True Detective

searching for deeper meanings was screen grab stuff like the yellow ties and the patterns. when whole scenes are devoted to the abrupt change in the 8 year old daughter's behavior from a sweet little girl to a morose kid posing rape scenes with her dolls and drawing sex pictures while the dad is working a case centering around kids going missing and being molested and/or killed by a cult. its a bit more concrete. as i said, it doesnt matter, the mistake was mine in thinking this was a show for deductive reasoning when it was just a drama with a crime wrapped around it.

She didn't pose the fucking dolls, dude. Do you need Nick Pizzaface to come and personally explain that to you?

ZyyzYzzy_sl said:

It is amazing we have Lithose and Astro not letting go. No one was trolling, you were just generating way too much "information" from fleeting scenes.

Like how Marty's daughter probably went to a Tuttle schools or how not wanting Grnadpa to help with something means he is a rapist.

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What are you talking about? I've said from the start that there really wasn't information to draw up the conclusion she was raped (I said Ihopedthey explain it that way because it felt kind of obtuse). But I have no problem with the conclusion being what it was. Marty just being an absentee father was a reasonable, and rational explanation for what we saw.

However, there were enough Red Herrings that it doesn't make someone an asshole for someone to be suspicious. If you think it does? Then you're just someone who was using post production direction from the writer to confirm your arguments, your first post in the thread wasn't until after the author's comment and after Episode 4 had aired (Kir much later than that). Hind sight must be an awesome high horse to sit on. (The writer even said, had the show been released in a large block, the symbolism would have been diminished. Since he's an author by trade, he wrote the episodes with a long view format--so it's completely possible he put in too much into one episode, not counting on the weeks between drumming up conspiracies--writing for shows and books is different due to formats.)

Speculation about shows is fun. There was plenty of fuel in that imagery around episode 2-3 to speculate on, which is why there were a lot of people speculating (The large majority of this thread.) Then we had the PTSD lost dip shits ride inAFTERthe writer's interview trying desperately to stroke their egos with their keen knowledge.

The only stupid people here are the ones that still refuse to just accept the ending, and those that were using elements outside the show, or well beyond original air dates, to pad their confidence. There is nothing wrong with saying the symbolism in the first few episodes was muddled. Because it was. The show became a lot more clear as to it's intent and theme after episode 4.

chaos_sl said:

She didn't pose the fucking dolls, dude. Do you need Nick Pizzaface to come and personally explain that to you?

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Wait, wait, wait. Who posed these dolls?

Lithose_sl said:

What are you talking about? I've said from the start that there really wasn't information to draw up the conclusion she was raped (I said Ihopedthey explain it that way because it felt kind of obtuse). But I have no problem with the conclusion being what it was. Marty just being an absentee father was a reasonable, and rational explanation for what we saw.

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Yeah, except here it's YOU drawing an explanation from what the writer said outside the show. You don't watch the finale and think to yourself, "Oh, I get what happened with his daughter, it was just cause he wasn't around."

No one, bro. No one.

if she didnt pose the dolls then its supposed to be in marty's head? and you dont think thats trolling? it touches back to what Lithose was saying about a false narrative. stuff we are shown is untrustworthy, how can we try and solve the case if we are given bad clues? i stand by what i have been saying. great drama. bad mystery.

So the show has to blatantly go out of its way and explain every little detail. So have Marty just start talking about how he thinks he saw the dolls posed and waste time explaining this shit?

Maester Chuk_sl said:

nobody is saying the show is bad, the acting and most of the story was top notch. i cant praise these performances highly enough, but at the end of the day, we still ended up getting trolled by the director. its called true detective, but the detecting is left to the lead actors who find a clue and pounce. traditional detective shows have the detective go around compiling information and it gives us the viewer a chance to put our own detective hats on and try to solve it with them. this show was all drama then when they needed to work on the case, they catch a break and work it. we dont get to use our brains, we just watch and enjoy the scenery chewing between matt and woody.

next time around i wont even bother guessing about anything because now that i know what pizzolato is playing at, ill just enjoy the acting and check my monkey brain at the door when it comes to anything close to a whodunnit.

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Detective's curse. Sometimes you get too immersed in it and you can't see what is right there in front of your face.

We aren't meant to solve the case, we are not the True Detectives. I think it was meant to be symbolism, it was meant to show Marty so distracted by his work even in this intimate moment with his family. And a rare moment, from what we know. But he was still focused on kids getting raped and killed and voodoo cults and shit.

And what Fingz said. These are things that were actually said, out loud, on the tv show.

Where the fuck are you getting that the dolls weren't posed? What fucking indication leads there? I guess his meeting with the principal later on also is fictitious? Good thing they added both those fictitious events in for....

what purpose exactly.

