True Detective – True Drama

Posted on April 30th, 2014 by Tim Aldiss

I am a huge Mad Men fan and was a huge Breaking Bad fan (and before them West Wing, et al.) and felt compelled (for the first time) to write something about this extraordinary drama unfolding before my eyes.

TD S01 E04 – SPOILER ALERT!

This is the episode where everything starts to unravel and we suddenly dive deep into the rabbit hole of Rust’s past.

Both leads have such a great story to tell – Marty on the down and Rust on the up.

The episode opens with the news of Marty’s affair reaching his wife. When Marty returns home to find her gone his first line of action is to get more aggressively into the case by following his lead to a rave and getting heavy with the heavies.

As Rust learns from Marty of the biker gang’s involvement in the case he suddenly realises he has the opportunity to go back into his former undercover drugs cop role and seems to relish it.

But it’s the great scene in the bar that is the pivotal moment in the episode, and indeed the series, as we see Marty’s frailty and vulnerability come up sharp against Rust’s hard world realism. Marty doesn’t have a moment to digest his situation or plan the right course of action, but instead (along with an ever-increasing drinking session) accuses Rust of bringing his situation on.

“You are like the Michael Jordan of being a son-of-a-bitch”!

Then we slip into Rust’s plan, and of course having snapped Marty out of his self-loathing marital situation everything falls in behind Rust’s “off-the-book” approach.

Lucinda Williams’s Are You Alright is the soundtrack to the following scenes as the duo (Rust steeling cocaine from the Evidence Room and lying about taking leave to see his father, and Marty seemingly moving in with Rust: “you know you’ve got an upstairs here” – both swigging Jamesons from the bottle).

And then the madness begins. Never on TV have we seen such a great and realistic seen of drug and gang mentality. The out of town biker hangout, the shack in the woods, the ‘hood that Rusty ends up in, but it’s Rusty’s character shift that takes the biscuit. In this company, in these neighbourhoods, he’s at home. Now we really start to understand why he suffers those flashbacks.