True Detective Recap ‘Black Maps and Motel Rooms’: The World Needs Bad Men

In the latest True Detective recap, Frank finds out who is behind his downfall and there’s a officer down as Ani, Ray and Paul get closer to the truth…

By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer

On average in the United States, murder is committed about 30 times per day.

One person killing another can come from any number of reasons — revenge, domestic abuse, hate crimes, drugs — and what cops will always look for in any murder investigation is motive.

‘True Detective’ season 1 explored a different type of murder than those listed above. Detectives Cohle and Hart were on the trail of a tried and true sociopath, who had no rhyme or reason for killing other than it had to be done. It’s a scarier prospect when someone murders out of some twisted primal instinct. It’s a psychological kind of murder that often times baffles the mind and shocks the senses because there’s no motive behind it in most cases.

For ‘True Detective’ season 2, creator Nic Pizzolatto decided to focus on a more common motive for murder — money. The people behind it are just as evil, but maybe not as scary.

On the surface anyways.

Ben Caspere had his hands in a lot of money and when he died, there were vultures circling his corpse to pick the bones before he was even cold and in the ground. Frank Semyon had a small, quiet criminal empire outside of Los Angeles, but he dreamt of a life away from the grimy clubs and dirty casinos he had to run to make a buck. So he made a play to get rich quick and it backfired because Frank wasn’t allowed to play with the real money men in this story.

And finally in the penultimate episode of ‘True Detective’ season 2 titled ‘Black Maps and Motel Rooms’ did we finally start to see who was in charge of the money, who wanted more of it and who was willing to kill for it. After seven episodes and a mountain of questions, the answers started flowing in the latest episode as the money trail began leading back to culprit after culprit and as the body count got higher, the detectives on the case realized this wasn’t some weird sex crime or an act of revenge.

This was about good old American money. Everybody wants it and everybody who has it, only wants more of it. Some people are even willing to kill for it.

With that let’s recap the latest episode of ‘True Detective’ titled ‘Black Maps and Motel Rooms’:

What’s In the Papers?

It appeared on the surface that last week’s episode of ‘True Detective’ finally equaled a win for the cops working this long suffering case to expose Ben Caspere’s killers as well as the deep seeded corruption currently embedded in Los Angeles. A week later, the cops find a whole lot of answers and secrets exposed and it only results in bloodshed and lives being torn apart.

While Ani recovers from her drug dosing at the hooker party, Ray and Paul start digging through the paperwork they stole from the house. The entire folder is filled with land deeds that originally belonged to Ben Caspere and now were being passed down to new holding companies — owned by Tony Chessani (the mayor’s over tanned son) and Osip Agronov (Frank’s former Russian partner). When Caspere died, his land shares were purchased for pennies on the dollar and then sold back down the chain to the new investors. For a moment it looked like Ray and Paul uncovered motive but not so fast…

In the middle of this conversation, Paul gets a text message containing two pictures of him with his old Army buddy in the throws of passion. Remember Teague Dixon taking pictures of Paul while he was out with his buddy a few weeks back? Well those pictures have fallen into the wrong hands and as we already know, Paul will do anything to make sure no one knows he’s actually gay.

Once Ani comes down from her considerable high, she’s worried about someone at the party identifying her and coming down for the murder she committed. During her drug induced haze, Ani starts flashing back to those moments where some guy at her dad’s hippie commune dragged her into the woods and did any manner of sick things to her as a child. Ani says that killing the guard at the hooker party was something she was destined to do because somebody was eventually going to pay for putting their hands on her.

Following her own trip of self discovery, Ani plans to interrogate Vera, the missing girl she’s been trying to find for months, to see if she can give her any insight into Caspere’s murder or the people involved in those parties.

It’s not going to be easy to nail these people considering the future governor aka Attorney General Geldof was hanging out at the hooker party and some of the others involved control the police and the purse strings for almost every lucrative operation in town. There’s no starting at the bottom and working to the top — the guys behind this conspiracy are as high as it goes and they didn’t get there by accident.

Know Your Enemies

Every time Frank Semyon turns over one rock and finds a snake, he turns over another and sees a scorpion. There’s no rest as he tries to wrestle his way out of a life of crime and now that he’s in bed with a Mexican gang of drug dealers, Frank is only falling deeper into his old life. When his wife questions this latest case of doom and depression, Frank can only tell her that the light at the end of the tunnel just keeps turning into a train barreling down the tracks directly at him.

“In the midst of being gang banged by forces unseen I figured I’d drill a new orifice. Go on and fuck myself for a change.”

~ Frank

Frank’s day only goes from bad to worse when Ray comes to pay him a visit with some disturbing information — his enemies aren’t trying to conquer him from the outside — they are already living in his house.

Ray explains that Caspere’s shares of the rail corridor land were sold off to a pair of holding companies — one owned by Tony Chessani and the other by Osip Agronov. Ray also reveals that the treasurer listed on the deeds was none other than Frank’s No. 2 man Blake, which means he’s in much, much deeper than just running girls behind his boss’ back. To make matters worse, Ray’s old boss Chief Holloway is also listed on the paperwork.

