... all the clichees and things like in any bad Netflix movie and soo unlikeable characters... who cares what happened to the dead people...

One reason Season 1 is hard to top is because you have 2 Hollywood actors giving what is quite possibly their best on-screen performances on a TV-show.

Started off interesting but I wish they wouldn’t have made any connections to season 1 bc none of them made sense. The ending was… meh whatever. Nothing will ever compare to season 1 tho.

Chatgpt can you write a true detective story about good indigenous women kill bad scientist men

I started watching first season again last night maybe for the 15th times. And every second, every line, every scene of the show is just fucking mental orgasm...the pace, the story, the story telling, the amazing editing style, IT IS JUST SHEER PERFECTION...

Great review

Very entertaining analysis.

Time is a flat circle...or something.

very solid take

The think I don’t see anyone talk about is the fact to the key to Season 1 is the director, who is absent after season 1.

The acting wasn’t that bad? Sir, I refuse to be gaslit like this. The acting is atrocious.

There was one scene I actually liked, when Pete's father described saving him as a child from death. You actually felt for the guy, he was a good father. But then they fucked that up as well.

...so you're saying Season 5 of STRANGERS THINGS is gonna be mediocre too? (*PSSSSSSSST* Looking forward that inevitable review & this one was unexpectedly needed),

This video was not recommended to me, nor was it in my sub box. Wonder if "killed" in the title is messing up the reach. Either way, good vid

Couple of points to take: 1. Season 1 was a masterpiece because Pizzaman was constantly writing/updating and changing the writing until he managed to get HBO to sign off on the show. The writing has been something that Pizzaman was working for quite a long time and it shows. 2. HBO managed to get Cary Joji Fukunaga to direct the entire show and he was a very underrated director at that time. 3. The character chemistry between Rust and Marty is a perfect pairing for season 1. Season 2 was a complete utter shitshow because Pizzaman managed to kick Fukunaga off the show and decided to write the entire season 2's writing in a span of year. Pretty sure this is the reason why HBO told him to get off the writing and just keep him as producer for season 3 and season 4.

Man, you found a really long and convoluted way of saying this season just sucked ass.

This show should’ve been a miniseries. It’s as simple as that.

I liked this season.

When you feel like your valuable time was wasted then it was a terrible show.

Thanks

Maybe the True Detective was the friends we made along the flat circle (which is time viewed from a higher dimension)

I've been binge-watching your videos, and they just keep getting better. Kudos!

I watch the first episode and give up this shiaaat

Sidebar: How can you say there’s no defense for time being a flat circle having been mentioned in season 4 when it’s the literal climax of the series? We see at the end that the woman the guy was seeing when he was shaking was the cop in the future. People just want to willfully hate things.

Before watching this here is my two cents on True Detective. After the first season when it was announced a second season would be ready to go by summer i thought that was an insanely short time frame considering it took Nick Pizollato over ten years to get the first season is game shape. I remember after the first episode of the second season thinking how it felt like a first draft with Vince Vaughn working hard to make lemonade out of crab apples. This to me was the worst decision Nick could have made. It was arrogant and delusional…..i dont think this show recovered from that decision.

The in universe explanation for the existence of the AI tour poster would hold more water if "making an ai generated metal poster for boomers out of boredom" sounded like something a real teenager would actually do.

Also, I can’t believe you praised foster acting. She did a terrible job with terrible material but Reis is a boxer and she carried what little was left of this show on her back

Cary Joji Fukunaga is the reason Season 1 is good. Every other season proves it.

