yep, unreadable after 2 episodes, might be a new record for OOTV

Nothing aidses up a thread quite as quickly as a bunch of guys screaming about how aidsy it is.

I think it's pretty funny that people are bitching about a thread that's actually talking about things of note in the show, even if they disagree with them (hello, it's a discussion thread about a show). There are truly a lot of pathetic people around here, and it just took this show to really let people show their true colors. That's another great side benefit of the show, I think. This season's Justified thread is one of the worst I've seen on here.

What about the people bitching about the people bitching about how AIDSy it is?

I'll take a sixer of Old Milwaukee or Lone Star, nothin snooty.

-Rust Cohle

so you feel like the threads are aids. interesting

Touche

Judge, well, the reason I said what I said was because the people who are calling it AIDS are calling it that because of me (someone who is actually discussing finer important points of the show). If I'm mistaken and they're saying the people bashing me are causing the AIDS, then I stand corrected. I can pretty much guarantee they're not talking about them, though.

People are calling the thread AIDS not because of this, but because of:

1. Your absolute certainty in your positions and the fact you call anyone with a different perspective/interpretation than you wrong.
2. Your need to restate those positions over and over in response to each new person who has a different opinion than you do.
3. Your unwillingness to reconsider any of your positions even when presented with logical, well reasoned interpretations that fit the facts of the show.

You don't discuss, you pontificate. Christ, the show is only two episodes old - you can't know with certainty what each of these scenes means yet. Lets let the show unfold and most (but probably not all) of these questions will be answered. We can discuss what we think they mean, but stubborn black/white statements on a forum like this will always make you a target for ridicule.

Enough participation; back to lurking...

Hell, even I don't.

lol, come on, at no point have I stated my positions WITH CERTAINTY, and I am certainly not pontificating. I back up my thoughts with actual substance, and I'm certainly not going to sit back and say nothing if I feel I'm being wrongly attacked (which I have been several times in this thread). Why is that so difficult to understand? Grrr.

Ha! I was thinking of adding that since the showrunner is your brother, that you had him put in scenes like the dolls just to troll nunnehi.

But, I decided that was over the top.

Really? You're haven't stated with certainty that the dolls were depicting a gang rape? You haven't stated with certainty that the boss was calling WH a bad cop? Come on...

Seriously, your points are perfectly valid, but your approach could use some work.

<3

I am glad people are by and large enjoying the show. I popped in because I heard complaints about the thread and wanted to see why. nunnehi, I think deadmau5 makes some good points. Some of your analysis is good, but some of it descends into nittery regarding whether your interpretations should be seen as absolute fact by others.

I have absolutely no inside information on what will happen with the show, so don't ask, and also don't worry that any participation from me ITT may spoil it. I do have the occasional tidbits to offer about Southwest Louisiana, and the creator, such as:

That's not an artifice for the interview. Nic actually does talk like that.

Also, not a tidbit, but I quite enjoyed his description of the plot as queso.

Time to add some ebola to the viral load

The risk of developing tunnel vision is a constant threat to a prolonged police investigation. You asked for an example from the show that illustrated Marty's competence. His awareness of the possibility of tunnel vision and his warning to Rust when he drew an apparently unsubstantiated conclusion is an example that Marty is good enough to avoid such investigative traps, which is therefore an indication of competence. Your narrow response to the doll scene is an example of tunnel vision. Suggesting that Marty is effectively not contributing to the investigation is bending the narrative.

The specific thing you said, to which I was responding here was OK, so now you have clarified that when you said he did close to zero police work, he actually did a lot of police work, but when you referred to "police work" you really only meant that subset of police work that is investigative work. Fine. Perhaps you could explain to us what investigative work looks like and how it differs from the list of things that we apparently mostly agree that Marty actually did, because they were part of his job, after all.

And I'll save us some time by surmising that you'll now say that you didn't mean he didn't actually do investigative work, you meant the investigative work he did wasn't done competently. (Perhaps you recognize competent performance of investigative tasks from all the procedurals you have watched. I'm sure that's a good source.)

Maybe I can save even more time by surmising that your standard for competence is him personally coming up with clues or theories or evidence that actually moves the investigation closer to capturing the perpetrator. That's remarkably results-oriented thinking for a discussion on a poker forum.

Let me suggest a partial standard for incompetence. Incompetence includes:

• destroying, losing, or invalidating evidence
• permanently ignoring obvious leads
• allowing a located suspect to escape
• failing to do the necessary standard tasks associated with an investigation

I don't think Marty has done any of these things.

