10 Reasons Why Season 2 Of True Detective Is Actually Awesome
5. It Retained Many Of The Themes Of The First Season
"To realise that all your life - you know, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain - it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream. A dream that you had inside a locked room. A dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams there's a monster at the end of it." - Rust Cohle
These lines, uttered by McConnaughey in the first season - when considered along with Frank Semyon's monologue about being locked in a room in his father's house - give rise to a number of links between the two story arcs. Frank, who we see die in the finale of Season Two, comes full circle (timer is circular, remember?) and speaks to his father as he walks, bleeding out, through the desert.
Before he collapses into the sand, Frank looks on over his own body. Is he having an out-of-body experience? Or, is he simply waking up from his dream about being a person? Frank's whole character arc reflects Rust Cohle's philosophy of a 'circular' existence as he seems to witness 'reality' falling apart in the ceiling of his home, and then again later on the tablecloth of the restaurant.
There are numerous other subtle hints at links between the two series and they share much of the same iconography - particularly the eerie bird masks...