PicoBlog

As it turns out, no one was really exaggerating during last week’s premiere when they mentioned Danvers being a little difficult. Over the course of this episode, she manages to piss off just about every single character—even loyal Pete gets screwed again when she demands he pull an all-nighter that mostly consists of babysitting duty for the corpsicles from Tsalal research station. Even when she’s just trying to do her job, she’s running roughshod over anyone, no matter how undeserving they are of her rudeness. (Poor Leah, who gets excoriated for daring to try and tell her adopted mother where she’s going, might best highlight the wanton meanness of Danvers’ instincts.) And the thing is, Danvers knows it. When Navarro says some cold-blooded shit to her ('“Take a look in the mirror, Liz—no one can stand you”), she can barely rouse herself to tell Navarro to get lost. It’s pretty obvious Danvers has said far worse to herself in front of the mirror already; and unfortunately, she seems to have made peace with her own withering self-assessment. Kindness is for suckers.

But this is why you hire Jodie Foster: She takes a character who could’ve easily come off as a smirking shithead and instead imbues her with layer after layer of guilt, regret, insecurity, and bravado, an all-too-human mix of hurt-first-before-you’re-hurt defensiveness and fuck-it resignation. That I-got-nothin’ bluster of a smile when Captain Connolly demands to know where she’s planning to thaw the bodies; the brief flash of an “oops, I went too far” look behind her eyes when she calls Kayla’s relative “Laundromat Grandma”; the hunger for tenderness she conveys after sex with Connolly, only to have it inevitably blow up when shop talk leads him to point out she’s not always great at her job; these are the moves of someone who’s been so wounded for so long, they don’t know how to stop hurting everyone around them, even if they’d like to.

“Part 2” does great work advancing the mystery, but it also performs the signature True Detective move of spending as much—if not more—time shading in its character studies with depth and nuance. Danvers gets the lion’s share, as we learn she hasn’t only been nursing a deep grudge of resentment for being assigned to Ennis in the first place, but also that she’s made her way through a not-insignificant percentage of the local mensfolk. Sure, she still feels comfortable barging into the school classroom of a former paramour, her eyes flashing with mischief as she does so, but there’s also the ex-husband of Kate McKitterick, the mining honcho, with whom Danvers may or may not have slept prior to their divorce. The chief has torched relationships with former friends, lovers, and colleagues all over town; Pete is right to worry he’ll be the next. (You can already see it coming, and it’s not going to be pretty, is it.)

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