True Detective (here be SPOILERS)

[RainDog]

44. I agree with Alyssa Rosenberg

the final moments were just cringe-worthy, to me. It's the oldest story, about lightness and dark.

Rust's sudden decision to join in with all the sorts of thinking he previously held in disdain? That was weak - just not believable to me and also very much a sop to convention. It would be perfectly in character for him to have had a moment when he felt his daughter's love when he was close to dying - but then to acknowledge the reality-based workings of our brain that make this possible - then to say... I'll take it anyway (that feeling). But that's not what he did.

He joined in the thinking of the killer and Marty, etc. and that was a betrayal of the character himself, to me.

actually, I haven't really read many reactions to the finale. But someone at The Atlantic seems to agree, as well, that the finale was "unearned" within the set up of the story and was much less impressive than what went before it.

The writer's statements along the way tried to deflect certain criticisms by saying... this is a metafictional story about generic detective work - but there was nothing to point to the issues of these meta narratives - which is the point of going "meta" in the first place.

anyway, I stick with my statement that the first two acts were brilliant, while the final act lacked the storyline/camera work that would sustain that otherworldly (while firmly grounded in reality) experience that made the first two acts work so well.

The final act needs to be the place where you just go into the resolution and the tension, etc. needs to increase, the eery, if it was initially part of the story, needs to increase - the action "rises" to increase tension in the viewer until the final release of the end (or near it) with the capture of the killer.

Most writers spend a lot of time on the first bits of work because they go over and over it as they build a story - and this often results in a final act that is less polished than what came before it - I think that's maybe what happened here - but who knows.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2014/03/10/true-detectives-predictable-simplistic-finale/

...we got a predictable crime story that even the show’s most ardent defenders are going to be hard-put to argue is a clever examination of the genre, or of political power in Louisiana. The real killer of Dora Lange (Amanda Rose Batz), the first victim Rust and Marty investigated, turns out to be Errol Childress (Glenn Fleshler), the son of former sheriff Ted Childress. That relationship might have been enough to protect Errol, but he had other connections. Ted Childress was the unacknowledged son of Sam Tuttle, a powerful Louisiana patriarch. As a result, the Childresses were related to Billy Lee Tuttle (Jay O. Sanders), Sam Tuttle’s son and a powerful minister who tried to interfere with Rust and Marty’s initial investigation into the serial killings in 1995. And Ted’s cousin was Eddie Tuttle, who served first as Louisiana governor and then as senator.
That’s a rich web of power and family to explore, but “True Detective” leaves most of its revelations for the last hour of the show, leaving little time to meditate on specific relationships or Louisiana politics.