Literally the only piece of detective work that was done by the main characters this entire season was checking the hatch of the ice cave entrance for prints. After which the entire story was explained to them in great detail by other characters. Any other shred of evidence or police work was done by Pete, who got cucked into killing his dad after he was kicked out of his house by his wife for working late on a multiple homicide for less than two weeks, or by Qavik who found the only person of interest and inflicted them of what the spiral meant. The same spiral that was very heavy handedly used by the marketing team to ensure people who liked season 1 would even watch an episode of season 4. Even the season 5 announcement used the spiral. People praise the “setting” of this show, it was filmed in Iceland, with fake snow and ice. In fact you only see a characters breath outside twice this entire season, and one of those times it’s CGI. This season had poor writing, poor execution, poor dialogue, and characters that were entirely unlikable. Danvers is a racist, abusive, philandering piece of shit, and Navarros whole gimmick is that she has hereditary schizophrenia and she can fight grown men. Also, how does a uniformed officer pass a psyche eval with schizophrenia and get to keep her facial piercings while on duty?

For me, the big flaw in this season is that we should feel the impact of an unknowable dark force but still get human size criminals to arrest, driven mad by it. This was not well executed.

The second season was comedy. Not sure what everyone expected. There will never be another season like season 1 and even that jumped the shark a bit. Jesus get over it.

The only True Detective is season one.

10:13 When you begin your explanation with, “This idea is…” maybe it’s time to admit your ideas aren’t very good. 🤷🏾‍♂️

You hit the nail on the head when you said it’s a product. All it takes is looking at her past work. Here in mexico Lopez is mostly “known” for putting out one mediocre cookie cutter rom-com after another pretty much the entirety of her career. The only real exception being a couple movies about young people struggling with the reality of cartels which has become a cliche since damn near every other up and coming aspiring director wanting to be taken seriously chooses that subject matter to make some really hollow social commentary akin to the acab stuff in Night Country. These two are the kinds of movies that plague so-called mexican cinema and anything else sadly struggles to get screening slots at cinemas, let alone funding. So ultimately Lopez has just pivoted from one kind of product to another and her aspirations are evidently not artistic.

I have an idea: How about they stop releasing True Detective seasons? It worked as a mini series, it can just stop. Is as if they want to match the bad writing of Game of Thrones S7 & S8 with each new season.

I have an idea for a new season. True Detective- The Early Years. In the early 1930s H P Lovecraft became obsessed with the Mary Pickford film Sparrows. A movie about a farm south of New Orleans were unwanted babies are abandoned. Lovecraft had to come to New Orleans to see if it really existed. They could do a fictional account of a true story

No payoffs to all the setups. Bummer.

Its kinda funny how script writers/studio execs these days are more obsessed with race than Houston Steward Chamberlain

Issa Lopez is terrible. Her excuse for being caught using AI is sad, and her attention to detail sucks

Season 4 promised too much than it could deliver that even Ms Foster cannot save the day, ugh… I should say save the night.

I feel like there was 10 plot lines that were under developed, as if this was meant for 10 episodes and hours of plot was left on the cutting room floor. And the lack of any sinister villain really leaves no lasting impact. The murder mystery ended up being done by characters we knew nothing about that hadn’t been in the show since the first episode. There were countless supernatural aspects that led to nothing. And the end pretty much romanticizes the suicide of the mentally ill. Horrible season

Wōmen

Did anyone noticed that every conversation is repeated at least twice.

🍻

People need to take a step back and stop the whining. TD season 1 was just a lucky mix of all the elements in a show managing to work supremely well together, adding up to an actual masterpiece. The other seasons are all just piggybacking of s1's success, they were never meant to exist, it's just a network trying to make a franchise out of thin air. Comparing any of them to s1 is just pointless at this point. Be thankful we even got that one season and stop watching the new ones if you expect them to recapture even 1% of s1's magic, that's just naive and whiny.

Great video. It was never a terrible show or anything, just mediocre. Frustrating to see it at a 92 on RT but it’s not the first time a virtue signaling script won praise by the critics.

All the hate for S4, at least I'll remember it unlike S3 or to be honest S2 apart from who was in it.

It is an abomination. Can anyone explain the trailer they find to me full of sculpture/art that beckons back to S1? I don't believe this was ever explained at all.

