There is, according to The Hollywood Reporter, a “colossal orgy sequence” coming up on True Detective Season 2—one that will supposedly be “Eyes Wide Shut-caliber” and involve “dozens of naked bodies,” including several lithe porn stars. It’s one reason to still be tuning in to Nic Pizzolatto’s headache-inducing maze of highway shots, pained stares, gloomy bar ballads, and a batshit plot that makes The Big Sleep seem soluble by comparison.
Another was the insane shootout that closed last week’s episode. If you’ll recall, it was a raid on a Mexican gangster linked to Ben Casper’s pawned watch that resulted in an exploded meth lab, several dead cops, and about two dozen slain civilians. Now, if this were real life, our trio of detectives would not only be saddled with heaps of paperwork and suspensions, but also crucified by the media for instigating a bloody massacre on the streets of L.A. But this is True Detective, so the event is all but forgotten. Case closed. Move along.
But let’s be real: Despite its myriad faults, the second season of True D is hilarious and utterly watchable. Where else would you get to see Rachel McAdams, in a sexual harassment class, sporting an ombre hairdo, say the following: “What can I say…I just really like big dicks…I want to have trouble handcuffing the thing.” Or closeted-gay Taylor Kitsch staring down a Lindsay Lohan clone in a deposition and, tears welling in his eyes, branding her a “fucking liar” for claiming he coerced her into a roadside blowjob mid-traffic stop. Or gangster-pimp Vince Vaughn stumbling over ridiculous lines like, “The enemy won’t reveal itself, Raymond. It stymies my retribution. It’s like blue balls…in your heart.” Blue balls in your heart! This is entertaining stuff, people.
Episode 5 of True Detective, titled “Other Lives,” opens with the news that it’s been over 66 days since city manager/voyeur extraordinaire Ben Casper’s dickless body was found auditioning for a Weekend at Bernie’s sequel along the Pacific Coast Highway. The shady state attorney general has decided to close the case in conjunction with announcing his mayoral run. This raises the eyebrows of the attorney general’s office, which decides to recruit Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell), Antigone Bezzerides (McAdams), and Paul Woodrugh (Kitsch) to a top-secret squad of state attorney’s investigators. They’re tasked with looking into Casper’s missing diamonds, his sex parties, his hard drive full of sex tapes, his murder, and all the rest.
The Mod Squad move couldn’t come at a better time for our trio of gumshoes. Bezzerides has, following her unfortunate sexual harassment episode, been reduced to working the evidence cage; Woodrugh is still serving his penance for not receiving that starlet blowjob; and Velcoro is not only serving a suspension and moonlighting as a loan shark for Frank Semyon (Vaughn) but also on the brink of losing custody of his ginger kid—something the attorney general’s office can help with.
“Other Lives” also took the time to remind us of several things we already knew: that Woodrugh’s mom is awful trailer trash who disapproves of her son’s “weirdness” (translation: gayness), that ripping out Santos’s grill would come back to haunt Frank, and that Frank’s wife can’t have kids. The scene between Woodrugh and his mother features some very impressive outbursting on the part of Kitsch, while the scene between Frank and his wife (Kelly Reilly) is truly painful to watch, a catastrophic blend of piss-poor dialogue and even poorer delivery.
Vaughn is trying very hard but so far floundering here. It’s not entirely his fault—the dialogue is crazy. At one point, Farrell utters: “Because my powers of influence are so meager in this sublunar world of ours…” Huh? Who talks like this? We excused Rust Cohle’s silly soliloquies because, Matthew McConaughey’s out-of-this-world performance aside, he was an oddball mystic. But Vaughn’s Frank Semyon is supposed to be a two-bit gangster and Farrell is a somber loser. The SAT words don’t fly.
Back to the wacky plot. Frank orders Velcoro to trail his associate, Blake, who’s embroiled in some sort of high-end prostitution ring with Casper’s therapist, Dr. Pitlor (Rick Springfield). So we get to witness Colin Farrell beating the ever-living shit out of Rick Springfield (!) until he admits that he has been providing cosmetic surgery for prostitutes who then participate in Casper and Tony Chessani’s (the mayor’s son) sex parties. At these sex parties, the two were compiling blackmail evidence against people of influence—including California state senators and McCandless, president of the Santa Clara Railroad Company and the face of Catalyst, who’s also the man that screwed Frank out of $5 million when he squeezed him out of the California Central Rail Corridor deal. McCandless ordered Frank to retrieve the hard drive in order to regain his stake in the deal, so now Frank and Velcoro are in a race to find the porn stash, presumably in the hands of The Birdman assassin.
Frank and Velcoro have some personal beef to squash first. While recruiting Velcoro to the top-secret squad, the attorney general’s office informed him that it caught his wife’s rapist weeks ago—in other words, that the man Frank fingered to Velcoro, an incident he’s been lording over him for years, was all a clever ruse to keep the cop in his pocket. The episode closes with a scene straight out of that Fright Night remake: brooding Farrell at Vaughn’s front door.
But about that orgy—or the reason why, the three cop performances aside, we’re still watching this charade. Bezzerides convinces her sister to try to score an invite to one of the Casper/Chessani sex parties. So if the scenes-from-the-next are any indication, next week we’ll be treated to McAdams going undercover at a sex party and taking in “a colossal orgy sequence.”
And that is reason enough for me.
