True Detective: Season One, Episode Three "The Locked Room"

"The Locked Room" brings the supreme acting clinic that is Woody and Mac into overdrive. A stick man is finagled out of a beer can. Woody actually fucks his wife. And the two finally catch a lead that might lead to the killer.

You should see my sculpture of Rod Beck.

Stan Earnest: Yes! We get a Shea Whigham sighting! The guy deserves more praise than he got for Boardwalk Empire. I'm diggin' the Elvis preacher man.

The interplay between Woody and Mac is beautiful. They both are great detectives in different ways. They both hate each other. They both intensely respect each other. It all seems natural, too, like these guys are two real detectives.

Craig Scholes: And they are both absolutely crazy in different ways.

SE: I love how Woody is a guy hell-bent on ignoring life's existential questions, and Mac is bent on exposing everything. It sure is funny watching these two make each other squirm.

So now it's not "Get off my lawn!" It's "I LIKE TO MOW MY LAWN!"

CS: What a horseshit lie. No one likes mowing.

SE: No way, dude. Mowing is legalized drunk driving if you have a rider.

CS: That yard wasn't big enough for a rider. Funny story though: I heard a guy describe yard size as a count of beer consumption. He had moved into a new place and said that with his rider it was a three-beer yard.

SE: I had a place once with a six-beer yard. And there is nothing like donning a sombrero, putting some live Grateful Dead in my ear, sauntering along with a nice sixer, and welcoming skin cancer. Ok, I lied about the sombrero.

CS: Finally got a Creole accent with the dude in the boat.  He was the first dude to have any sort of Creole accent.  For this taking place in Louisiana, there have been very few backwater Louisiana types.

SE: I thought that was Johnny Gomes' dumb ass. 

CS: They could get Michael Rappaport to double down on his shitty Southern accent he is using in Justified.

SE: So Woody's way of describing how fucked up he has become is to refer to himself as Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff? Now that is fucked up.

CS: So it’s the law when there is an emergency vehicle with its lights on that you must pull over, but you never see a car pull to the side in a chase scene.

SE: I think I saw one old dusty Buick pull over. 

Synesthesia! Warning! Warning! *Psychology nerd alert.* That is a real thing, and a famous scientist Ramachandran posits that it is the basis of artistic creativity.

CS: I can taste emotions.

SE:  Woody's sidepiece can taste bologna.

CS: You and your obsession with Woody’s bologna. 

SE: I've seen some shitty slow country music playing shitholes where the old fogies get down on a Saturday night, but that bar has to be the saddest sad bastard bar I've ever seen. If that band was playing any slower, they might as well have been downloading a song using NetZero dial-up.

CS: That very well could have been Twisters here in Pittsburg.

SE: Just finished the ep, so the killer is Walter White?

CS: Clearly. 

SE: What's this "in two weeks" bullshit? The Super Bowl is a bigger monster than the killer. Looks like a total shit-hits-the-fan episode though.

CS: I don't disagree.  I am only going to watch the game because I feel obligated to attend a social function.

SE: I've been invited to probably an amazing party where there will be nothing but Broncos fans there. Great people, but I might have to wear a Richard Sherman jersey just for spite.

CS: Tebow jersey.

SE: The Tebow Patriots shirsey would throw them all out of whack. They hate the Patriots, but love Tebow. It would be a nice touch.

We have to skip a week of True Detective for this?

CS: Maurice Clarett jersey.

SE: O.J. Simpson Bills throwback!

CS: But that doesn't really have any tie to the Broncos.

SE: Well, just one Bronco, a white Ford.

CS: This has really gone off the rails.

SE: I really don't think half this shit should make it, but I mean not a lot to say about these episodes other than the script is fucking mind-blowing, and the acting is flawless.

CS: So much more happened this episode than the last one though.  At least this episode advanced the plot.

Editing this episode of the podcast is going to be a real fucking asshole. 

SE: You deserve it for the nightmare that this is. 

CS: Says the guy who completely forgot about it.

SE: Mario Galaxy with the kids is fucking addictive.

CS: We haven't even talked about this episode at all.

SE: Preach brother, preach. What do you want to say?

CS: I love how judgmental Woody is of McConaughey (I accidentally spelled that right) while being completely oblivious to how big a piece of shit he has become. I’m not the type of guy that can wax poetic about the technical mastery that McConaughey is doing.

SE: I think we need to give props to Woody just for keeping up with that.

CS: Oh yeah, he isn't doing anything wrong in the show.

Brokeback Mountain II: Psychedelic Mushroom Farmers

SE: I'm just happy to see a show celebrate the dirtiness detectives must be crawling in. I mean, one has to be some kind of evil bastard to catch evil people. It just comes with the territory. Woody is self-absorbed in worrying about his marriage and then the episode flips the script to McConaughey that just explodes the "sin" in every direction. He knows he is bad. What does he care? He thinks he is just a biologically programmed monkey like those he hates, so there is this strange masochism present. I can't remember a character so eye-opening in the last few years.

CS: Yeah, he makes no apologies for being the way he is.

SE: The beer can stick figure was amazing. I can't even shotgun a beer without cutting my hand.

CS: I honestly just thought he was turning that can into an ashtray.  My old roommate was this proper asshole who could be judgmental about anything and everything.  But that asshole wouldn't buy an ashtray; no, he would have these fucking ghetto Coke cans with the top cut off, but we couldn't have a coffee table because it collected clutter.

SE:  I had a roommate that used stacked empty pizza boxes for a coffee table. Fucking roommates.