The only thing that matters, is that it's about two strong and independent women, who need no man. 😅

Season 1 is arguably the greatest season of television ever. Seasons 2 and 3 were still very good, just not all-time great. Season 4 isn't even the same genre, and is extremely low in quality.

🤗🙏💯

I really thought that season 1 was an anomaly. Like someone said in the comments most of what made S1 so great was Matthew. I really thought that Jodie would do that for S4. The writing was solid in S1 but has declined and i had no idea how it would be for S4 but i thought Jodie is that kind of actress that always makes a film or show way better than it would have been without her. She can play unlikable Characters with a so much charm or humanity that you actually love watching them. The Brave One and Inside Man are examples of that. But here she was just so unlikable that she wasn't compelling. And since no one else was likable either it was up to the story and that was terriblle. This made me go and watch Wind River again 😂😂😂 Not exactly the same thing but some similarities and it was so good

Appreciate you tackling what’s contributed to the continuing decline of this show without hiding behind “wOmAn bAd!” like a lot of other channels. This series has lost it since season 1 ended, but night country really stunk. As others have mentioned, best thing night country did was get me to rewatch season 1, which is probably giving hbo bad ideas

Top of the Lake, eh? x

True Detective Season 1 - masterful lightning in a bottle. Excellent writing, plotting, pacing, dialogue, mythology, and acting. True Detective Season 2 - convoluted and confusing with too many subplots and minor characters, but ultimately bearing the TD universe DNA, and the story is interesting. Season 3 - return to season 1 form. Interesting characters and story, dialogue was believable and story was mysterious. Season 4 - this doesnt feel like True Detective honestly. Too much agenda and not enough story. Dialogue was stilted, poor writing, plotting wasn't tight, no true mythology in the story, just a lot if lifting of ideas from season 1. Love(d) Jodi Foster, excellent actor, probably the best thing about this season, but that's it. It's too bad. I think season 4 has probably assassinated the True Detective franchise.

there is one one true season of true detective, the rest of the seasons are like the jarhead sequels, not even related or supposed to be a true sequel to the original...

I enjoyed the first few episodes actually really enjoyed them. It kinda fell apart unfortunately. I thought the setting was pretty sweet though very 30 days of night. I really thought it was going to go full lovecraftian horror with all those bodies together. Unfortunate how it ended up being just a bleh story. Could have been an awesome cosmic horror.

True Detective never managed to keep the quality of the first season. Compare this to Fargo TV show that have at least 3 excelent seasons, one average and one kinda bad, but even that bad fourth season of Fargo is a masterpiece compared to this.

You lost me at "this season is not a complete abomination"

What bothers me is backward engineering criticism/interpretation of season 1 to make night country seem consistent or even an improvement, e.g. “season one also had ghosts”.

I seriously wonder if certain shows aren’t being watched while they’re being made: did ANYONE watch the dailies for this dreck while it was being filmed? I knew this would suck right from the first shot: spooked caribou stampede off a cliff, a hunter goes “huh, weird” and we have no clue when this is happening, or what the last sunset of the year has to do with anything. Poorly written drama. Poorly conceived characters. Rambling subplots that added nothing but uninteresting time waste. How many boyfriends and ex-husbands did the Chief have anyway, how many kids or ex-kids or step-kids? Just trying to figure out who was who and how they were related was puzzling as hell. Terrible show. No way could I finish it, and based on what I’ve read, I missed mothing. If I’d known this show would include a ton of supernatural mumbo-jumbo to explain things or help fill in gaps, I’d have never watched. That’s as tired a trope as The Big Bad Company vs. The Local Townsfolk. 🙄

Who killed True Detective? The usual suspects. Stunning and brave crowd.

What of you took Wind River and made it bad.

Fair criticisms, Taylor. I wanted to like this season so much, but they lost me with the last two episodes of this season. As you said, this was extremely mediocre. Great video

oMg iTs ŵOĶè

wow a new bad season of The Terror