Aquarius (Tuesday, Sky Atlantic) is a 1960s-set crime drama about policeman Sam Hodiak (David Duchovny) who is trying to find Emma, the missing teenage daughter of an old flame. "Sam, get my little girl back," whispers the old flame. Could a missing child rekindle their love? Probably.
Meanwhile, her slimy lawyer husband (excellent Irish actor Brian F O'Byrne) watches them through narrowed eyes like a man with something to hide.
Spoiler alert: he has something to hide.
This being a drama set in the 1960s, there are familiar tropes to contend with. The soundtrack never stops. It’s basically like being at a non-stop golden-oldies disco and, furthermore – spoiler alert – the times they are a changin’.
"It's a little different from my day," says Hodiak to his son in the second episode."A lot of things are," says his son, knowingly, and at home we nod appreciatively because we know about Reaganomics and Diff'rent Strokes and Twitter and the music of Hall and Oates and at least two other things that have happened since 1967.
Roughing up hippies
Sam Hodiak is an old-school cop with a square-headed haircut who says "for Pete's sake" and roughs up hippies without even really thinking about it. It's like a compulsion. Sometimes he reaches for his sunglasses and when his hands come back they're not actually holding sunglasses but are, in fact, roughing up a hippy.
In fairness, the hippies here are pretty annoying. Now that baby boomers have retired from making television to enjoy their historically anomalous pensions, the preferred narrative about the 1960s is the one about Altamont and broken dreams, in which 1960s longhairs are hedonistic space-cadets and deluded drug casualties (The Ticket’s two core demographics, incidentally).
In order to gain their trust for his investigation, however, Hodiak enlists the help of a more tuned-in, turned-on, dropped-out cop called Brian Shafe (Grey Damon). Shafe has been living with the freaks in the wild, much like Diane Fossey, and he knows their ways and beard-grooming techniques. He does annoying things like insist Hodiak read hippies their rights after he roughs them up. He himself only roughs up hippies for good reasons or socially with a drink. What I'm saying is, he can take or leave it (it's discomfiting, really, the general tolerance for what is essentially police brutality in US cop shows).
"You see something you don't understand you want to hit and shoot it," he complains in the first episode.
In this universe, hipsters are the buzz kills, while squares, as embodied by Hodiak, are happy-go-lucky rebels who just want to get their straight white patriarchal freak on. This is largely because Duchovny is a very likeable actor and plays a potentially two-dimensional thug with nuanced swagger. I suspect he wears sunglasses to hide the fact that he’s winking at us down the camera lens.
If that’s where the premise ended, this could be an enjoyably disturbing opposite-attracts buddy drama called Squarehead and The Freak, or, possibly, Hippy, Hippy Shakedown. But the main pitch for Aquarius is that it’s a fictionalised “historical” drama and the cult-leader with which Emma has absconded is real-life serial murderer Charles Manson.
“Ooh, I know him from ‘The Past’,” I hear you say.
Yes, using a real mass murderer creates a frisson of recognition, but dramatically it's a dead end. You might as well make your antagonist "Robot Hitler" (note to self: try pitching Robot Hitler). Decency prohibits writers from telling a story that makes such a villain charismatic or explicable or interesting. So Manson is, rightly, a monstrous cartoon blow-hard, manipulating and abusing young women, blackmailing their fathers and playing terrible songs on his guitar. And he isn't even a murderer yet: that horrible crime spree is two years away. His master plan simply involves achieving pop stardom, making him, in the short term, no more nefariously ambitious than your average X Factor contestant.
TD is totes adorbs
True Detective II: Too Many Detectives or, if you like, New Detective! Now with More Detectives! is over. The finale is about a day long and mainly consists of Vince Vaughn looking sad.
Ani (Rachel McAdams) and Ray (The Farreller) are now fugitive cops in dysfunctional love. “We’re going to see you again?” Ani says, over the phone when they’re separated. “You’re going to need a restraining order,” says Ray, which is more disturbing than romantic really, given his past behaviour, but is, in the context of True Detective, totes adorbs.
There have been so many distracting plotlines until now that this is the first episode in which Frank the gangster (Vince Vaughn) meets Ani.
"You're a cop right? A lady cop?" says Frank. "What gave me away..." says Ani, "the tits?"
Yes, she says this. Everyone in True Detective is an excellent conversationalist.
Ray and Ani track down distressed siblings Laura and Len. Len killed former city manager Caspere while dressed as a crow, in retaliation for the murder of their parents. Ray dons a large cowboy hat so as not to be conspicuous, and goes to a shopping mall to pretend to blackmail Holloway, the corrupt police chief, about the murder/sex parties/high-speed rail deal/stolen diamonds/ whatever-else-you’re-having.
He gets Holloway to explain the plot again because, like the viewers, he’s not sure what the hell is going on. Holloway exposits like a Batman villain. He tries mapping it out on a white board with some coloured markers right there in the shop. “Could you go through it again,” says Ray. “I’m still not sure why I had an amazing moustache at the start of the series and why it’s gone now?”
Then Len stabs Holloway for a while. There’s a gunfight. Ray loses all his evidence because, well, Ray makes bad choices.
There’s nothing for it, Ray and Frank must kill a cabin-full of Russians and steal their money. They shake hands and nod before parting ways, as if to say “We are not so different you and I; we both thought being in this would be good for our careers."
Instead of going straight to Ani to escape to Venezuela with their Russian blood money (their relationship is so cute), Ray decides to go and wordlessly stare at his estranged son. He regrets his wordlessness soon afterwards when he decides he actually wants to tell his son something and is unable to get a phone signal. Ray, you putz! Crooked cop Burris and his men chase him, then shoot him a lot in a forest.
Over in the desert, Vince Vaughn gets a 10-minute death scene after being stabbed by some tangential mobsters. That’s loads of acting. In his death-throes he hallucinates his abusive father, some gang members, his wife, victims of his crimes, the cast of Swingers and everyone who saw Wedding Crashers. “Where is my McConnaissance?” he weeps.
Life is unfair. Three quarters of the programme’s stars are now dead (Taylor Kitsch’s character died previously). When we see Ani again (she’s had very little to do this episode because of the detective surplus), she’s in a Venezuelan hotel room passing evidence of corruption to a journalist (some of the conspirators are still alive). And she has had Ray’s baby.
You can tell its Ray’s baby because it has Ray’s missing moustache. “It was I,” says Ray’s Moustache. “I was the True Detective all along.”
I knew it! Who did you guess was the True Detective? Give your answers in the comment section below or scribble them in the margin of your newspaper. Also tell me if I’ve missed the point of the series.
