In eternity where there is no time, nothing can grow, nothing can become. Nothing changes. So death created hashtag games to grow the time that it would kill. And that is the terrible and secret fate of all life: You’re trapped by a meme you keep chucking LULZ into.


In layman’s terms: Overnight, the hashtag #TrueDetectiveSeason2 rippled across the flat circle that is Twitter, with users of the micro-weblogging service and real-time Olympics commentary ticker opening their locked rooms to let out fantasy-casting picks for the next round of HBO’s True Detective. Near as The A.V. Club can tell, it all started innocently enough yesterday morning, with the New York Times’ Dave Itzkoff riffing off of True Detective’s many driving sequences to propose a pair of footloose and fancy free stars for the crime anthology’s second season:


Though, to be fair, some people were making this joke more than a week ago—they just failed to launch it with a behind-the-wheel image.




For a while, the joke rolled around, all over Internet town, yielding variations like this one from one-time A.V. Club contributor/current L.A. Times entertainment writer Meredith Blake.


But the joke truly gained steam when the #TrueDetectiveSeason2 hashtag was attached, a hashtag we’ve all used and will use (if its continued popularity is any indication) again and again. How many times has TV critic Jaime Weinman used it? Who knows? But he does know that Detectives Hart and Cohle can’t remember their past lives.

HitFix’s Alan Sepinwall, meanwhile, agitated for a second season where the Audrey and Maisie equivalents have adorable, chubby cheeks.


Sepinwall also provided an assist for a suggestion from Ryan Mowbray that loops in two of prestige TV’s favorite little girls lost.


Sound On Sight editor Josh Spiegel foresees a True Detective in which one star picked the wrong week to quite sniffing glue (though, really, aren’t we all sniffing a glue called “the illusion of free will and independent thought?”).


Media scholar/Marathon Packs blogger Eric Harvey has detectives on his case—they filmed the whole charade.

In the vision of pop critic Ann Powers, it’s a Purple King rather than a yellow one. And Time isn’t a flat circle—it’s a kick-ass backing band.


Author Kelly Oxford wants a True Detective where the detectives get a car, and you get a car, and you get a car, and you get a car, and you get a car—everybody gets a CARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!


The pitch from Broad City’s official feed? Broad fucking City.


And in the interest of self-promotion: The staff of The A.V. Club is funny on Twitter Dot Com as well. In Sean O’Neal’s version of True Detective, one of the Lone Star can men is ALIIIIIIIIIVE!


Not pictured in the season that Ryan McGee sets a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away: The commanding officer who’s extremely concerned about traps.


Les Chappell, meanwhile, opts for a different fantastical setting: Bat Country.

The final line in Zack Handlen’s True Detective: “Let’s go exploring (all of the ways we’ve deluded ourselves into thinking this existence isn’t some projection from deep within the synapses of a mad creator).”