Incompetence does not include:

• not being the first one into the shed, or first to turn around in a church
• letting the obvious keener do the detailed examinations, or run down a lead on his own
• floating a theory that gets shot down
• choosing to first follow a lead that turns out to be unproductive rather than first following a lead that turns out to be productive

It might be an interesting discussion whether using physical violence to successfully extract information from uncooperative witnesses is an example of competence or incompetence. I tend to agree with Salvor Hardin on the subject.

So you're saying he is competent? In a job performance context, being able to perform one's basic job functions is a pretty standard definition of competence.

All this stuff is police work that Marty did, and did competently. It is also investigative work. I've already talked about the importance of "doing his job" in evaluating competence. I'll comment on a few of your other comments

Do you wonder why Rust makes sketches? Marty's photos wouldn't be used as evidence, but they are a not uncommon form of note-taking by detectives in the digital age.
Completing the required reports is a necessary part of the competent performance of his job. If you are suggesting that Rust wouldn't file reports (there's no evidence to support this) then you are actually suggesting that Marty is in at least one way more competent than Rust.
From the second neighbourhood canvass interview he got the disappearance of the Fontenot girl. From the third we learn that the sticks woven into pyramids are a long-time local thing called "devil nets" known to more primitive Christians. From Charlie they learn the victim was into something religious, was high, was "going to become a nun" and had "met a king". They also got a contact for a friend. At Danny Fontenot's they found the devil net which appears to tie Marie's disappearance to the current case. They also got the name of Marie's father. At the victim's mother's place they got a hint of a past allegation of sexual impropriety when the victim was a girl, they saw a picture that looked like the victim standing in front of a group of men wearing KKK outfits sitting on horses, and confirmed that the victim was involved with a church. From the friend they reconfirmed recent involvement in a church that coincided with a change in habits and residence, and got a vague location for where she might have been staying. This tied in with the bunny ranch down south, whose location Rust then extracted from the guy in the workshop. At the bunny ranch they got the victim's "diary" and other material, which gave them the location of the church were they found he wall pictures that tie to the killing. Without these interviews, the chain of which was started by Marty's methodical approach, they'd have nothing other than the crime scene and pathology. They wouldn't be tying this in with a local perp, a local church group or an ongoing local history of acts against girls.
"Green spaghetti monster" is wearing a crown, which they both noticed. Girl chased though woods is reminiscent of the references to "kids in the woods" in Marty and/or Rust's 2012 interviews.
No, this is trying to find Johns after visiting the bunny ranch - something you suggested Marty was doing to keep Rust away from real evidence. And yet, it was Marty who actually spotted the hidden church. What Rust was doing was trying to track down colleagues of the victim, not clients.
Rust found a reference to the particular church in the victim's things, located at the bunny ranch that they both visited. No reason to think that Marty would not have got it if Rust wasn't there. However, they found the bunny ranch through Rust's solo encounters with the drug-selling girl from the bar. This is the church, BTW, that you "guaranteed" Marty new the pastor of.

Using imprecise language leads to sloppy thinking and misundertanding. But that's OK. With a little dialog we can work things out.

I see all the observations directly from the show, except the alleged obstruction. I think that might be a misinterpretation. Your interpretation of Marty not being a good detective is a little less clear. I never said he was above average. But I don't think there is any strong evidence that he's significantly below average either. Average is established by what we know about his colleagues, not by what protagonists miraculously accomplish on other cop shows.

I'm not sure how the two parts of the bolded quote go together, but we seem to share a view regarding NCIS. My attitude towards the show is why I used the reference. Again, I invite you to tell us what the performance of competent investigative work would look like, IYO.

DTM's word bomb game is on point

Wow, nath. Your brother is the man, send him my internetlove

Yep, the show is fantastic. Thread is confirmed terrible however. Standard.

Lol at thinking present day Woody looks younger than past Woody.

DTM, fine you win, but I don't remember saying I "guarantee" he knew the Pastor, not that I didn't say it. I've already said I've used poor word choice and articulation in regards to some of the stuff I said. No need to continue on that path. I will try to be more careful with what mean, since it can obviously be so easily misconstrued.

