As for the VV, frankly, I don’t want to Vince my words, but what of the Vaughnaissance?? As the season progressed I became less and less aware that I was watching a schlocky washed up comedian and his fivehead and more convinced of Frank Semyon; a gangster with a heart o’ solid gold navigating LA’s underbelly with a steadfast moral compass.

Back to the heavily criticised convolution of the story; I think that this season was less about the case and more about these characters striving for some kind of redemption. And at the end of the day, I felt for these characters and wanted them to find some kind of peace so someone was doing something right. The world that Pizzolatto crafted is so dense that I could spend an entire article dissecting the Grecian nods alone: from the Oedipal gouging of Caspere’s eyes, the Elektra-esque revelation of Caspere’s illegitimate daughter having slept with him to the seer-like prediction of Ray Velcoro’s fate: shit felt straight up lifted from a Euripides tragedy!

I did like the writing on the whole, but I will admit that the dialogue wasn’t as consistently on-point as season 1 (I’m not sure if the actors were coached to mumble their lines to enhance the austerity or if the audio mixing was so off, but I always NEEDED subtitles). Regardless, I feel that people are looking past some fantastic little one-liner gems. Case in point, the following list:

Ray: Well, just so you know, I support feminism. Mostly by having body-image issues.

Ray: Pain is inexhaustible. It’s only people that get exhausted.

Frank: I used to want to be an astronaut. But astronauts don’t even go to the moon anymore.

Frank: In the midst of being gangbanged by forces unseen, I figure I'd drill a new orifice, go on and fuck myself for a change.

I really feel that this is where the comparisons have to stop. Is Louisiana comparable to LA? Sure, both are desolate landscapes but we move beyond swamplands and poverty to empty highways and full pockets. That being said, the intersecting shots of the highways of LA seemed to hark back to the atmospheric sprawling miasma of bleak lifelessness that was Season 1. The utterly smashing soundtrack also helped set the tone. I have to fess up to moodily crooning Lera Lynn’s dive bar laments for the past month or so because they’re just so darn tootin’ great.

Despite my gloriously positive view thus far, I do have some gripes with this season. Taylor Kitsch wasn’t bad as the emotionally stiff, closeted veteran but wasn’t particularly good either. I believe that he played Paul Woodrough well but I didn’t find the character to be particularly fresh; ‘Oh I know, we’ll create a cold, calculated war survivor but we’ll make him gay!!!!1’ That move felt a bit forcefully contrarian to me, so much so that it became trope-ish.

On the subject of tropes, although Velcoro encapsulated some of McConaughey’s existential car musings, it fell short for me in the absence of Rust Cohle’s signature nihilism. Perhaps outside my diehard dedication to the character of Cohle, I may well have fallen in love with Velcoro’s audio love notes to his perplexedly ginger son (who is in competition with Velcoro’s ‘stache as my favourite character).

No series is perfect. Heck, season 1 had some serious issues itself, but the case remains: TD S2 was an exhilarating ride. It had a heart-wrenchingly satisfying ending and some seriously fantastic climaxes: (e.g. the clusterfuck firefight in which Woodrough emerged a “god warrior”, the sinister, orchestral mind-spin that was the sex party, and the tragic last stands of our brooding antiheros). I await news of S3 with bated breath and challenge anyone who wants to slander the past season to a Bezzerides style knife fight.