Who Goes There (S1x04)
Airdate: 9 February 2014
Written by: Nic Pizzolatto
Directed by: Cary Jo Fukunaga
Running Time: 55 minutes
The fourth episode of True Detective arrived burdened with an extra week's delay, HBO having adjusted its broadcast schedule around the Super Bowl. The knock-on effect for an international audience was a prolonged wait that sharpened expectations considerably — and with sharpened expectations comes a sharper critical eye. The creators, whether they intended to or not, were thereby obliged to deliver something the series had not yet managed, or at the very least to signal a meaningful gear change.
The preceding episode had done the important work of identifying a principal suspect, which meant that the murder investigation — nominally the engine driving the entire show — could no longer idle on the hard shoulder whilst Nic Pizzolatto indulged his evident fondness for probing the private lives of his two detectives. The structural shift in Who Goes There reflects this: the 2012 framing device, in which Cohle and Hart are questioned by younger colleagues, is reduced to a handful of shots — a few dry, self-aware remarks, the occasional retroactive gloss on their actions from 1995. It functions here less as a narrative mechanism and more as punctuation.
Fans of Alexandra Daddario will, if the episode is any indication, be bidding her farewell — and those of a certain disposition may additionally abandon whatever hopes they had harboured regarding HBO's customary generosity with its female dramatic talent. The resolution of her storyline, however, is handled with the restraint that has become the series' signature. Pizzolatto and director Cary Joji Fukunaga resist the obvious; the fallout for one protagonist's domestic life is conveyed obliquely — through reactions to letters, overheard telephone conversations, and a quietly devastating sequence in which the other half of the partnership attempts to manage the resulting disorder with a conspicuous and almost comic absence of empathy or tact.
Once the episode has dispensed with its personal entanglements, it turns its attention to the professional — and here the picture is equally compromised. Cohle and Hart, pressing deeper into an investigation that begins to suggest something far larger and more monstrous than a single murder, resolve to go underground. For one of them, a former undercover operative, this constitutes a homecoming of sorts — a return to the reckless, "cowboy" mode of existence he has never quite relinquished beneath his veneer of respectability. Laws are broken. Procedures are abandoned entirely. This goes some considerable way towards explaining why, seventeen years on, the two men are so carefully "economical with the truth" when recounting their methods to their interrogators.
Their descent into what might fairly be called a criminal heart of darkness is anything but understated — and here the episode departs decisively from the implicit register it has favoured up to this point. The climactic sequence — a routine undercover operation that deteriorates, with a kind of grim inevitability, into a robbery that then deteriorates further still into sustained and bloody chaos — is executed in a single, unbroken, multi-minute take. Fukunaga, who over the preceding three episodes had appeared content to serve as Pizzolatto's obedient technician, here seizes his moment with considerable authority. The long take unfolds primarily from one character's point of view, pulling the viewer directly into the violence rather than allowing any comfortable critical distance.
It is, frankly, a stunning piece of filmmaking — and it is also, frankly, what saves the episode. Who Goes There is not particularly well-constructed as a whole; it is uneven, and its constituent parts feel imperfectly balanced. But that final sequence is remarkable enough to recalibrate one's overall impression substantially. It also, somewhat inconveniently, raises the bar to a height that Pizzolatto, Fukunaga, and HBO will have their work cut out to clear in the remaining four episodes.
RATING: 8/10 (+++)
(Note: The text in the original Croatian version is available here.)
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