The original post: /r/television by /u/thalguy on 2025-10-19 16:13:29.
I’m a huge fan of True Detective S1. I think it is one of the best seasons of television ever released. I was disappointed in S2 and S3. I was so disappointed that I skipped S4 even though I love Jodi Foster. Last week I decided to rewatch S1, and when it finished HBO Max recommended S4 so I decided to give it a watch.
The good: Jodi Foster was amazing, as always. I thought Kali Reis did a good job, and some of the other supporting actors did as well. The direction was great. There was some interesting camera work. I enjoyed hearing the Inuit language.
The bad: Pretty much everything else was fucking absurd. There were so many stupid callbacks to season 1, and it was derivative in the worst way. Marty kills Reggie Ledoux and Rust helps conceal it, so let’s do the same with these detectives. Let’s throw in the Tuttle name, as if that makes any sense at all. Let’s say Time is a flat circle, even though it doesn’t make any sense to mention that. It’s a meaningless callback. Rust had a kid die, so let’s do that again. Rust’s kid dying provided motivation for his character, and drove him to want to protect kids from being raped and murdered. What did it really add to Jodie Foster’s character? Let’s have some corrupt cops, just like we did in S1, even though that doesn’t really add anything to the plot. Let’s have a mystery that you can’t really follow along or try and solve. The ending made absolutely zero fucking sense. The scientists at the research lab were ridiculous top to bottom. Why would pollution melt the permafrost in a manner that allowed drilling to be easier to complete? You would need heat to melt the permafrost, not just simple pollution. Even then, you would need tremendous amounts of heat, localized to the drilling location, not just pollution in the general area. Although I did enjoy the direction, there were problems with that, too. Who decided to use the shot where the character sees the shadow of something run by? That’s overused. There were other overused tropes as well, like the character just shaking supernaturally. So the research station sat on top of the ice caves, but no one in town knew about the ice caves? Somehow the police investigated the research station and didn’t see the hatch at all? A large group of women invade the research center, abduct all but one person, force them into a trailer, drive them out to the ice, force them to strip, and leave absolutely no evidence? You have a professional boxer as a main actor, and you don’t work that in at all? The weird supernatural elements were extremely jarring. They detracted from the show. What was the point of calling anything Night Country? That ended up meaningless as well.
I just don’t know who this season was written before. I understand that it can be hard to live up to the hype of an all time great season, but this show cannot do anything right in the last three seasons. The writers don’t seem to understand what made S1 so great. Jumping back in forth in a timeline was fun, but by itself didn’t make S1 great. Somehow Nic and the writers thought that they could repeat that in S3 and get another winner. It seemed overdone. The dialogue that worked so well in S1 didn’t work in S2 with Vince Vaughn’s character. Rust having synesthesia added some cool moments in S1, and it played well against him being so grounded in reality. Turning that up to 11 for S4 was just ridiculous.
Lastly, I think they chose Alaska because of Rust’s connection to Alaska, but they didn’t build upon that. You could move that plot to damn near any location and it wouldn’t matter. If you moved S1 to another location it wouldn’t work.