I think that their revenge was giving all of that information to the reporter.
One thing that I noticed that went by quickly is that in the montage they showed that Holloway is chief or police now.
The checking of the weapons is the same reason they tell the reporter not to leave for an hour. They’re taking precautions in case the reporter was followed by someone that wants to kill them. Both women are loose ends, but particularly Bezzerides.
It makes no sense that they would travel back to exact revenge with a newborn in tow.
Wasn’t Holloway stabbed and shot multiple times? i was fairly sure he died at the train station.
Sorry, Burris.
Holloway was the chief and was killed at the station. Burris was the Lieutenant and was chief at the end.
Yeah but the other guys had body armor and automatic weapons. I think he was more worried about getting that voice mail to his kid and gambled he did, then did the Wild Bunch last stand thingy. His actual mistake was going to visit his kid, the second he did that I was like "you STUPID fuck . . . . "
Considering he was owner of that dive bar, surely they had one of their members staking the place, and saw him leave and followed him while phoning the other Mexicans to do the setup. Now, if he didn’t go there, who knows, but it was a good bet by the Mexicans.
Maybe but he was the only guy they could shakedown for payback. And they were right, he did set the fires.
Why? He was a drunk, and junkie and beat the shit out of the father of one of her sons schoolmates. She had grave concerns about Ray being around her son.
One of the traits of a good detective is strong powers of detection.
I hear ya. The writers style evolves from LA Noire type old timey crime novels, that had all these different storylines and plot twists. Probably not too popular with todays short attention span generation, but I agree, the show does ask the viewer to concentrate a little harder than with most shows.
Seems like the writer has something for adding creepy mystical characters in his serials; season one it was the Yellow King, this one its the Ravens head. I thought it added dread to the overall atmosphere of the show.
Actually I wonder if Bez’s? father and sister are still hiding in Eugene LOL
Personally I loved Season 2. I loved the Ray character, I enjoyed they pulled the season out of the headlines of a real world small town criminal empire that actually exists in California, and I enjoyed the moodiness. I do get why a lot of viewers didn’t like it however, so your not going to get me to shove the show down your throat. I hope this doesn’t discourage HBO from doing a Season 3. It seems like this, Ray Donovan and other otherwise good shows are getting killed by the critics and the audience, and Im afraid shows like this might go away because of it, sand we will be left with 80 versions of CSI.
BTW I can’t remember a show where so many people watched it loyally, can talk about all the plot points to the finest detail, than bitch about how much the show sucks. 
it’s weird I think there’s SOMETHING that draws 12 million people a week to watch a show, but at the end of the hour it’s seems like there was something more they were expecting than what they got-----then, they tune in AGAIN and torture themselves all over again! I’ve never seen anything like this with a TV show. It’s like viewers are tuning in just to hate it. Either the show is a lot better than a lot of viewers really want to admit, or we’ve just turned into a society of Twitter curmudgeons who just feel better by hating everything.
Stop by the *Big Bang Theory *threads when the new season starts. Based on the comments there, you’d think it was lucky to be renewed, and Penny’s hair is responsible for most of the decline of the Western world.
I can’t speak for the other 11,999,999 people who watched, but I kept hoping against hope that the show would somehow find its philosopher’s stone and turn the crap-ton of lead it was shoveling at me into a block of gold. I watched the first season in much the same mindset, but I didn’t have to wait that long – within the first couple of episodes it was quickly obvious we were on a journey with a specific destination in mind, and we had capable guides who were taking us there. They might stop or detour along the way to point out some interesting things, but we were always headed toward our goal. At the end of the season, I could look back over the entire thing and say “Man, that was one amazing trip.”
With this season of True Detective, my overwhelming feeling at the end was “That’s 10 1/2 hours of my life I’ll never get back.” It’s not a matter of me having a short attention span, or being a Twitter curmudgeon who hates everything. It’s a matter of a show flinging 37 different pieces of crap on a wall and trying to convince me the pieces that stick form a coherent pattern.
It is weird how we all kept coming back (me included) in spite of our confusion. I’ve been trying to figure it out.
