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True Detective Crawls Back From the Void
Almost ten years after a tracking-shot episode set an impossible standard, the HBO show is reinventing itself for the better.
The cult of True Detective was crystallized in a tracking shot in season one’s fourth episode, “ Who Goes There.” In those six minutes, Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) stumbles through a public-housing development, dodging bullets and scaling fences, attempting to escape a race war that he and his partner, Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson), instigated to gather intel for their investigation into a mythical-seeming murderer. But after the tracking shot, the show took on frenzied levels of hype, an expanding supernova of buzz that eventually deflated ever so slightly when the killer turned out to be a born-amid-incest, still-practicing-incest backwoods weirdo who got off on Old Hollywood classics and torturing his father’s corpse — not some mythical creature lurking in a horrifying kingdom called Carcosa. Boxer turned actress Kali Reis is her raw-edged, short-tempered, unapologetically religious former partner, Evangeline Navarro, and like Marty and Rust before them, they have a ragged chemistry built on contrasting belief systems, uniquely fucked-up family histories, and shared frustrations with being a woman on the job.
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