I'm loving this season so far, especially this second episode (first wasn't quite as strong, but still necessary). I think the biggest problem was people expecting things from Pizzolatto based solely on season 1 of the show and not his other works. Reading Galveston and Between Here and the Yellow Sea, you begin to understand what he prioritizes and what he does not, and I think it more properly sets your expectations.
Anyway, as with everything he's written, I'm enjoying the character work in S2. I think the biggest problem with the first episode is that, as a novelist, he's used to injecting characterization through internal monologue (both Galveston and Between Here and the Yellow Sea are told from an internal perspective, for instance), and thus with his main characters being apart from each other, there weren't enough moments in which their internal idiosyncrasies were probed by external circumstances.
I'm not a fan of the season 1 comparisons because I think they're inherently limiting, but to indulge them for a moment on this train of thought, I think the frame narrative interview structure of the first season more easily allowed Pizzolatto to make the jump from the novel to television because Cohle and Hart could narrate their past experiences and color them with audio that served as an internal monologue. I think it's also why there are those people who don't like the last few episode because the interviews were cut short due to narrative considerations, and thus we were shut off from Rust and Marty's direct thoughts. All of this is to simply say that season 2 is lacking this convention, and as a result Pizzolatto is attempting a less convenient way of characterization that I think will ultimately pay off, albeit at a slower pace. One final note is that most would agree that the second best way in which Pizzolatto provided characterization in the first season was through the back and forth between Cohle and Hart, in a more typical "buddy cop" sense, in which their differences allowed a deep probing of their beliefs and outlooks.
The point of all that rambling is that I think season 2 initially had a harder time connecting us with the characters because it stripped itself of both of these storytelling conventions in the first episode: no narrating and no probing banter between main characters. I think the second episode is more successful (for me, at least) because the characters are finally allowed to interact and it feels more organic on account of it being less beholden to the case.
TL;DR: I liked the second episode a lot.
Last edited by
o SHAKESPEARE o on June 29th, 2015, 1:32 am, edited 1 time in total.
