An inescapable theme in television storytelling is redemption. It is rare these days to encounter a show that does not have a fall from grace and a subsequent rise in its narrative arc.

One recent show to apparently buck this trend is season two of the HBO crime drama True Detective, which originally aired last summer. The storyline seems to follow a fall with a further fall — a permanent downward spiral rather than an eventual recovery.

Appearances, however, can be deceiving. On a closer look, the major question True Detective’s second season asks its viewers is laden with redemptive overtones. The question is whether the experience of being harmed transforms us, in a fundamental way, of if it simply brings out what has always been there. Do our past experiences brutalize us or do they activate in us what was there all along?

Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughn), a mobster whose misconduct is always measured and whose vocabulary is extravagant, grew up with a father who would lock him in the basement whenever he wanted freedom from the burden of parenthood, which on one occasion lasted six days. Ray Velcoro (Collin Farrell), a police detective, became a different man after his wife was raped. Velcoro killed the man he thought was responsible and subsequently went on Semyon’s payroll. Ani Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams), also a police detective, was sexually abused as a child. All three endured catastrophically evil treatment at the hands of others.

Here’s the show’s main preoccupation: Have these events inexorably ruined them?

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The reason why the second season of True Detective appears as though it’s uninterested in redemption, even though redemption is central to its concerns, is due to the way the story is written. Season two is really, really bleak.

When a narrative achieves a certain level of bleakness, the possibility of salvation can feel like it has disappeared. Everyone is compromised; everything is tainted. These are the stories whose real life counterparts the philosopher Thomas Nagel calls “moral tragedies,” situations in which no good outcome is actualizable. The characters are so mired in muck that a recovery of a pure past is no longer possible.

It is this bleakness which gives the impression that redemption is ultimately elusive. Though it’s true the show attempts to project an atmosphere of utter hopelessness, it’s also true that the characters find ways to radically break free from their pasts. The reason redemption seems to fly under the radar is because it is often obscured by other elements in the story that are highly dispiriting.

(HBO)

Take, for example, the utter incompetence of the detectives. The police work on display is so bad, and the detectives themselves seem so aloof, that it feels as if there’s no hope of setting things right. It’s almost as if the detectives’ inability to make headway on their case is offered as a meta-critique of the show’s inscrutably complex plot; the failed police work functioning as a metaphor for the audience’s inability to track the show’s convoluted story. Watching the detectives at work, the mind transitions from thinking there’s no hope of cracking the case to thinking there’s no hope of a good outcome.

Or take the fact that there are no characters with clean hands; none with pure motives. William Friedkin once described his masterful crime film To Live and Die in L.A. as a story in which every single character betrays his or her partner. Portraying main characters this way not only makes it hard to sympathize with them, but also manages to inject the story with a powerful kind of bleakness. Heroism is structurally eliminated by the guilt-inducing nature of broader forces at work; everyone is compromised.

Another reason why redemption seems elusive stems from the lack of narrative clarity, which at times can feel like darkness. But there is a world of difference between the story being dark and being in the dark about the story. The difference isn’t very pronounced while watching, but upon reflection, needlessly complicated plot lines don’t necessarily rule out moments of character redemption — they just make it harder to identify them.

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Season one of True Detective displayed a wonderful synchronization of story and character. Not very many of us are antinatalists, yet you were almost dared to convert to Rust Cohle’s (Matthew McConaughey) position as the details gradually emerged about the ways in which those children were being abused. The two features dovetailed: Cohle’s nihilism was reinforced by the terrifying nature of the crimes being investigated. There wasn’t any such accord between character and story in season two.

This past season’s storyline suggests that a dark past cannot extinguish the capacity for goodness. Having a dad who effectively locked you in a dungeon might turn a person off to the notion of fatherhood altogether, yet Semyon is obsessed with becoming a father. In fact, in one of the season’s rare tender moments, Semyon consoles a teen-age boy who has just lost his father, intimating how nurturing and encouraging Semyon himself could be toward a child of his own, if given the chance.

In Velcoro’s case, the rape caused a downward spiral of destructive behavior that ruined everything in his life. When his then-wife decided to have the baby that was ostensibly a product of rape, you expected Velcoro to see in that child a physical manifestation of the pain inflicted on him. You would expect him to hate the child. Yet what we find is that he loves him unconditionally. In fact, he is willing to give up everything, even access to visitation, if his ex-wife will promise to conceal from their son who his father really is. He is willing to part ways with the only thing in life he cares about if it means sparing that object of his love the devastating news that his biological father is a rapist.

These are, unquestionably, redemptive moments.

With that said, nothing can save True Detective’s second season from itself. In season one, the victims were the most defenseless members of society. This amplified the horror and gave the investigation an indelible moral force. In season two, a mobster gets out-schemed by fellow mobsters — yet who cares about this? An abusive pervert gets blackmailed and murdered for a past crime — are we supposed to shed a tear? High-class prostitutes are mistreated — here, admittedly, there is lots of room for sympathy, yet the show undercuts our ability to feel. One of the prostitutes delivers a monologue in which we’re told that since “everything is fucking,” what all the characters do is basically more or less the same, morally speaking. This sabotages the pity we’re allowed to feel.

The third detective, Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch), which I hadn’t even mentioned until this moment as a testament to how irredeemably bland he is, gets killed in the show’s penultimate episode, yet I swear I’ve never felt so indifferent to the offing of a main character as I was to Woodrugh’s elimination.

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Late in the season, Velcoro bitterly reveals to Semyon that he has killed the wrong guy; whoever it was, it wasn’t his ex-wife’s rapist. He tells him “I sold my soul for nothing.” Semyon responds by telling him: “[T]hat choice was in you before your wife or any of this other stuff. It was always there. Waiting. And didn’t you use that man to be what you were always waiting to become?” Writer Nic Pizzolatto followed up an excellent season one with a disappointing season two — if the recent rumors that HBO might green-light a True Detective season three are true, can Pizzolatto find his way back?