World Literature

Rachel McAdams and Taylor Kitsch on the case. Photograph: Lacey Terrell/2015 Home Box Office

“Do you want to live?”

So how did we feel about True Detective’s big fake-out? Ray Velcoro is blasted with a shotgun from point-blank range and lives to tell the tale. Really? In pure narrative terms, that might feel like something of a cheap stunt, but it’s hard not to be relieved that Ray is still with us. Besides, I’m willing to forgive that one contrivance in an episode as convincing as Maybe Tomorrow, the instalment of this second season in which things finally begin to click satisfyingly into place. The show’s eye is beginning to wander further afield from the neon-lit streets of Vinci, to film sets and, most memorably here, the gloriously gaudy house of Vinci’s corrupt mayor, Chessani. At the same time, its storytelling is becoming more focused: even Paul’s undercooked storyline is beginning to warm up.

“You’ve got your father’s hands”

We open with the season’s strangest moment to date: a purgatorial dream sequence, in which Ray’s father, a gnarled police officer, tells his son about the chilling vision he witnessed. In that vision, Ray is shot and killed by unknown forces while running through a forest. “They shoot you to pieces, ” his father says grimly. For the time being it’s a premonition that remains unrealised: soon after, Ray wakes up on the floor of Caspere’s house, covered in his own urine but otherwise OK - the hail of bullets fired at his chest by the masked assailant turned out to be non-lethal riot shells.