True Detective Season 2, what are your thoughts?

[AbbathTheGrim]

kungfuian said:
Overall I think it was a solid effort. Really great acting and characters you actually care about!!!

But the story/pacing wasn't quite as good/effective as in the first season. They tried to tell a much more complex story than the first season and as a result it felt like they fell back on the old 'time to explain what the hell is happening/happened' dialog; which ended up a little on the thick/convoluted side. IMO, if a story is well told their shouldn't be the need for so much direct explanation.

But in the end the parts are greater than the whole, and the show is better than 90% of the crap on TV. Can't wait to see what they cook up next.

There were indeed lots of talking about the situation and setting questions that had no memorable resolution afterwards. The season felt very anti-climatic for me, things barely build up and when they did they resolved into something barely memorable.

You feel like everyone responsible, everyone taking a role in the crime was introduced early on and it was just a matter of finding out which role they had in all of it.

Blob said:

Aweful.
It's hard to put into words why I felt this. I guess it felt like everything was either underdeveloped or underwhelming to me. The main romance, while obvious it was going to occur, gave us no real reason to care about it. Kind of the problem with the whole season,  things happened but I was never given enough reason to care. 

I found that the moments I liked best in the season where those story moments away from the crime. I would have liked to see more of Velcoro's disfunctional relationship with his son and his relationship with his ex-wife, I think there could have been more emotional situations the writer could have tapped on with that approach.

Stunning McAdams strong female officer character had a lot of potential, like that scene with the sexual harassment meeting, I think that was the only part that I found funny in the whole season.

Frank felt like a Michael Corleone character taking care of business when lots of people try to saw his trees down, like The Godfather does at the end of the first film, but Frank took it a little more personal by taking action with his own hands.

@BOLDED: I think one of the main problems with this season was that the main crime felt like a faceless crime. If you think about it, it all started with solving the murder of Caspere which was mixed with crime and prostitution and Frank wants to know who stole his money through Caspere and then McAdams and Woodrugh and Velcoro are appointed so that they don't get anything done and they discover appropriation of land schemes and more prostitution and they are looking for a chick who wants to keep prostituting herself... I don't know, it's like there isn't a reason to get behind these detectives to see them resolve the case. Maybe they should have focused on making it a story of underdog detectives proving their worth or something, I don't know.

I mean, there are countries where even prostitution is legal so there could be people finding it a non-issue situation. Maybe there was an "underage" element implicit there but I didn't feel they established that very strongly.

There was the situation of the siblings there though, maybe they should have set them as the main drive of the investigation, but they appeared later on in the episodes and where more like a side-dish to the crime.

All in all, I didn't feel the crime made me cheer for it's resolution, like I did for season one.

The last episode brought a nice closing to the season I think. But I can't shake that feeling that there were lots of missed opportunities there.