Summary
True Detective starts to literally heat up in Episode 2, an hour dense with information and strikingly grim imagery.
Episode 2 of True Detective Season 4 – titled simply “Part 2”, this being a show with no time whatsoever for cutesy episode titles – is jam-packed with information, horrifying imagery, and surprising connections to Season 1. It’s a great, albeit dense hour of proper grown-up TV, and it continues to sketch the wintry town of Ennis, Alaska as a real character of its own, full of fraught internal politics, transactional relationships, and eerie mythology.
Ennis sucks
Forgive me a slight deviation to round all this up, then. Recaps are weird things to write at the best of times, and weaving bigger-picture thematic development in and out of A-to-B crime-thriller plotting is a bit challenging. But just know this – Ennis, for the most part, sucks.
I don’t say that lightly, but there’s plenty of evidence in my favor. The local police can’t investigate anything without big-city Anchorage cops breathing down their necks. You can’t go for a drink without a fight breaking out, mostly between the hard-working miners and the hard-done-by Natives; the former can’t quite get their head around the idea that their culture and their drinking water have been equally polluted by the mines, and the latter struggles to accept that the industry keeps the town afloat, albeit on a river of murky runoff.
Everyone in Ennis believes in ghosts. People are entitled to their beliefs anywhere, of course, but this particular one is a problem when people start turning up dead in alarming numbers, as they have since Episode 1. And the Ennis townsfolk, gently prompted by sage elders like Rose, are inclined not just to believe in ghosts but to see them and communicate with them. A grim recurring image in “Part 2” is the Tsalal Station researchers gradually defrosting on an ice rink, frozen in a grisly tableau of agony and death. But it seems like everyone who passes from this town remains frozen there, still visible in the right light.
Was Travis Rust Cohle’s father?
I mentioned Rose above. She has a rather long conversation with Navarro in this episode about the living and the dead, and how the spirit world mustn’t be confused with mental illness and such, but she also let’s slip that Travis had a familiar surname – Cohle.
In our preview of this episode, we shared a popular fan theory being peddled on social media that Travis was the father of Rust Cohle from Season 1. It seems like this is true, or else it’d be a mighty coincidence. Rust mentioned that his dad’s name was Travis and he had lived in Alaska. Score one for the Reddit sleuths.
Defrosting the dead
Also above, I mentioned the Tsalal researchers frozen in a screaming pile of heads and legs. It’s worth mentioning again because it’s so effectively awful I’ve found myself thinking about it multiple times since. Maybe it’s the injuries – all ruptured eardrums and eyes scratched out and fingers bitten off; desperate, frantic wounds – or the deliberate juxtaposition of the bodies and the stadium where they eventually find themselves. Stadiums are for sporting events and hotdogs and signs, not slowly melting corpses.
Perhaps it’s the fact that one of the presumed-dead researchers turns out to be missing, and another to be alive. Anders Lund, the station’s director, was in a medically induced coma for a leg amputation. When one of his frigid arms is snapped off, he wakes up screaming. If that’s this show’s idea of a lucky escape, these people are in for a long season.
Liz Danvers gets around
It’s worth noting that thawing the bodies is mandatory in the forensic handbook as a way to preserve physical evidence, and Liz is using it as an excuse to keep the case in Ennis so that Connelly can’t transport all the bodies and evidence to Anchorage. It’s also worth noting that Liz has been sleeping with Connelly for almost two decades, on and off.
The reason this is worth mentioning is that Liz seemingly has a laundry list of previous sexual conquests that wriggle out of the woodwork in Episode 2. The ice rink owner’s ex-husband is one. A high school geology teacher is another. We see Liz and Connelly have sex at one point, and it’s clear – like in Episode 1’s sex scene – that it’s a self-serving and empty thing. Ennis is so miserable that people don’t even enjoy the sex they’re having with the people they don’t like.
There are also hints in this episode that Liz is deeply traumatized by grief, so her relative promiscuity is probably also a coping mechanism. She doesn’t believe in the spirits, so she needs something to take the edge off.
Is the spiral tattoo the one from True Detective Season 1?
Anders Lund has a spiral symbol drawn on his forehead, and later in the episode, we learn that paleomicrobiologist Raymond Clark, who remains missing, had a tattoo of the symbol on his chest. The murdered activist Annie K also had it tattooed on her back. Fans will recognize it as the same symbol attached to the Yellow King cult in Season 1.
Fan service? Maybe, but also maybe not. The financials of the Tsalal station reveal it’s funded by an NGO hidden behind a shell company belonging to an international conglomerate. Tuttle United is mentioned, and the Tuttle family was behind the Yellow King cult. It’s all coming together, it seems.
How does True Detective Season 4 Episode 2 end?
Inevitably, the second episode ends with Liz finally accepting that her case is intimately connected to Navarro’s, and goes to her to pitch a tentative alliance until the whole thing is solved. There is a great deal of history between these women that still needs to be unpacked, and it’s likely to be gradually unfurled as we go. For now, though, this is progress.
The first lead they attend together is the trailer that Navarro learned Clark bought off a cousin years ago and deduced he hid in plain sight at an RV park called the Nook. The trailer is an altar to the occult, Annie K, or both – everything we’ve learned about Clark throughout the episode indicates that he was quite mad, and this just confirms it.
But the final reveal of “Part 2” is that Clark isn’t just mad, but alive. His body isn’t frozen with the other researchers. He’s still out there on the ice somewhere.
What did you think of True Detective Season 4 Episode 2? Let us know in the comments.
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