Michelle Monaghan is a talented actress who deserves more to work with than the perpetually dissatisfied housewife character she's been given. (It can't make that leap in only one episode.) Her arc is shorter, less defined, and mostly in service of the history between Rust and Marty. Unfortunately, this isn't on par with the best episodes of the season thus far, and "Haunted Houses" doesn't find a way to make Maggie as important to the story.
#TRUE DETECTIVE SEASON 1 EPISODE 6 RECAP SERIES#
This is the chance for Nic Pizzolatto to expand what has so far been a fascinating but narrow mystery series concerned with masculine existentialism, giving it a broader, more inclusive meaning. By bringing Marty's ex-wife Maggie into the story, as a third witness to the history between the detectives (and supposedly one without the sort of bias that would lead her to shield either of them anymore) it's an opportunity to take the only continually-significant non-male character and carve a meaningful place in the show's world for someone other than brooding men with haunting secrets. The specific, societal experience of the various communities-white, rural, tent-preacher frequenting types, or the urban ghettos-don't matter through a lens that only searches the psyches of these two men.Īll of this leads to the observation that "Haunted Houses" has the most daunting task of any episode of True Detective. To Rust and Marty, everyone gets boiled down into a symbolic representation because that's the best way for them to sift through all the information and make sense of a case. But it ignores the overarching approach that frames Rust and Marty as the two unreliable sources for the entire narrative. It's correct in the limitations of barely establishing the biker gang, and in not even bothering to set up the people living in the projects. That's a valuable perspective on the scene.
#TRUE DETECTIVE SEASON 1 EPISODE 6 RECAP FULL#
That long take depicted all of the minority characters as some kind of criminal, either as residents of a stash house full of drugs, or toting automatic weapons and running through the streets to fend off the biker gang in the robbery-gone-wrong. In her analysis, the show went into a project in the New Orleans area and didn't reveal anything about the lives of the people there. In the rapturous aftermath of the "oner" from the end of True Detective's fourth episode, Alyssa Rosenberg wrote the most astute pushback against all the hype.