True Detective Season 2 Episode 3 Review: Maybe Tomorrow

This True Detective review contains spoilers.

True Detective Season 2 Episode 3

Okay, so buck shot isn’t deadly. I’ll have to keep that in mind. Far be it for me to disagree, I have Shawn Thompson keeping me almost honest in the comments, but I thought a point blank range shot of anything from a gun that size, even a BB gun, maybe the right water pistol, would cause lethal damage. I figured maybe, just maybe, it was a belly wound and from what I’ve learned about belly wounds from Reservoir Dogs, which is about everything, they take a long time to kill someone. They’re painful. The person would wish they were dead. But they have time to get help.

So seeing Detective Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell) blow up his lungs was a relief. I wouldn’t put it past HBO to kill off the main character early on. That’s part of why I’m hooked on the network. It’s a tradition that probably predates The Sopranos, but took root in True Blood and blossomed on Boardwalk Empire. Game of Thrones turned it into an art form. In an eight episode arc, when compared to the five seasons of Game of Thrones, this is about the point in the story that the gang on Thrones lost daddy Stark. Well they didn’t lose him so much as they misplaced his head. Nic Pizzolatto is playing with that very dynamic. He’s a novelist, you know.

Velcoro can’t ID the shooter. He doesn’t say it, but it’s because the guy with the gun was wearing a crow’s mask. The same mask that we saw in the passenger seat during Mr. Caspere’s last ride. The shooter was probably wearing the crow’s mask because he knew the blast wouldn’t be lethal. Which means he killed Velcoro as a warning.

Velcoro is pretty strident for a guy who just got murdered. He thinks he might have been set up and he’s positively apoplectic about it. The burnout detective explains that he followed a cross-tip from the CIA to his ad hoc boss, Xena the apparently warrior princess Bezzerides, who takes him at his word. This seems like an easy lie to catch. Velcoro was actually sent to the murder scene by Frank Semyon, who is conducting his own investigation into the death of City Planner Ben Caspere, his defunct real estate partner. Caspere took five million of Semyon’s dollars with him on his way out.

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There is no part of Semyon’s life that isn’t live-or-die important, even his bodily fluids have to stand at attention, no matter how stressed he is. His wife Jordan (Kelly Reilly), gets in the last lick though, telling him to suck his own dick in the plastic cup room of the IVF clinic.

“Mr. Velcoro, do you want to live?” says the doctor checking out the buck shot wounds. Velcoro hasn’t made up his mind. He probably gets that from his old man, a retired LA cop who found that its no country for white men after the O.J. Simpson conviction came down and tied his hands together. Now he smokes high end dope and catches old Kirk Douglas movies like Detective Story from 1951. He should hook up with the Mayor’s young bride who sucks her dope of a a little balloon? Apparently, that is a high-end vaporizer. Wonder where you get it, my eyes are killing me.

Bezzerides gives everyone the same amused parting glance that says she’s filing them away for later. Even Steve, the one-night-stand cop she found knocking at her backdoor, gets the look. On the set of the movie that shooting in Vinci, some 100 ton piece of shit dystopian future thing with Mad Max hairpieces, the set photographer says the industry party that Caspere was last seen was “well attended,” which is code for “wall to wall pussy.” The movie director, who drinks, says he only remembers the suits. Once again Bezziredes shoots Velcoro that look. After he accepts the excuse that they’re “burning dollars” her sideways glance screams “what? Are you impressed with this?”

We learn that almost getting blown in half doesn’t clear you of suspicion. Officer Ani Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams) still looks at Velcoro like a favorite cat left him on the doorstep. She’s thrilled to have him in her sights and more than happy to play with the crooked burn out cop before she devours him whole, along with his whole city.

Bezzerides doesn’t look like she’s doing it strictly for the collar. She’s seems to enjoy the chase and probably goes through post-book’em-depression when she finishes the paperwork. Antigone, the self-help child at the center of the investigator, probably doesn’t even mind the paperwork.

Woodrough, on the other hand, would have a big problem with it. I can picture him going off after a particularly nasty papercut, much less the typing in the little boxes. He’ll never get a personal serenade from Conway Twitty, I’ll tell you that. Bezziredes tells Woodrough to roll some of his angsty cop drama over the Vinci’s working girls. Someone unknown tasks detective Teague Dixon (W. Earl Brown) with keeping a photo journal.

Again with the fucking e-cigarettes? I have a feeling these references are more than just a running gag. They further dehumanize Bezziredes, who just earned some empathy points by telling the motorcycle cop he should cash in on the exposure he got from the blow job heard round the coast by suing the loaded actress.

Woodrough may not want to remember that did he did in the desert, but his friend does and says it will be a part of him until he takes a good long look at it. Last week, Woodrough’s girlfriend said she read that Black Mountain Security, where he served, did bad things.

Black Mountain Security has to be based on Blackwater Security. Blackwater changed its name to Xe Services and then Academi after a Sept. 16, 2007 incident in Nisour Square in Baghdad  where 14 unarmed civilians were killed and 17 others wounded. The Blackwater Private Security Detail PSD was escorting a U.S. State Department convoy to an International Development meeting. The Iraqi Government revoked Blackwater’s license to operate in Iraq on September 17, 2007. The FBI filed that they couldn’t match the bullets in the incident which raised the idea that insurgents also fired at the victims.

Blackwater had charges of negligence, discrimination, prostitution, murder, and arms smuggling thrown at them. Erik Prince, the company’s founder, called them “baseless,” but on April 14, 2015, one ex-Blackwater Worldwide security guard was sentenced to life in prison and three others given 30-year terms for killing 14 unarmed civilians in in Nisour Square, a Baghdad traffic circle, in 2007.

The murder scene in West Hollywood was rented for Caspere by the Catalyst Group. Who took the video from the hidden camera? There was a fucked up psychology at that place before it was a murder scene. It boggles the mind.

Woodrough is rolling on the right track because he bumps into Semyon just as he’s entering the lion’s den.

Not for nothing, but I am seeing Frank Semyon more and more as the protagonist character on this season’s True Detective. He’ll probably solve the case before the state or the city cops do and he’s doing it for right reason, a better future for his as-yet-unborn kid. Semyon has the most to lose. He is chum in the water for Osip Agronov (Timothy V. Murphy), the half anaconda, half great white shark that’s dripping cash and licking his lips as Semyon tries to recoup his losses.

Who the fuck would have something against Stan? The guy was on board right away when Semyon explained how things were going forward. He gave the imposing gangster a little back talk and immediately used it to fix some union problems. Turns out Semyon is what he used to was. Semyon collects on the no show jobs with a little fight club action that ends with him pulling out all the gold teeth from the mouth of one of the lesser sharks. He takes the teeth home with him as a kind of trophy that has no place on a shelf.

After finding some diamonds in a safety deposit box with the dead city planner’s name on it, Bezziredes and Woodrough follow the lead that the last person Caspere was seen with. Miss Tasha escorted him to an expensive exclusive party. The party was lavishly and lasciviously catered by the local ruling class. The Mayor’s son is running Eastern bloc pussy as an event organizer. This is the same kid who the Mayor said was out of his mind with the drugs last week, which might explain all his accents. The big-bulged, though I think he’s padding, budding prince is starting an empire in the debris of Semyon’s land deal. I wonder what the Mayor’s son would look like in a crow’s mask.

Bon fucking voyage.

“Maybe Tomorrow” was written by Nic Pizzolatto and directed by Janus Metz Pedersen.

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