Christopher Orr, Spencer Kornhaber and Amy Sullivan are some very hard to please people. The latter two also made a very basic error. They tried to solve the case in HBO’s True Detective and then were disappointed that all those clues that were left everywhere turned out to be teasers and dead ends. Did they not consider the source of inspiration for the series?
The King in Yellow is a book of short stories by American writer Robert W. Chambers, first published by F. Tennyson Neely in 1895. The book is named after a fictional play with the same title which recurs as a motif through some of the stories. The first half of the book features highly esteemed weird stories, and the book is described by S.T. Joshi as a classic in the field of the supernatural. There are ten stories, the first four of which, “The Repairer of Reputations”, “The Mask”, “In the Court of the Dragon” and “The Yellow Sign”, mention The King in Yellow, a forbidden play which induces despair or madness in those who read it.
A “play which induces despair or madness in those who read it.”
How self-unaware, then, is Spencer Kornhaber when he complains that “As I said last week, my suspense heading into the finale came less from the storyline and more from my continuing befuddlement at what True Detective really is” and “it all feels like the show and its viewers had been studying for a test that never came”?
How clueless does Amy Sullivan read when she writes:
I vowed to watch the finale as a fan, not as someone trying to figure it all out. But even as a fan, I still found these dangling threads and implausibilities frustrating because the show practically begged us to get into the weeds, to wade into swampy waters. That’s okay if it winds up giving viewers some extra insight. But it’s another thing entirely if the show is just messing with us.
She didn’t expect swampy waters in a show that was shot in the Bayou? The show practically begged her not to get into the weeds, lest she fall into despair and madness.
What kept the viewer turning the pages of the series, so to speak, was the suspense created by all those dangling threads. And the supernatural elements of Carcosa argued against expecting plausibility.
All three critics loved the first three shows, which were primarily set in a police station where the two retired detectives were being interrogated about a murder they had supposedly solved seventeen years earlier. Who could have expected, at that point, that neither one of them was guilty of any substantial foul play, and that they would actually leave the police station, reunite, and go find the real killer?
Letting us believe that one, or possibly both, of the detectives might have actually been the killer or somehow involved with the strange Carcosa cult was simply a device to keep us guessing.
And these folks are complaining that it worked.
Let’s face it. True Detective was an inspired project that was highly entertaining. The acting was great; the direction was great, and the cinematography was great.
It was a story about a story that would make you insane if you read it too intently.
I guess the joke is on them.