The Catalyst CEO, Jacob McCandless, was also at the party and he’s the one selling the parcels to Osip (he promised Frank additional land at no cost if he could recover the missing hard drive from Caspere’s apartment). In other words — every road Frank had pegged for an escape are all leading to dead ends.

Finally having knowledge on his side allows Frank to begin fighting back and it starts with the serpent currently coiled up on his leg, pretending to be his right hand man.

When Blake comes to pay the boss a visit, he plunks down a $15,000 payment for the party he ran the night before. It’s likely after a guard was killed and the papers were stolen, McCandless and the others want to make sure the information stays out of the wrong hands and paying Frank off with a pittance is what they believe will keep him from being suspicious.

Wrong.

Frank plays his hand with Blake after smashing a glass across his face and then stepping on his head while his cheek laid in the shards. It turns out Osip has been plotting to take over Frank’s territory for the past year. Osip paid off all of Frank’s guys, with the exception of his driver Nails, and everybody else has been feeding on the Russian’s power tit. It all happened because Frank started to wiggle his way out of the crime business and while that might lead to a happy retirement for him, what about all of his loyal employees?

Frank also finds out that Blake is the one who killed his friend Stan (the guy found in the pit a few episodes back with his eyes gouged out) because he was onto him. Stan tried to blackmail Blake so instead of paying him off, he just killed him in the same manner Caspere was murdered so it would confuse Frank and leave him looking in the wrong direction for answers.

According to Blake, no one knows who killed Caspere, but his death is certainly turning profitable for a lot of people. It’s also revealed that Blake was the person who handed over the suspected rapist who Ray Velcoro ultimately murdered. It seems he was a meth head who blamed Blake for burning him on a deal so instead of paying the piper, he put a sad and vengeful detective on his trail that ultimately ended with his death. So Blake was the person responsible for Ray’s turn to the dark side by tapping into his instinct for revenge against the man who assaulted his wife.

Blake also tells Frank about a big money exchange that’s happening in a day between Osip and McCandless for $12 million for the land in the rail corridor. Osip is paying in cash and if Frank plays his cards right, he could have it all. Blake tries his best to seem like he’s back on the right team, but Frank knows better this time around. He takes no chances, puts a bullet in Blake’s belly and watches him bleed to death on the carpet in his casino office.

Now that he knows exactly who’s gunning for him, Frank can go on the offensive and he racks up a lot of points by the end of this episode.

He plays nice when Osip comes calling and reveals that he’s bought out the casino and the club from under Frank. His Russian partners wanted Frank dead, but Osip said that his old friend was a smart businessman and he could play by the rules once he figured out he wasn’t going to win this match. Frank bows down to the Russian mobster and agrees to play his reindeer games while quietly plotting against him.

With Osip gone and believing he’s in full control, Frank burns his casino and his clubs to the ground after taking every penny he had inside with him. Frank is cashing in all his old accounts and if things go as planned in the ‘True Detective’ season finale, he’ll leave this California hell hole with his hot wife and $12 million of Osip’s money to boot.

The Blue Diamond Heist

Once Vera wakes up from taking way too many drugs at the party the night before, Ani is able to show her the pictures that were mailed to her sister that included photos of the blue diamonds that once belonged to Ben Caspere, which were also the subject of a 1992 robbery that left two jewelry store owners dead and their two children orphaned.

Vera says the photos came from another working girl named Tasha — Tasha was the girl who Caspere would take with him to important functions, parties, etc and introduce her around to all the right people. Well it seems putting Tasha in those situations, led her to the idea that instead of getting paid to fuck, she could fuck somebody rich right back and get paid even more. So Tasha started taking pictures and collecting information to eventually blackmail her way into a small fortune.

But Tasha eventually got caught when someone found her carrying a camera into a party so Tony Chessani and his guys to her north to a small cabin in the woods where the proceeded to pain the walls with her blood. Tasha was the person murdered in the cabin that Ani and Paul discovered a couple of weeks back and now she knows why.

Ani also finds out that Vera was never actually missing — she started working the parties because it was good money and that’s not a life she was trying to escape. Thanks to Ani pulling her out of the house and killing a guard at the same time, Vera is now marked for death as well. Ani tries to convince her that playing sex toy to a bunch of rich guys isn’t exactly empowering, but Vera says all jobs are the same — she’s just more honest about it.

Ani: “Maybe and this is just a thought, but maybe you were put on Earth for more than fucking”

Vera: “Everything is fucking”

While Ani is questioning Vera at the motel, Paul is back at the station digging into arrest records to see how everything ties together with the blue diamonds.

It turns out that back in 1992, the main cops in charge of the area in the vicinity of the jewelry store were Kevin Burris (the lieutenant from Vinci who didn’t want Ray to look into the Caspere murder case too hard) and Teague Dixon (the now dead detective who took the pictures of Paul and his part time lover) under the command of future Vinci police chief Holloway. He also finds out that the accountant in charge of that division was none other than Ben Caspere.

So Paul finally puts two and two together and figures this out — Burris and Dixon were the guys who robbed the jewelry store and killed the owners and Caspere was the person in charge of fencing the diamonds worth over $2 million.

