Hitting an unanticipated peak last week, we are now staring down the barrel of the penultimate episode of Season 2. At this point, despite the increase in quality, I doubt I’ll be rewatching this 8-episode arc any time soon. The first half lacked the gravitas and arcane red herrings from Season 1. However, that doesn’t discount the fact that I’m enjoying it more with each layer peeled away.

One thing that is guaranteed is that this season will end with an innumerable body count. With more central centers in the crosshairs and a wider conspiracy, it’s dubious that everyone will escape unscathed. Is it just me or was Rachel McAdams channeling a bit of Clarice Starling in her ramblings about being found “in the woods”?

In keeping with the title, Nic Pizzolatto finally elucidates the audience with gumshoe details about the grants and land parcels by Anthony Chessani. Ray and Ani obviously exhibit sexual tension but Ray is sober enough to dissuade Ani from a frivolous one-night stand during his hallucinogenic-induced haze. It could be infinitesimal but I like Paul unburdening himself to his fiance Emily (Adria Arjona) about how he was “just trying to be a good man”.

By hiding their family members and loved ones in motels and other clandestine locations, the rising action to a blazing showdown between the cops and the city council is inevitable and it ingratiates us with the promise of unbridled warfare. Same goes with the debts on Frank’s clubs and how his assets are about to be seized by force from the Russian mafioso.

I adored Frank’s indignation over the prostitution ring underneath his nose with his explanation that the difference between a pimp and a whore is that “a whore can still have integrity”. If anyone questioned Vaughn’s latent ability as a “heavy”, he was completely omnipotent in the scene where he bludgeons and executes Blake just to coldly scowl at him as he slowly bleeds onto his carpet.

Frank is a murderous gangster but he endears us with his dire-straits circumstances in terms of his equity. Like the IMF, the trio has been disavowed and reduced to switching license plates to avoid detection. It’s transcendent that a ubiquitous character actor like Morse can work wonders on rather meager morsels and his tearful scene in the woods with Ani over her childhood molestation is juicy.

The lingering silence before Ani whispers “you’re not a bad man” to Ray qualifies as elegiac poetry. But Ray can’t forgive himself when he reasserts that he is despite his recent altruism. Pizzolatto’s pessimism runs deep but he has the courage of conviction for the gray areas. Other highlights include Frank looking nirvanic and relieved when he incinerates the Vinci Gardens Casino behind him and Paul’s nail-biting shootout in the tunnel.

On the lam from their departments, Pizzolatto has successfully manipulated me into submission because against-all-odds underdogs are a guilty pleasure of mine. It’s been a sizable adjustment for the audience but Season 2 is hurtling towards a brisk, but enormously enrapturing ending. This brutish wind-up toy is about to uncoil with fireworks.

Rating: 4.25 out of 5 

I try to avoid speculative rumors about where this season is headed but if the theological conversations about Ray trapped in limbo are true, I’ll be sorely disappointed. This might not be the best season of any crime drama but it has been gaining traction with each new episode. For instance, the staredown between Ray and Frank in the kitchen with their guns adjacent from each other is accusational and menacing in a Tarantino way. Farrell dropped his voice a few octaves and he was in full Christian Bale smoky-vocals mode. It still worked beautifully in a long-fuse powderkeg moment.

Vaughn countervails Farrell’s indignation with the that Ray was just transmogrifying into his intrinsic, corrupt nature (“You think you were Superman before?”). Though it would be facile to stigmatize Frank as a superficial, manipulative villain, Pizzolatto scuttles this platitude for a multi-dimensional guise of ambivalence. I earnestly believe that Frank wasn’t cognizant that he was “setting [Ray] up” and the scene ends in rare appeasement. Ellroy Leonard’s fingerprints are incontrovertible in the bedeviling sign-off from Ray (“I’m going to see about killing a man”).

Now Ray is a sardonic vigilante with a Dirty Harry ulterior motive. It’s a bit nonplusing that Ray’s mercenarial activities have supplanted the blue-diamond investigation for the viewers’ focus. While I enjoyed checking in on Paul and Ani, their storyline is of waning interest next to Ray. Once again, the semiotics of parenthood reemerged during a Q&A between Paul and an informant where he discusses a reconnaissance mission’s orphaned children and Frank’s heartfelt interaction about resilience with his deceased colleague’s son.

