Even the rosiest colored glasses can’t erase the fact that the last season of the series also got off to a slow-ish start. But when you compare the electric charisma of Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle and the shocking occult staging of that first female victim to the dreary exposition of the first two episodes of this season, there’s no doubt that, so far, True Detective is operating on a different caliber. But it’s possible now all the players and conflicting interests have been laid out, that we won’t have to suffer through anymore clunky backstory on our detectives, our gangsters, the transportation project, or the city of Vinci. And god how those back stories clunk. We’re used to a True Detective that deals in the murky lines between heroes and villains but when, in this episode, we get Ray Velcoro’s ex-wife saying, ”You’re bad, Ray. You’re a bad person . . . you were good at being decent” or Paul Woodrugh’s girlfriend saying, “You're not right,” or Vince Vaughn’s whole opening monologue about his harrowing childhood, well, it all lands with a morally uncomplex thud.

True Detective is all exploring the seamy underbellies, but the weighty self-loathing be it via Ani Bezzerides’ family issues and dark sexual proclivities, Ray’s laundry list of bad habits, or Paul’s physical scars and potential closeted sexuality, is all a bit much. We need that shock of weirdness (a.k.a. a gunman in a raven’s head) to spice up the gloom. Here are the other ways True Detective Season 2 is circling the greatness of Season 1. Fingers crossed that the ending of tonight’s episode means the show is back on track.

The Mythology: “The Yellow King” and “Carcosa” are the twin mythological terms (lifted from Ambrose Bierce and Robert Chambers) that helped set True Detective apart from the pack last year. In an interview with Vanity Fair, series creator Nic Pizzolatto said his mythological inspiration for Season 2 goes back much further than Bierce and Chambers. The article points out that “he described the new season as a detective story in the manner of Oedipus Rex, in which ’the detective is searching and searching and searching, and the culprit is him.’” We see echoes of the Oedipus myth in the blinded murder victim Ben Caspar or, in this week’s episode, in the inappropriate relationship between Paul Woodrugh and his mother. Ani’s full name, Antigone, is a reference to the play that precedes Oedipus Rex in Sophocles’ Thebes trilogy. (Antigone, for the record, also features a famous blind character.) And, finally, there’s Ani’s father’s Panticapaeum Institute near Guerneville. Named after an ancient Greek city, the coastal commune is bound to crop up again given that in tonight’s episode Ani found out that the missing girl had more ties to Guerneville. So, likely, we haven’t seen the last of David Morse and ridiculous Rust Cohle-esque lines like “This is how we must live now, in the final age of man.”