True Detective's Most Defining Moments | MarkMeets | Entertainment, Music, Movie, TV & London Film Premiere News

True Detective’s serialised yet self-contained crime stories have gripped us, played with our emotions and left us crying out for more (or, on occasion, simply crying). However there’s something about both series of the crime drama that is simply indefinable. How do you put your finger on just what it is that keeps you coming back for more?

In an attempt to answer that question, let’s look back at the standout scenes from the first two series of the show and look at what they tell us about True Detective.

Rust’s Passenger Seat Monologue
This scene in the very first episode is one that’s been done a thousand times in a thousand different movies and TV series. There are two cops, they’re in a car together and they’re clearly wildly different people. Do you think that’s going to create some tension? Do you think maybe they’ll overcome their differences to build a lasting bond of friendship? Sure you do!

Yet while this scene walks a well-trodden path, it does so much more with it. Rust’s monologue doesn’t just establish the good-cop/bad-cop, chalk/cheese dynamic. It nails down the philosophy for the whole show, managing to be funny while throwing down bleakest of all possible outlooks as Rust explains, “The honourable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand-in-hand into extinction.”

The Six Minute Tracking Shot
In the episode “Who Goes There?” we witness an epic six minute tracking shot as Rust, undercover with a band of meth-head bikers, gets dragged into a robbery gone wrong. The atmosphere is confused and hectic as we see Rust dive in and out of buildings, getting into and out of fights and constantly hoping the next door is a way out.

It’s also one of the most cinematic things you’ll ever see on television, and is emblematic of the entire approach True Detective takes to making TV. With a single director, a single writer and a cast who get given the scripts for the entire series up front, this is as close as you’ll get to watching an eight hour long movie.

Church in the Ruins
This episode was a payoff for a lot of the slow-burning build-up we’d seen so far in season two, however it also marked a shift in tone for the second series. While the first series of True Detective very much had its roots in traditional gothic horror, particularly The King in Yellow, the second series eschewed a lot of the horror trappings of the original, but in this episode there is a healthy dose of Hitchcock evident.

As Ani made her way through the club, it was a jarring and immediate switch in tone as we were trapped in her drug-addled perspective, with a Hitchockian score and a sense of old fashioned suspense you’ll struggle to find in other contemporary TV shows or movies.

Frank Semyon’s Death
As Frank Semyon stumbled out into the desert with a sucking knife wound, it was a weird moment of catharsis for the viewers. As he encountered those that had wronged him, those he wronged, the love of his life and eventually his own corpse, we truly saw what made Frank tick. Which is a recurring theme across both True Detective series – death is when we see who a character really is.

From Ray Velcoro’s dreamed encounter with his dad as he lies on the floor with a gunshot wound, to Rust finally realising that at the moment of death the thing you see isn’t a monster, but love — it’s when a character dies that we truly find out what their life was about.

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