TV DICKS AND TRUE DETECTIVES Lately I’ve been recording some old shows (off El Rey) and watching them with my meals or on the weekends. For instance Starsky and Hutch (for my wife) and the X-Files for myself. Know something Ive never understood about TV Dicks? Why are they so reckless about their job? For sentence I’ve been rewatching the X-Files (one of my all time favorite shows) but this time really watching how Mulder operates. It’s pathetic. He breaks into a place by breaking glass? He leaves doors ajar behind him? He doesn’t know how to scout or clear a room? How to set up an ambush? How to avoid an ambush? For God’s sake. He’s supposedly an FBI agent. Look, maybe nobody bothers to train actors or the directors don’t hire a consultant. But you B&E a place and you wear gloves. And you never break glass except in an emergency. The noise alone guys, not to mention the risk of unintended injury plus it’s gonna be eventually discovered. You pick the lock. You don’t leave doors ajar behind you, you shut and lock them as you pass. There is a way you scout and clear a room and make advances. You don’t just blunder into stuff. The guy can’t carry a set of latex gloves in his pockets? Doesn’t carry a plastic bag to take evidence or clues? Never carries a set of binoculars, not even collapsible ones? No knife? No multi-tool? And you can’t take 2 minutes to know your escape route before you go in? You always know your escape route(s) beforehand. All you gotta do is take the time to observe in most cases. And he hardly ever uses his authority. He’s FBI. Yet he operates like he’s a criminal but he does it like a total amateur. I don’t get it at all, it’s like his training ended at middle school with a book he read from the back of a comic. I mean this stuff is just simple common sense and good technique. The most inexperienced Vadder knows that if you’re gonna B&E a place that you don’t leave any trace you were there or that anything is amiss. Just basic observation and experience would teach you that kinda thing. And you’d learn it a lot earlier than ten years into your career. If you’re gonna infiltrate then you infiltrate, you don’t infiltrate like a bull in a china shop. You’re dead that way. At the very least you’re taken. And good luck with that one. Which brings me to True Detectives. I watched the episode Form and Void. I liked it. The cheap and ridiculous philosophizing was kept to a bare minimum. Instead in this episode they stuck to bare-bones and very well executed Detective work, plus a little greasing of targets. But hey, sometimes you gotta do that. But for the first time I saw they did truly excellent detective work. But again I didn’t get the take down at all. Had that been me I’d have infiltrated days ahead of a take down and surveiled my target until I knew his movements, patterns, and habits. If youre working off the books or private you got the time anyway, and time is your ally. Time is your back-up when you don’t have any other back-up. I’d have went in on foot and at night and I wouldn’t have been noticed. I’d have befriended and fed the dog. I would have observed and scouted the surrounding territory carefully so that I knew his local geographic movement patterns. I’d have infiltrated the nearby buildings at night to see what and who they contained. Look, I know the writers wanted Rust knifed and the Cohle hatcheted for dramatic purposes. I get that. But he’d have never gotten close to me. He’d be dead or taken by ambush long before that happened. Because that’s the way you really do it if you’re going in alone. You don’t just blunder up to the front porch and chase a guy into his operational lair because you want to feel him out one day just to confirm your suspicions. You confirm your suspicions long before that, then you take him from behind. You ambush him just like he ambushed the little kids he murdered. You don’t give him a fight. You give it to him the way he deserves. Now that being said and those problems aside I will say three things about this episode of True Detectives, and it may have been the last episode, I don’t know. It was significantly better in every way than any previous espied I’ve ever seen, and I liked it. More importantly it did a fantastic (and I mean fantastic job) of transmitting that feeling you get when you know you’re at the right place and you know you’ve come at the wrong time. (Which is why experience teaches you quick to come in at your time, not their time.) There is a certain creepy feeling that runs up and down your spine and out through your arms and legs when you know your suspicions are right but you also know you’re open to ambush. It is a combination of anger at yourself (for coming in unprepared and ignorantly), incredibly heightened senses, a feeling that you’re open to being killed and that you’re ready to kill, and a sort of stoic sense of “well, this is the way it is and that’s the way it is.” It’s an uncanny, almost supernatural feeling of disorder or maybe the better term is displacement. Like one world is being impressed upon another, an uncanny one on the real world. And you know it when you see it and you never forget the feeling no matter how used to it you become. This episode did a great job of cooking that feeling, especially while he was tracking through the ruins (which were quite impressive). I suddenly realized that I was standing right in front of the TV with my fists clenched in a sort of crouching position, trying to look through the TV and around the debris. I didn’t remember crossing the room but I know why I had. I was prepared to place myself in the corner for an ambush. When a show does that you know it’s done that part right. But again, even considering that they blundered in half-ass and uncocked it would have still been fairly easy to take that serial killer. Serial killer shave two real advantages, they aren’t afraid to kill (they aren’t inhibited by killing) or use their body to do close in killing work, and they prepare elaborate ambushes and deceptions, because like all predators they know how dangerous hunting a potentially dangerous target is (so most stick to far weaker and unprepared targets – they don’t usually hunt cops or soldiers for the same reason a wolf doesn’t hunt a Bengal tiger). Like 95% of all hunters, humans including, they prefer the safe and unprepared prey to the prepared and dangerous equal. So, once they have no surprise and once they meet a guy who has no more problem in killing them than they do in killing anyone else they’re pretty much screwed. Backwards and sideways. The rest is just working the numbers and killing or capturing them first. But of course they got ambushed (TV Dick style) and badly wounded cause that set up the final scenes and those couldn’t have happened without the knifing and hatchet work. And so that brings me to the very end. I thought that the show ended (if that was the end) very, very, very well. ”Looks like to me the light is winning.” Yep. Bit by bit. But we shouldn’t be taking knifes and hatchets to get there.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 02:24:39 +0000
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