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Her pain takes the form of rhetorical questions: “Children should laugh, right?” And: “What kind of woman hates the only things that ever showed her love?” Wishing she had the courage to use her gun on herself, she begins just straight-up bawling and howling “God forgive me.” Actor Mamie Gummer is so convincing here you want to cover your ears.īut when she takes poorly to her visitor’s suggestion that she reach out to Wayne with any information she might not have previously revealed, an entirely different sort of pain starts pouring forth. “I’ve got the soul of a whore,” she says, lamenting her neglect of her kids.
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The moment the teacher offers a shoulder to cry on, the grieving mom unleashes a torrent of self-loathing. This is doubly true of Lucy, whom Amelia visits. “I can’t be in that house, man,” he says, sounding like a broken man even before he adds, “I just wanna die all the time.” It’s an absolutely heartbreaking performance from Scoot McNairy - the fact that it begins with a racial slur and ends with him begging the cop not to reveal his shameful bigotry only makes it more so. But when West sticks up for his partner, saying he’s the best detective on the job, Tom apologizes, immediately and repeatedly - and digs deep into his own despair. When Roland picks up the former from a bar where he picked a fight with a man that his wife slept with, he spits out the n-word to describe Hays the black cop’s assignment to the case, he claims, proves that no one’s taking it seriously. The thornier material here centers on Tom and Lucy Purcell, the estranged alcoholic parents of the murdered boy and missing girl. He may act like one of the good ones, but he hasn’t drunk enough “I don’t see color” Kool-Aid to pretend there aren’t enough bad ones to justify the neighbors’ suspicion. Wayne’s partner Roland West takes umbrage, but he doesn’t press the issue afterwards, even when the crowd breaks his windshield. His blackness is pretty much the only detail she either remembers or feels is necessary to convey.Īnd when the detectives go to the guy’s home for questioning, he and his neighbors angrily protest that he’s being railroaded by a trigger-happy white cop. The church-going woman who made the dolls found at the crime scene, for instance, is so casually racist in her description of the man who bought them that beyond saying he’s got one discolored eye. Here it gets a complex and unflinching examination. The subject of race, and how it’s an all-too-convenient weapon for white people to grab and wield against people of color, became a major aspect of his legendary HBO Western in its second and third seasons. Unpersuaded, the detective simply deadpans “I get to feeling penitent, I’ll let you know.” Very Reverend Smith and Al Swearengen, no?īut it isn’t just the rhythm and the word choice that meshes with Milch’s preoccupations as a writer. There’s also the bit where the local Catholic priest tells Hays how much he’d love to hear his confession.
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Their first big romantic date in 1980 is pretty hot stuff too. (“Look it up,” she adds.) The entire fight-or-fuck exchange that follows could come straight from Seth Bullock and Alma Garrett.
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Some moments just feel a bit more, y’know, Milchian than others - Amelia dropping SAT words like “vicissitudes” on her husband Wayne Hays in 1990, for instance. Co-written by Nic Pizzolatto and David “ Deadwood” Milch, with the former making his directorial debut, it’s simply another well-written procedural, funny where it wants to be - and ugly where it needs to be. The landmine rigged to detonate the moment the goons kick open his front door blasts us right into the closing credits.īut the preceding hour-plus of television wasn’t explosive per se.
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Hunted by a lynch mob that wrongfully (and racist-ly) believes him to be a child-killer, Brett “Trashman” Woodard booby-traps his home using techniques he learned in ‘Nam. You might say that tonight’s episode of True Detective - “The Hour and the Day” - goes out with a bang.
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