The final season of the hit HBO anthology series “True Detective” has moved away from what made its previous seasons so compelling and introduced an entirely new element: vigilance.
It's a sad fact, but not unexpected, given the current entertainment landscape and the fact that the show features two female leads from the LGBT community – Jodie Foster and relative newcomer Callie Reese.
Foster plays a police chief named Liz Danvers in the fictional Alaskan town of Ennis – near the North Pole.
Reese plays Alaska State Trooper Evangeline Navarro – a Native American cop who seems destined for a tense relationship with Danvers. The last seven episodes will tell us more about that.
Warning: Spoilers ahead
The first part starts off with two decent hooks.
As the people of Ennis prepare for two weeks of complete winter darkness (due to the Earth's axial tilt), a hunter watches a herd of deer commit mass suicide in the twilight by jumping off a cliff.
It is soon discovered that a team of scientists from the area's research laboratory has disappeared. The only clues to their disappearance are a whiteboard declaring that they are all dead and a severed tongue on the floor.
Danvers arrives on the scene and determines that the scientists have been missing for at least two days and identifies the tongue as belonging to a Native American woman.
This is the point at which the ring loses its strength.
Navarro deduces that the tongue belonged to a Native American woman named Annie Kotok, who was killed six years earlier. The crime was never solved. During the interaction with Danvers, Navarro at one point uttered the words, “My spirit animal eats old white ladies like you for breakfast.”
Even Foster's supposedly gay, NFL-obsessed character isn't diverse enough to break free from Reese's character's screeds.
Three additional negative comments about whiteness are made throughout the episode – two of them from Navarro and one from the girlfriend of one of Danvers' male deputies.
In the final 35 minutes of the episode, viewers see Reese belittle most of the male characters she encounters, and each one of them is portrayed as brain-dead.
As the episode comes to a close, Navarro complains that Kowtok became a cold case victim, just because she wasn't white.
Additionally, Danvers is discovered to be raising a lesbian orphan girl who finds herself in a compromising position due to filming a pornographic video with another teenage girl, allegedly 15 years old.
In short, this version of “True Detective” feels like a toxic, unnecessary sequel to the once-great HBO series.
Nick Pizzolatto, who wrote and produced the first three seasons, wasn't involved in any writing about the mess, which may explain why the series lost its identity just minutes into one episode.
Pizzolatto created the iconic characters Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) in the first season — which premiered 10 years ago this week and has proven to be timeless.
The second and third seasons of True Detective are not very popular with fans of the first season, but it can be said that the third season was interesting and must-see television.
Additionally, in the three seasons that Pizzolatto was at the helm of the series he created, there were strong female and minority characters. None of them had to resort to it Head girl Their way of dealing with issues and making negative comments about whiteness.
Michelle Monaghan's performance as a strong female character in season one was fantastic, as was Rachel McAdams' performance in season two unforgettable.
Meanwhile, Season 3 featured two Black main characters — Mahershala Ali and Carmen Ejogo — and each mastered their role without demonizing whiteness. They are just trying to solve the puzzle.
Ali's performance has been criminally underrated, despite the fact that he continues to receive endless praise from critics.
But the cultural pathologies that are identity politics and wokeness seem poised to take all the fun out of the current season of the show.
Will Danvers and Navarro solve any crimes? After one episode, it's hard to care.
This article originally appeared in The Western Journal.