I think it felt like there was an interesting story there somewhere, in spite of the confusing plots and red herrings. I also think we enjoyed coming online and working together trying to puzzle out what the hell was going on.
Regarding the remarks made above about the short attention span generation: I’ve been watching TV since the black & white days, not quite from the very beginning, but close to it, so I don’t think I’m part of the generation you’re thinking of, and I was confused by this show. And there is plenty of excellent TV currently available that doesn’t require weekly online dissections to understand. Breaking Bad is one of this best shows ever made, possibly the best, and it wasn’t the least bit difficult to follow. So I don’t think we’re in any danger of losing interesting television.
Really? It’s not uncommon:
Big Bang Theory
Game of Thrones (most recent season in particular)
The Office
Heroes
Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip
The Newsroom
Or maybe, just maybe, this season wasn’t very good.
FWIW, Covert GPS trackers don’t have little red lights on them because they’re, you know, covert. Also, having placed a few of these myself, they are not that hard to remove. They usually use rare earth magnets, which are quite strong but not so much so that you can’t get them off with a little effort. Tracker or not, it would very easy to lose tail long enough to ditch the car and move on with the money. And you don’t do that by heading off into the wilderness. The freeways /downtown LA are perfect for shaking a tail. The fact that Ray’s kid was staked out in the first place is a bit of a reach, too. Five guys armed to the teeth waiting at a school is really putting all your eggs in one very unlikely basket. How long had they been watching that kid? All in all, too much suspension of disbelief was required to make this TD enjoyable.
I’m somewhat willing to forgive the red light, that’s a convention used to indicate to the viewer what they’re looking at, kind of like LED countdown timers on bombs.
Was Velcoro not able to remove it, or did he just decide not to in favor of instead leading them away from Bezzerides?
I agree that the guys staking out the school was dumb. I also agree that Ray could have lost them in downtown LA if that was his plan. But I’m not sure that was his plan. I think he just didn’t want to risk any chance of them following him to Bezzerides.
Then all he had to do was ditch the car and take the huge bag of money and hide somewhere. A few days later he could buy a shitty craigslist car with cash and make his way back to the bar and get on the next boat to Venezuela.
All true. No need to even buy a car, just take a cab or bus. I didn’t say there weren’t other possible plans, just what I thought his plan was.
He decided not to. He said so in the show.
What I didn’t get is were we supposed to recognize the place he led them to? Was that a location that had meaning to him or something or did he just drive randomly into the woods?
The finale and penultimate episode were OK, and better than what had come before, but considering how poor the season as a whole has been, that isn’t saying much. It certainly doesn’t compare to season 1. It felt like the writers had read too much James Ellroy (The Big Nowhere in particular.)
Yes, most of us were waiting for a payoff that didn’t come. It turned out to be a muddled confusing mess instead of a clever meander to a intellectually stimulating and dramatic climax. If you are writing a slow-paced show, you better do a better job with both the plot and dialogue instead of thinking that the film noir and pulp fiction vibes will carry the show on their own.
I decided after watching this season that Pizzolatto pretty bad at writing dialogue, but the casting and directing in season one saved him. This season much of the dialogue was still awful but couldn’t be saved by the actors. As an example from the final episode, the farewell scene between the Semyons was particularly bad.
Am I way off base with the assessment of the dialogue? Every main character can’t talk like Rust Cole, taking three minutes to say something that could actually be said with one sentence.
I agree with Russian Heel. I was pretty interested in this season but I did require a lot of discussion outside of the show for clarification on a lot of the points. I think that has less to do with attention span and more to do with the kind of learning to which my brain adheres. A lot of points weren’t illustrated but just mentioned briefly in dialogue. I think some viewers can do fine with that while others may absorb things better if they’re actually shown visually.
I didn’t notice that, but if he did that would be a good way to make sure they were found as soon as his body was. Not sure that makes any sense.
re Ray’s suicide by (bad) cop… assuming one of them was the baddest of the bad and Ray would have something personal against him, I would have thought that he would have tried harder to take him out at the end