The best thing about “Black Maps and Motel Rooms,” the penultimate episodes of True Detective’s second season, is how efficiently it manages to push its supporting characters to the margins of the story. As baffling all the characters' individual subplots have been, all four actors have shown flashes of brilliance when playing off one another. And since all the various tangents and character shadings have mostly made things more difficult to follow, it behooves the show to pare down the story to only the central characters and one goal, which makes for a more compelling hour of television.
The aftermath of the high-end hooker breakout leaves Paul, Ani, and Ray holed up at a motel with their potential witness, unable to reach out authorities. Ani is wanted in connection with slicing up the security guard; since she posed as her own sister to gain entry to the party, she convinces her old partner Detective Illinca (Michael Irby) escort her father and sister into hiding in Oregon until they can break the case open in public. And while Ani believes she did a good thing in saving a missing girl, that doesn’t go over too well with the hooker the following morning; while the woman provides some information, she balks at testifying and castigates Ani.
Here’s where Nic Pizzolatto waxes philosophic with his vulgar noir. Ani's cut off from the world, paralyzed with guilt, unable to move around freely to further the investigation—and the only good thing she managed to accomplish gets taken away. Now, faced with the fact that she jeopardized the hooker, Ani resorts to telling the girl to lay low or she’ll leak the police connection known, and “they’ll paint a cabin with you.”
The overarching theme of this season has been that corruption seeps into every level of government, and it’s impossible to discern where it ends—or how to root it out. So when Ray goes to meet Katherine Davis (Michael Hyatt), the only officer who knows that the trio have reopened a covert investigation, and finds her shot dead in her car, he flips out and flees the scene. That’s two down on the investigative front, since Ray believes he’s been framed for that killing, but not before he shares all the new information with Frank. (“I…had a bit of a strange night.”) This leaves Paul as the only man not wanted by corrupt police forces conspiring to cover up something big. Woodrugh stashes his mother and pregnant fiancee in a motel room together, and acts as Ray and Ani's liaison to the outside world.
Meanwhile, Frank finally finds some illumination while torturing his associate Blake: Osip is moving in to take over his entire territory. He bought the land Frank wanted along the rail corridor, plans to take the rest of Frank’s criminal business holdings, and aims to topple Mayor Chessani and replace him with Chessani’s son Tony as a puppet. After Frank kills Blake, he coolly explains the situation to his wife—who sees firsthand the violence her husband is now soaking his hands in, before promptly disappearing from the rest of the episode. It's a nifty bit of exposition that also manages to sideline extraneous family members, and helps distill the show to the four main characters and their struggle to stay alive/reveal the truth/escape. Was it worth all those hours of molasses-like conversations in woozy bars? Maybe, maybe not, but at least the show managed to retain some of momentum from last week's final sequence.
With Ani and Ray as fugitives, sequestered in the motel, Paul looks into police service records—and sees the entirety of the iceberg that the trio has been scraping at. During the LA riots in 1992, most of the people in control of Vinci—Police Chief Holloway, Lieutenant Kevin Burris, and the now-deceased Detective Dixon and City Manager Ben Caspere—conspired to steal highly valuable diamonds from a jewelry store in order to gain access to the Vinci power structure and cushy salaries in Chessani’s regime. One of the children orphaned by that crime grew up and eventually tracked Caspere down in order to pose as his assistant. Her subsequent disappearance suggests she had a hand in Caspere’s death. All of the events surrounding that investigation, from finding Caspere’s place torn apart to the shootout, were part of the search to find the diamonds that constitute the only piece of evidence in a decades-old double murder.
That wraps everything up tightly in a nice little bow, with just about every mystery stemming from the initial case solved. But it still leaves three people with critical information and no any way to disseminate it—and Paul's still searching for the person blackmailing him with pictures of his sexual dalliance with a man. Paul heads out to deal with the extortion, and tips Velcoro to the possibility that he’s walking into a trap...before heading right into it anyway. His former military police comrade and hookup turns out to be working private security for one client—Catalyst Group. Police Chief Holloway, and several armed guards, want Paul to give up Bezzerides and Velcoro and drop the entire investigation. But Paul eludes capture in the extensive tunnel system beneath Vinci, knocking out Holloway and killing the other guards. But Paul can’t escape from Burris waiting outside another entrance, and unlike Velcoro’s supposed death early in the season, this one looks pretty certain.
While that’s occurring, with the light of a fake fireplace glittering over Ani and Ray’s faces, Pizzolatto supplies some of the most lunkheaded dialogue of the entire season, which fails in every way to create chemistry in a scene of drunken cabin fever:
Ani: “You’re not a bad man.”
Ray: “Yes…I am. Do you miss it?”
Ani: “What?”
Ray: “Anything.”
And then they sleep together. It’s an event the show has been hinting at all season, from Ani’s penchant for getting involved with fellow officers, to the State’s Attorney’s suggestion that she make Velcoro believe she would sleep with him. It's true that there’s a version of this story where the tryst is the logical outcome for two incredibly damaged people, but this isn’t it.
Frank’s plan by the end of the episode is simple: withdraw all of his cash reserves; burn and destroy everything he has that will be taken over by Osip; intercept a $12 million cash transfer between Osip and Tony Chessani; escape to Venezuela with his wife. It’s incredibly dangerous and likely unsurvivable, but it’s the only play he has left. And with Ani and Ray holed up in a motel with their only law-enforcement ally gunned down, their last remaining hope is Ray’s connection to Frank. They all want justice, or revenge, or some kind of significance in the face of what the corrupt officials of Vinci have done to their reputations.
There’s a 90-minute finale next week, the kind of overindulgence usually only afforded to Kurt Sutter in the later seasons of Sons Of Anarchy. It’s tough to fathom what exactly a movie-length finale is going to do to ease the confusion that has dominated this season. Then again, it hasn’t been very much fun watching these characters weave around Los Angeles shining lights into various dark corners—maybe Frank blowing it all up on his way out will bring us the satisfaction we've been lacking.