Still, you're holding up real world examples vs. a TV show. We are theoretically supposed to judge it against TV procedurals, because it's a TV show. That's part of what makes CMAR's post about them potentially subverting our expectations about the level of detective skill (from other shows we've seen) so good. If they're doing this like a real world example, then I'm clearly wrong. Based on standards of other investigative TV shows, you can see evidence of what I'm talking about in this show. I hope you would agree that Hart is a dud on any typical or even atypical TV procedural (again, I'm not putting him in the real world, I'm putting him in a TV universe, and that could be a mistake if they are intentionally try to subvert our expectations).

I still think many of you are discounting symbolism in this show. And I disagree with anyone who says I've been unequivocal about my opinions, or have not backtracked anything. Unlike most of you, I have no problem admitting when I'm wrong.

Demau5, about the gang rape doll scene, I first came on here and pointed out there was a shot of dolls appearing to depict a gang rape. I was beaten to a bloody pulp by people saying I was insane. Then, goofyballer posted the actual picture from the show, and sure enough, it looks exactly like what would be a gang rape (pointing fingers, angry staging, guy straddling victim in a state of undress, etc.). Others have used the term gang bang, but seriously? That doesn't even advance the plot forward in any way. The fact that it's intended to represent some effed up sex act is clear. If I'm not allowed to state that as pretty much objective fact, I can't say anything on here at all.

The point of bringing it up at all was that Hart did nothing about what he saw immediately, and I felt it was a character touch to further imprint the idea of the "see something, do nothing" apathy of his character. If you want to have righteous indignation over something in this regard, talk about the underage hooker. Hart was outraged that an underaged hooker was working there, I mean OUTRAGED. He was so outraged that he left without doing anything other than be angry about it (apathetic hypocrite). He's a cop, he could have extricated her from the situation, and even made some arrests (even if that would be a lack of good faith).

I absolutely DID NOT say that Hart's boss thinks he's incompetent. I said that I felt the show wrote those specific lines to have two meanings (nath, can you find out if your brother wrote that scene with potentially two meanings, if he's willing to say?) based on how you perceive the character. It was NOT directed that way. In the initial context, I thought some of the word choice was quite interesting, but I personally felt that the director intended it as a straight conversation (directors often botch writers' intent, and I consider myself pretty good at catching that kind of stuff, though I am in no way saying that it was 100 percent intending two meanings, but if it were intended that way, the director did not direct it that way). CMAR actually brought up that he felt the boss was dissing Hart's skills, and coupled with the clues and character drops up to the point of that scene, I felt inclined to agree with CMAR's assessment, though I believed it was written to give you two potentially different meanings based on how you perceive Hart's character at that point. DTM is taking the character completely at face value, and apparently is taking the show at completely face value (sorry if I'm misrepresenting your actual views DTM). In my opinion, this is an extremely artistic show filled with symbolism, and use of props that are very important to how we perceive each character. Could I be wrong? Yes. Can you say I'm wrong yet? Absolutely not. People need to stop acting like I'm going around stating everything as fact, I almost always use the words "I think" and "in my opinion" when stating stuff, and typically can't stand people who take subjective stuff and treat their opinions as fact. There are many places where things are objectively so, and it's no problem to me when people are unequivocal in that regard. So don't try to word twist me on this.

I agree the setup of the dolls looks like a gang bang, I'm not sure if anyone actually disagreed with that. What I, and most others, disagreed with was your opinion that the girls meant to make it look like a gang bang and that they had somehow witnessed one somewhere.

I'm pretty confident the dolls scene was meant to look like a gang bang to the audience and I think it was meant to show that WH's work is gonna follow him home no matter how badly he wants it not to.

came to LOOOOOL at nunnehi

That's cool because I generally spend every waking moment LOOOOL at you.

We know almost for certain the killer attended (in some way) that burned up church. If Woody is the killer, then people from that church identifying him is going to be a real clue, and a major problem. There's various visual clues in that scene, like how Woody darts to the looking out at the water, or glances over his shoulder at the moment MM might possibly uncover the chalk sketch.

MM has cleared himself on tone. He is strenuously trying to solve the case. How about the part in episode two where he pings the detectives for information about the 1992 case of Andrea, when they closed down the schools. Or the parts where he actually spends his days off working the case. We're two episodes in and he's already got the less experienced shaved head detective questioning his preconceived notions about MM. I think it's somewhat important that they've made it clear Woody was interviewed first.

Also I noticed how Woody got super upset when MM brought up the info about the trailer park brothel location. It was covered up as Woody being mad about MM's nose for pussy.

Given that it's nath's brother running things it's possible there's a sick level involved here. But if it's a character study disguised as a murder mystery, why go for the level? I'm watching the show assuming Woody is the killer.