Finale of "True Detective" last night: What's the deal with that baby at the very end?

[Paladin]

That's not a spoiler, given how convoluted the finale was. Christ, what a frustrating, muddled series. I should have put my time to better use than watching the second season.

[packman]

1. Muddled , yes

needed a white board with cards to figure out the plot - but all the major characters gave great performances IMHO. Frank (Vince Vaughn) was brilliant. Can't wrap my head around that final scene with the baby - was it Ana's? And that forest shoot-out left me cold. Ray had more intelligence than that. Seems he could have done away with his pursuers and gone off to meet Ana.

[Skinner]

2. I assumed it was...

...the baby of Bezzerides and Velcoro.

[JustAnotherGen]

3. Me too

Especially the way she held him to her like that in the sling.

[RockaFowler]

5. Bezzerides mentions something about taking care of Ray's Children

That was when I went huh?? The next scene showed the baby and it hit me. Ah yes Ray now has 2 kids

And how sad that his son was really his son.

[Paladin]

4. There's an "explanatory" article in today's Slate.com.

And all it does is confirm how ridiculously over-complicated the series was. I think the first season was such a huge critical success that the series creator was given unsupervised carte blanche this time around---big fucking mistake.......

[yallerdawg]

6. I thought Season 2 was excellent.

While I appreciated the Rust - Marty banter and philosophical musings of Season 1, I felt the new show continued the character development and evolution of these Season 2 characters in the same spirit as the first season. There are mysteries and conjecture remaining in the story. Real California crime and events again gave us glimmers of cosmic truths in the storyline. All of the main characters were interesting and well-acted.

And we can never be sure Frank ever left the cellar. Fade to black...

[DawgHouse]

7. I liked TD2 but felt it was difficult to follow because there were too many players.

With TD1, I would watch each episode more than once because of the outstanding character development and great writing. With TD2, I re-watched each episode so that I could try to unscrew the plot line. Often I was left thinking, "Okay, this must be important!" Later, I found out it meant nothing or was only a minor sub plot.

It was poorly written IMO, although the story itself was not bad and the actors were very, very good.

JMHO

[Paladin]

8. I'm with you.

I appreciate a complex plot, but I resent a poorly-developed one.

[PasadenaTrudy]

9. Ani and Ray's baby. n/t

[Silver Gaia]

10. Wow. I just found out that the best parts of S1 were plagiarized.

In January 2014, WSJ published this article: http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/01/30/the-most-shocking-thing-about-hbos-true-detective/

Evidently, Pizzolato did not really respond until the story was again reported in this article from August 2014: http://lovecraftzine.com/2014/08/04/...ti-and-others/

And then, he responded just to say that, yeah, he had read Ligotti's work, but denied that he plagiarized.

Yes, he did! He mentioned several influences all along, but never mentioned Ligotti until confronted with this outright (and still does not do so in his denial statement). Some of it is verbatim, and some of it is paraphrased. It's plagiarism either way. It's just TOO similar.

The portions in question are Rust Cohle's monologues, those long nihilistic ramblings that made us all go WOW when voiced so superbly by Matthew McConaughey. This formed the whole center, the heart and soul, of Rust's character. To have even done something so simple as to show Rust with a copy of Ligotti's book would have been helpful. It would at least have shown he was aware and would have been an acknowledgment of sorts. But Pizzolato gave Ligotti no credit at all.

I knew S2 was poorly written, but I am even less impressed now. I had liked Season 1. I still like it, but not Pizzolato. This guy is NOT a good writer. Yet HBO is going forward with Season 3. Go figure.

----

Oh, and yeah, the baby was Ray and Ani's baby. She says something about doing justice for "Ray's sons," which made me think, "but he only had one son...???" And then, when Jordan handed the baby to Ani, and Ani started putting him into the baby sling, I realized they were saying it was HER baby... with Ray. More importantly, perhaps, what was the POINT of the baby? Did it add anything to the story? For me, no.

[Paladin]

11. Oh, well. Congrats on comprehending the final mumbled dialogue.

I think I'll be finding something better to do with my Sunday evenings than watching season 3........

[Silver Gaia]

12. Yeah. Same here. :/

[Paladin]

13. HBO's coming out with a "Westworld" series in 2016.

Based on the old 70's movie about a futuristic theme park gone horribly wrong; Anthony Hopkins has the part that Yul Brynner played in the flick. Sounds promising......

[Silver Gaia]

14. I'm looking forward to that one, too.

I've also been reading about another 2016 HBO premiere called "Vinyl" about rock & roll in the early 70s that has Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger as showrunners. Saw a promo for it recently, too--might have been right before or after this finale? Could be good.

[Paladin]

15. If Scorsese is involved, I'm there. Thanks for the info. (nt)

[yallerdawg]

16. What Pizzolatto said:

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/02/02/writer-nic-pizzolatto-on-thomas-ligotti-and-the-weird-secrets-of-true-detective/

I read “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race” and found it incredibly powerful writing. For me as a reader, it was less impactful as philosophy than as one writer’s ultimate confessional: an absolute horror story, where the self is the monster. In episode one [of "True Detective"] there are two lines in particular (and it would have been nothing to re-word them) that were specifically phrased in such a way as to signal Ligotti admirers. Which, of course, you got.

The philosophy Cohle promotes in the show’s earliest episodes is a kind of anti-natalist nihilism, and in that regard all cats should be unbagged: “Confessions of an Antinatalist,” “Nihil Unbound,” “In the Dust of this Planet,” “Better to Have Never Been,” and lots of Cioran were all on the reading list. This is before I came out to Hollywood, but I knew that in my next work I would have a detective who was (or thought he was) a nihilist. I’d already been reading E.M. Cioran for years and consider him one of my all-time favorite and, oddly, most nourishing writers. As an aphorist, Cioran has no rivals other than perhaps Nietzsche, and many of his philosophies are echoed by Ligotti. But Ligotti is far more disturbing than Cioran, who is actually very funny. In exploring these philosophies, nobody I’ve read has expressed the idea of humanity as aberration more powerfully than Cioran and Ligotti.

One of the joys of the "True Detective" series now is to dig into the sources and references of the story and then put your own spin on it. In Season One, there were "clues" sprinkled throughout the show that would take you along different paths of discovery. "In the Dust of this Planet" is a whole 'nother philosophical chain that is real cool to follow out. Lovecraft and Ambrose Bierce, "The King in Yellow." Discussions of Rust and Marty representing the death of the old imaginary ideal America and emergence of the new post-industrial America, visualized in the post-Katrina Louisiana with all the missing people.

These gems are also hidden in the California season. Freeways, orgies and ritualistic murders, government corruption of epic proportion, occult references, wild gunfights (a gunfight in California is the direct event arming the police across the country with military-style response) - religious allegory - you can go down the rabbit hole in Season 2, also!

Can't hardly wait for Season 3!