True Detective: 10 Reasons Season 1 Can’t Be Topped

5. One Take Wonder

If it was the slow-burn paddle into an existential apocalypse that got you to episode 4, then it was the head-first barrelling into those uncharted waters that pushed you through the rest of the series. What starts off as another piece to the procedural storyline (the discovery that Ledoux works for the Iron Crusaders) rapidly becomes a source of intrigue. As Cohle lies his way into taking personal time, it is discovered that the next piece of the puzzle is not going to come easily as Cohle is forced to don his old skin and go undercover with his former gang. Two fantastic sequences laced with tension follow as Cohle first attempts to win back the trust of his former comrades, all who look like extras from the Sons Of Anarchy. The first reminds that Hart and Cohle are, essentially, two sides of the same mirror. As Hart struggles to find out what is happening to his friend behind closed doors, Cohle€™s blood pressure has already dropped and he has put on the mask of darkness that fits him so well. But it is once the bar has been left and the car pulls into the murky Louisiana projects that the sequence that puts all of the slow-burn into context is revealed. In the following ten minutes, the full extent of what Cohle is capable of is finally realised. In a single-take of exploding terror, Cohle enters a contest he knows he cannot win before slyly escaping with Ginger who has now become his prisoner. The scene is bloody, action-orientated and, above all else, is jarring in its juxtaposition to what has preceded it. By all accounts, this is a sequence that would be more at home as a mission in GTA than in the grim procedural that True Detective was thought of before the scene. And for that very reason, True Detective proved it had the ability to shock you by showing you that nothing was out of the question.