Burris was also the arresting officer in 2006 for Lito Amarella — the meth cooking Mexican who eventually got sucked into a shootout with cops that left a ton of people dead. Remember his girlfriend revealed to Frank last week that a tall, lanky cop handed over some of Caspere’s belongings and told them to pawn them? Maybe Burris was that cop.

It puts Caspere’s murder on ice because the cops will look at Lito and his girlfriend for killing him and because they are selling stolen merchandise from his house, no one is going to think twice about blaming them. The simplest answers are usually the right ones.

The problem with this entire scenario is the blue diamonds were never sold because Caspere held onto them for years. Dixon was looking for them even before Ani and Paul found the safe deposit box with the diamonds so clearly he knew they were out there in the world. Caspere’s death is what set this entire thing in motion so Ani, Paul and Ray know that it couldn’t have been the power in the Vinci police department responsible for his murder because if he’s still alive, no one is looking into any of this mess.

While Paul is investigating all of this back at the station, Ray goes to meet with Katherine Davis to hand over the paperwork they discovered at the hooker party. Only one problem — when he gets in the car, Katherine is dead and bleeding out. Ray jumps out and makes a run for it, but doesn’t realize that he just left all kinds of fingerprints inside a dead woman’s car.

Ray doesn’t figure out what just happened, but Paul sure does when he sees an all points bulletin looking for two cops wanted for questioning. Ani Bezzerides is wanted in suspicion of the murder of a security guard while Ray is the prime suspect in the death of police officer Katherine Davis. It looks like our cops are being set up to take the fall and if nothing else, this move keeps two out of the three of them looking over their shoulder instead of looking for who killed Ben Caspere.

Paul gets taken out of the equation as well when he gets another text message with more photos and a note that he needs to meet someone at the hall of records at midnight if he wants to keep the rest of those pictures a secret.

Officer Down

Back at the motel, Ani and Ray start looking through the pictures that Tasha took before she was killed and someone in one particular photo looks familiar.

Ray recognizes her as Erica — Ben Caspere’s assistant and the girl Ani met when they visited the set of that movie that was being filmed near Vinci several episodes back. When Ani questioned Vera about the girl, she said her name was Laura and she was one of the people who used to work parties with her.

It all comes together when Ani and Ray realize who is actually standing next to Caspere in those pictures — it’s Laura, the daughter of the jewelry store owners who were murdered in cold blood back in 1992 while their children were hidden in a display case watching it all unfold. It seems Laura aka Erica has been stalking this case ever since she got old enough to understand what happened and now she’s gunning for the people responsible for her parents’ deaths. But where is her brother?

All of this heat has everybody pulling up stakes and going into hiding. Paul puts his fiancée and his mother up at a local motel while Ani sends her sister and father north to Oregon just in case things get worse before they get better. She also has a heart to heart with her dad about the memories that washed up while she was in the middle of a drug induced haze back at the hooker party. From what I gather, Ani was kidnapped and assaulted for four days in the woods until her father finally found her while the man responsible was never discovered.

Ani and her family have a moment of reconciliation as well as her partner, who has agreed to tail them to Oregon to make sure they arrive safely.

After dropping off his fiancée and mother, Paul heads over to the records office to find out who is turning the screws on him with the dirty photos. When he arrives, Paul is shocked to see his old Army buddy is the one waiting for him. It seems Paul’s old friend has fallen in with same crowd pulling the strings on this entire murder and cover up, and once he goes down in the tunnels beneath the city he finds another person who is at the top level of this conspiracy — Vinci police chief Holloway.

Holloway demands to get the paperwork back that Paul and Ray stole from the hooker party and in exchange he’ll let him go without any further entanglements from this case. Paul agrees, but then quickly turns on Holloway and makes his escape. He’s able to subdue Holloway and then kills all four men guarding him — including his former lover.

As Paul snakes his way through the tunnels and subway system below Los Angeles, Ani and Ray are getting closer back at the motel. This long ruminating flirtation finally comes to fruition when they begin holding hands and Ani shares her opinion with Ray on how she views the embattled cop.

Ani: “You’re not a bad man.”

Ray: “Yes, I am”

The two eventually end up in bed together but Ani’s words struck a chord with me when she said them. Ray is admitting he’s a bad man, which means one of two things to me — either he’s falling in line with what Rust Cohle said a season ago — ‘the world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door’ — or maybe Ray really is just a bad guy. Is there a chance Ray Velcoro has quietly been working with the Vinci PD this entire time? Is he responsible for setting all of this in motion when he finally realized he was never going to get a big enough piece of the pie? Remember, the man wielding the shotgun back in Ben Caspere’s apartment shot him with rubber bullets, which put Ray down but not out.

Something to watch in the final episode.

And finally, Paul makes his great escape only to catch a bullet in his back courtesy of Lieutenant Kevin Burris. He was the one missing link this entire time after Dixon died and Holloway was unconscious in the subway tunnels. Burris shoots and kills Paul Woodrugh and our detectives are back down to two again.

Officer down, repeat, officer down.

Tune into the 90-minute finale of ‘True Detective’ season 2 next Sunday night on HBO and then follow up with our recap after the episode airs!