I’m more impressed with Rachel McAdam’s feral, steadily volatile performance with each subsequent appearance. Fiddling with knives while her sister is exhorting her not to go undercover in a sex-worker party of Caligula-scale debauchery, McAdams never staggers and seems fully prepared for the dangers ahead. I love the murky perspective of Ani on Molly, it was a surreal Brian DePalma journey into a socialite den of iniquity ala a less abstruse, less pretentious, but equally disturbing Eyes Wide Shut.

This was a less plot-driven episode and the trio of McAdams, Vaughn and Farrell truly shined incandescent in their respective roles. Kitsch is still perpetually stuck in neutral and this might be his most utilitarian episode. He only infiltrates the party with his black-ops skills. Meanwhile, just when Ray had our approbation for his rehabilitation, he collapsed back into a bender of cocaine, alcohol and self-loathing.

Ironically, his non-contest of custody was the most lucid decision Ray ever made.In relinquishing his thwarted efforts at being a father, Ray is Pizzolatto’s figurehead for his condemning statement that Los Angeles (Vinci in particular) is an Island of Misfit Toys whose owners (parents) have abandoned them and they’ve had to harshly become autodidactic and self-reliant. With contractual documentation about the land deal and the thread about Ani’s missing person solved, it might be convenient but we are speeding towards the conclusion of this highly polarizing season.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Last week people decried the cockamamie contrivance that only the three main players survived a torrential bulletstorm in downtown Los Angeles. To me, it was an indicator that they are included in the detritus whether they’re lying on the ground or not. They are already departed from this plane of existence. Either way, the episode had a ripple effect and as long as the show is causing waves, it’s an excellent sign of its longevity and place in cultural conversation.

In the aftermath of the shooting, the trio are undergoing several self-modifications. It’s startling to see Ray clean shaven and not bleary-eyed with alcoholism. He was in a cocoon of self-loathing and he has emerged with a swagger and a purpose for life but he is still the errand boy of Frank; a role that he seems increasingly uneasy with. I’m glad that the tape-recorder messages to Chad are perpetuating with some regularity.

The fact that there was an empty chair between Ani and the rest of sexual harassment seminar is a pointed character cue for her antisocial behavior. Her confession of an insatiable, nymphomaniacal appetite for penial girth was crudely funny. This season is lucidly cloven between two halves: the investigation of Caspere’s murder leading to the Mexican meth-factory standoff and the non-heroic treatment of the detectives afterwards.

The underlying mystery that continues to haunt Frank throughout the show is the five-million dollars that Ben absconded with and the whereabouts of it now. Tonight’s episode had a throttling David Fincher ambience with the Dust Brothers-esque electronic score playing over Ray’s surveillance of Blake.

Pizzolatto is audacious with how darkly recessive and subterranean he’ll explore. For example, “You could’ve been a scrap job” might be the most nastily vicious that has been uttered on the show but it doesn’t excuse the ultimately untoward plotline with Paul and his closeted affairs. W. Earl Brown would’ve been a more germane candidate for perusal.

Frank might feel qualmish about the term “gangster” and that he was “drafted” into his scurrilous lifestyle but Jordan (Kelly Reilly) wisely ascertains that his nascent prostitution ring has cratered a rift between them. In Lynchian logic, the officers might don sleek, decorated uniforms now but those are veneers over their shackled hearts in which they are doggedly pursuing a case that “nobody cares” about.

In a moment designed for Emmy and Golden Globe nominations, Farrell quietly seizes the powerhouse epiphany that his ex-wife’s rapist was caught weeks ago. While director John Crowley doesn’t savor it long enough, the next scene of Ray brutalizing Dr. Irving Pitlor (Rick Springfield) is his belligerent coping mechanism. That was a blip on an otherwise graceful metamorphosis for the second half of the season. The final shot is a neo-western cliffhanger to the showdown at the O.K. Corral between Frank and Ray.

Rating: 4 out of 5