Oh I get it, the meeting with the principal is real and the doll thing is a fake memory he inserted to explain his daughters later behavior. How thin do I need to stretch my explanations to make up for the show's narrative flaws?

Thinking Marty built that up in his head is as unfounded as thinking Audrey had some sort of interaction in some sort of way with the cult. I'd say more unfounded actually since we don't see that happen any other time in the show except for Rust's hallucinations which are well explained (although the last one is pretty perplexing and a stretch).

I think a lot of it comes down to NP's inexperience. As Lithose mentioned, I think he just didn't consider episodic content delivery when taking parts from the book.

Holy shit, Lost and Shamalamadingdong have people totally fucked in the head now when watching shows. For now on I guess a writer has to fucking put disclaimers on everything and can't do anything visually creative so people don't think they are being tricked.

Kirun_sl said:

Seriously. Some people in this thread have a serious case of, "hearing footsteps and thinking it's elephants" going on. You can interpret things a million different ways, if you sit down and over analyze it to death, always searching for some hidden or "deeper" meaning.

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And that's fair. Like I said in my actual post; I think the ending was fine. It was rational and made sense that the girl was just acting out. What I was saying is that the little things in the first few episodes were muddled for a show that purported itself to be a straight up, simplistic narrative crime drama. Seeing twists around Episode 3 or 4 doesn't make someone an asshole, there was enough there to suspect those things.

Only when the whole show came out, and you saw those little signs NOT build into anything else, would someone start to write them off. Which is fine, but I'd have preferred cleaner foreshadowing if old Nick wanted his fan base not to run afield.

And like I said, he even admitted in an interview that the story was written as a large block--so if people could have seen it all, the stuff he crammed in at the start wouldn't have been so emphasized. Because it was meant to be digested with the cleaner later episodes. However, in a TV show format, the signs/symbols in Episode 2-3 were just kind of left there for everyone to interpret, and of course they ran with it. That shit could have meant anything.

And I felt that using such symbolism was kind of obtuse. It was front loaded and felt like a bit of misdirection.

Dbl post.

Starting to understand how so many people watched lost for all those season, holy fuck im glad I quit watching midway through season 2. I can only imagine how retarded that thread was

The Ancient_sl said:

Yeah, except here it's YOU drawing an explanation from what the writer said outside the show. You don't watch the finale and think to yourself, "Oh, I get what happened with his daughter, it was just cause he wasn't around."

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Well, not just that. But maybe, by the time it gets to the end, it's hard to seperate things like that because the information is out there. This is why I do NOT like it when writers comment on their own work. As many famous authors say, they have no more valid interpretation of their own work than someone else does. Once you push that work into the public domain, it's not really yours to "add to". That's why George Lucas is an asshole.

A big part of my opinion just came from finding no more clues after Episode 4 though. It kind of settled me into the belief that what we were seeing was the detective's curse playing out in Hart's mind's eye (IE there are connections right under my nose). But yeah, the authors comments probably swayed me too (Which again, is why I dislike authors commenting.)

Alex_sl said:

Thinking Marty built that up in his head is as unfounded as thinking Audrey had some sort of interaction in some sort of way with the cult. I'd say more unfounded actually since we don't see that happen any other time in the show except for Rust's hallucinations which are well explained (although the last one is pretty perplexing and a stretch).

I think a lot of it comes down to NP's inexperience. As Lithose mentioned, I think he just didn't consider episodic content delivery when taking parts from the book.

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I don't see any other reasonable explanation. Audrey having any kind of interaction with the cult is just ludicrous. And there is nothing to even hint at that in the show. But TV is a visual medium and to me it makes sense for them to try and portray Marty's mental state visually.

Lithose_sl said:

Well, not just that. But maybe, by the time it gets to the end, it's hard to seperate things like that because the information is out there. This is why I do NOT like it when writers comment on their own work. As many famous authors say, they have no more valid interpretation of their own work than someone else does. Once you push that work into the public domain, it's not really yours to "add to". That's why George Lucas is an asshole.

A big part of my opinion just came from finding no more clues after Episode 4 though. It kind of settled me into the belief that what we were seeing was the detective's curse playing out in Hart's mind's eye (IE there are connections right under my nose). But yeah, the authors comments probably swayed me too (Which again, is why I dislike authors commenting.)

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When I first saw the dolls I was not certain if it was real or some kind of symbolism, but I was certain it was connected directly to the cult and was looking for other representations of the 5 men in the show. But more and more it just didn't seem right to me. Rewatching it, and getting a broader context, really sealed it for me that this was about Marty and not the murders. I don't think you need the author's comments to get there, but you do need to take the show in as a whole, and for that reason think they should have just left all that shit out. It doesn't add to the show and creates confusion.