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Oh Fuck Off

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Oh, True Detective.  True Detective, True Detective, True Detective.  What are we going to do with you?

Spoilers

Season One’s undoubted quality was marred by the stock and shallow nature of the woman characters, by the show’s unrelenting focus on manfeels and manpain and the tortured, disoriented experience of masculinity in a world where the traditional masculine virtues are no longer zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. 

And you actually seem to have taken note of the criticism.  So for Season Two you’ve given us a woman character as co-lead.  She’s one of the three cops whose paths converge at the end of the first episode, and will presumably end up investigating this season’s plot alongside (in some sense) the highway patrolman one who can’t get his willy to go hard (at least in non-abusive situations) and the hard-drinking, miserable, semi-criminal Colin Farrell one.

But her bits of the episode are the weakest by far.  By far.  Noticeably weak, melodramatic, straightforward and rubbish compared to the less-scrutable strands concerning the other two.  So jarringly crap that they almost seem to belong to a different, inferior show.  One of the bits of the Law & Order franchise, for example.

She’s got an unsatisfactory relationship with her needy boyfriend, towards whom she is perfunctory and cold, apparently just using him (not very effectively) for sex.  Aww, poor him.  His girlfriend must have ISSUES of some kind if her primary focus in life isn’t servicing his emotional and penile needs.  (We meet the highway patrolman’s girlfriend later.  Her primary focus in life seems to be servicing his emotional and penile needs.  Funnily enough, there’s no indication at all that she has ISSUES of any kind… aside from pouty jealousy when he leaves her for even 8 seconds.)

Cop woman’s got a schizophrenic younger sister (we know she’s schizophrenic via the highly original and unclunky line “have you gone off your meds again?”) who is hostile towards her.  Cop woman had to look out for when their mother died which led to said younger sister being rebellious towards her and going off the rails, ending up on drugs and petty crime and porn (because, of course, no woman is a sex worker unless she has ISSUES).  Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that on TV before.

The woman cop finds out that her rebellious younger sister is doing porn by happening to raid the place where she happens to be doing porn.  So that’s not contrived at all.

We later learn of the underlying problem with Cop Woman’s life, and guess what… it all traces back to a man!  Guess which man.  Go on, guess.  Yep, you guessed it: Daddy.  She’s got Daddy issues!  Colour me fucking astonished.

You know how we find out about said daddy issues?  She goes to see her partly-estranged father during the episode as a result of picking up a missing person case directly linked to his hippy self-help commune.  So she goes to investigate (’cos, on TV, detectives are always allowed to investigate cases involving their own families) and ends up having a fraught chat with Daddy… during which we learn, in dialogue so leaden and expository that it belongs in the early scenes of an 80s Bond film, that she holds him responsible for her mother’s suicide (what a fucking surprise) and that she joined the police as an act of rebellion against his hippy lifestyle (again, unprecedented in TV drama).…

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“Go on, tell them,” says Jacko to Sean. 

“Tell them what? I’ll tell them nothing. They’re not people like us, they’re just a bunch of sardines.”

The fish people in the water below do not like this.

“You heard me,” jeers Sean, “Cold-blooded fishes. You haven’t got a drop of good red blood in your body.”

They don’t like that either.  They’ve been surgically altered by the regime of Professor Zaroff, an old Nazi scientist who was employed by the Western powers before he disappeared (it’s implicit) and who is now running the underwater city of Atlantis (the Nazis were obsessed with Atlantis).  He has forcibly turned an army of his workers into fish, complete with gills and fins and big round eyes, so that they can do the underwater jobs.  (They just don’t make mad scientists like Zaroff any more.)

“A flatfish from Galway would have more guts in them than that bunch!” Sean continues.  Oh yeah, I forgot to say… Sean’s Irish, hence his “gift of the gab” (sigh).

The fish people start throwing things at him.

“All right, all right, all right,” laughs Sean, “Oh, calm down and listen. Listen, will you?”

The fish people decide to hear him out.  Presumably because he’s like them: a man captured and exploited by Zaroff’s regime.  He hasn’t been surgically mutilated, but he’s been put to work in the Atlantean mines.  (By now there should be no need for me to reiterate the connection between surgery and capital, the way the evisceration and infibulation of the human body expresses anxieties about life in capitalism, about how wage labour cuts into your bodily autonomy and your life and your physical freedom, dissecting your time and… oh look, I’m reiterating.)

“Look, you supply all the food for Atlantis, right?” asks Sean rhetorically, “It can’t be stored, right? It goes rotten in a couple of hours. That’s why Zaroff has you working like slaves night and day, right? Well, has it never occurred to your little fish brains to stop that supply of food? Feed yourselves but starve Atlantis, eh? What do you think would happen then? Well now is your chance. Will you do it, or will you stay fish slaves for the rest of your lives? You’re men, aren’t you? Well, start the blockade right now!”

Again, this is workplace agitation.  The jokes at the fish people’s expense are clearly rhetoric.  Sean whips them up.  But the power is theirs.

I won’t attempt to describe what comes next.  The fish people’s underwater strike is indescribable.  And that’s good.  It must be seen to be believed… and by that I don’t mean ‘believed’ in the sense of believing that there were actually fish people who actually swam around in Atlantis.  I mean ‘believed’ in the sense of believing that it ever actually got made and broadcast.  To us, now, it looks like a transmission from another planet.  Again, that’s good.  The planet we live on now is pretty boring compared this one.

It’s a relic of a lost time, when the spectacle could still express material relations of struggle, and express them materially. …

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