True Detective: Season 2 Episode 4 – Down Will Come

Back in 1971 Rod Stewart and Ron Wood penned a tune. The title was Every Picture Tells a Story. From the lyrics:

Make the best out of the bad, just laugh it off
You didn’t have to come here anyway
So remember, every picture tells a story don’t it

Now think of what Velcoro said about the world, its people . and their problems, in answer to Woodrugh saying I just don’t know how to be, out in that world.

Woodrugh: I just don’t know how to be, out in that world.
Velcoro: Look out there. Nobody does.

Velcoro said – Look out the window. Nobody does.  It’s like dust in your eyes – blink it away.

From the song:

I firmly believe that I didn’t need anyone but me
I sincerely thought I was so complete
Look how wrong you can be

But the characters in True Detective aren’t complete, and certainly what you see is not all that you get. The Series, in its second season, is the TV equivalent of peeling an onion,. What I mean is that there’s multiple layers to each of the leads. They’re haunted by their pasts, and they struggle in the present.

As Frank Semyon says to his wife, Avocado trees? Having a kid? Stan? With everything going on in my life – I’m lucky I can even see. So Frank goes back to being a mobster rather than a business man. He’s doing drug deals, he forces his way into a motel partnership with the same guy he sold the motel to in the first place. He shakes down a construction outfit.

He even asks Velcoro to sign on with him. Velcoro says, I’m not muscle, Frank. But Semyon doesn’t want Velcoro to be muscle – Frank likes that Velcoro is smart. He even suggests that Velcoro put his police career to bed.

And speaking of beds, Woodrugh, to his horror, wakes up in the bed of another man. And what we suspected all along, that he’s gay, is now almost a fact. He rushes off to work, but the paparazzi and news media are waiting for him. He gets Velcoro to pick him up. But later on, he hears some life altering facts:

Em has just dropped a bombshell on Paul – She says, I’m pregnant!

Meanwhile the police work is paying dividends. They canvas pawn shops and the get a hit on a watch. We are asked to disregard a strong fact – in the pawn shop – the watch that had been pawned didn’t match the photo of the watch. There was lettering on the photo watch in the center of the lower third and the center of the upper third of the watch in the photo, but not on the physical watch.

But the pawn shop had a video, and they were able to lift prints off the watch. So now they had a suspect – the possible trigger man, and the hooker who might have a tie to Caspere.

Bezzerides, Velcoro, and Woodrugh are assigned to raid the location where their suspect could be. A team of ten coppers, all in Kevlar vests, heads out there, and to the surprise of no-one (except the 10 coppers) the bad guys are heavily armed and ready for a shootout as their location is a meth-factory.

Bezzerides says, [The] Bosses said take him, so they go for it. It’s war = right out on the street.

So to me, that it looks like Bezzerides, Velcoro, and Woodrugh were hung out to dry – as surely, there had tbeen a tip sent to the targets. It couldn’t have been Frank Semyon as he wanted to question this guy.

You probably weren’t surprised to see the Police Chief, and Mayor Chessani present at the briefing before the raid. Connect the dots.

All of that, I mean the actual shoot out – was strongly reminiscent of the bank robbery shootout in the film Heat. By that I mean it was very well done. Deadly well done. 10 cops enter. Soon there are bodies every where, and the only ones left standing were Bezzerides, Velcoro, and Woodrugh.

Pyrotechnics aside, there was a more important takeaway from this episode, like the words from Stewart’s song – Every picture tells a story. Bezzerides and Velcoro drive out to her father’s spiritual retreat. Yes, Elliot Bezzerides recognized Caspere from the photo Velcoro showed him. And then Elliot showed them a picture from his own album.

The infamous Dr Pinter, and Chessani, and Elliot and Caspere all knew each other and hung out back in the day. Every picture does indeed tell a story.

Bezzerides: Why would our vic come out to these sites so often?
Velcoro: Maybe this is where the bodies are buried–

And that story is the one about the land deals. Some one is buying up loads of uninhabitable land. Frank tried to get in on it, but he lost his stake when Caspere turned up dead. My guess is that Chessani will be the bad guy, Velcoro will end up badly, even dead, Woodrugh will be the physical hero, and Semyon will find his way to some kind of redemption and all will be good in the Semyon household. They will not become one of those couples that are always fighting..

Bezzerides is the one I can’t quite figure out just yet. She’s got a lot of foul stuff on her plate. She’s got gambling debts (from Semyon’s casino?), she’s got a trail of inter-departmental love affairs, and she’s been suspended by the Ventura cops for the police version of conduct unbecoming. Which in this case is sleeping with her subordinates.

I think the show got off to a shaky start. They asked us to keep track of too many story lines and characters. But like those California freeways, and highways, the ones that blend and merge, the story is coming together nicely.