True Detective Recap ‘Down Will Come’: Worse Self is Your Best Self

In the latest True Detective recap, Ani and Ray find a connection to Caspere’s murder and a shootout nearly claims everybody’s lives after the bullets start flying…

By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer

Most real cops will tell you when conducting an investigation, the likeliest suspect is probably the one who did it.

A cheating husband gets murdered — chances are the wife killed him.

A business deal gone wrong — it’s usually the people who were wronged that closed it.

The truly complex cases are few and far between but those are the ones that become the subjects of series like ‘True Detective’, who wouldn’t have much compelling television to show us if Ben Caspere’s murderer could be caught within the frames of a single episode.

Another real cop-ism that rarely gets shown on TV (although series like ‘The Shield’ do a great job of it) is showing that most murder investigations are solved within 24 to 48 hours. Beyond that it gets much tougher and a lot harder to pin down a suspect and find the kind of evidence to link them to the crime.

On ‘True Detective’ this season three cops — Ray Velcoro, Ani Bezzerides and Paul Woodrugh — are all investigating Caspere’s murder and while they have come up with some interesting theories and a juicy look at his nightlife, there’s not been much evidence secured in finding out who actually killed the guy.

But this week’s episode titled ‘Down Will Come’ finally found a suspect and it put the cops on the hunt to take him down. Except we all know four episodes into the series, this wasn’t the mastermind behind Caspere’s murder and the backlash is going to make time feel like a very flat circle because the events of the latest episode are surely going to haunt these true detectives for quite some time.

With that said, let’s recap the latest episode of ‘True Detective’ titled ‘Down Will Come’:

Least Favorite Life

There are a couple of things we’ve learned while following Frank Semyon this season — he’s great at one liners and he clearly doesn’t enjoy being a gangster anymore despite really being good at it.

With each passing day that Ben Caspere’s murder goes unsolved and his $5 million seems lost forever, Frank is forced to engage in more and more criminal activity while living with a wife who wants nothing more than to have a baby but right now he can’t even get that right.

“Right now there’s so many things for me to go about the wrong way, I’m losing my fucking vision”

~ Frank

Frank has his old nightclub back after de-toothing the man he sold it to last week and a construction business he’s shaking down for a cut of the profits. As of now he also brokered an agreement with some serious drug dealers to start pumping product back into the club and also put the clamp down on a hotel owner lining his pockets with the cash of some very poor residents.

Frank’s embracing his darker side although internally he really seems to be hating himself for it.

In the midst of his day trying to wrangle back the criminal empire he just walked away from, Frank also has to face off with his wife’s ex-boyfriend, who she suggests as an investor for his recently re-acquired nightclub. Instead of getting a partner, however, Frank sees the douchey Hollywood executive come awfully close to just slapping his wife on the ass and calling her honey.

But in his fragile state of disgust, Frank turns on his wife instead for even suggesting the guy for this business deal. He tries his best to come to some sort of internal understanding with the man he wants to be and the things he now has to do to survive. When he meets with his old pal Ray in their favorite smoky bar late in the episode, he mentions to the burned out cop that maybe his place is on the streets as his No. 2 instead of toiling away playing police in a town that wants a lot of things but law and order aren’t two of them.

Ray doesn’t want to be paid muscle, but Frank sees something in him that he believes can be transformed into an asset for his old is new again criminal enterprise. Frank despises what he has to go back to doing, but there’s no denying he’s good at it and that’s the trick. Embracing what you do well, whether you like it or not.

“Sometimes your worse self is your best self.”

~ Frank

Surviving the Game

Following a rough night of drinking at the Lux club, Paul Woodrugh wakes up in his unmentionables, walks out into the living room and sees his old Army buddy sitting on the floor watching TV and eating waffles. It seems in his drunken stupor, Paul fell back into old habits that he developed while serving overseas and the guy he tried to push away a week ago, he’s now pulled into his bed.

Disgusted with what he’s done, Paul runs off to work but runs into a gaggle of reporters waiting outside his hotel room to ask him questions about the actress he supposedly tried to bribe for favors and then realizes that while taking home a man to bed, his motorcycle was stolen.

Paul gets a ride from Ray instead and the two exchange their first meaningful conversation of the season. Paul doesn’t go into detail but long story short he’s fucked his life up and the reporters who are just clamoring for the chance to get him on tape talking about the actress he pulled over for swerving and speeding on a highway that later turned into a front page TMZ headline are buzzing around him like flies circling a dead carcass.

Ray’s been in these kinds of headlines before, or at least that’s the way it seems and so he lays out some knowledge on his younger counterpart.

When it comes to reporters, just remember the kind of headline seeking scumbags you’re dealing with.

“I’d rather be wrong and first than right and second. That tells you all you need to know.”

~ Ray

And he also explains how Paul has lived through a tour in the Middle East with bombs blowing up overhead and people charging through the sand on a daily basis with a mission to kill him. Once you’ve lived through that kind of constant pressure and torment, a few reporters and a bad news story are the least of his worries.

“You’re a survivor. Everything else is just dust in your eyes. Blink it away, man.”

~ Ray

Paul’s life gets even more complicated when he visits with his ex-girlfriend and she reveals that she’s pregnant and going to have the baby whether he’s in her life or not. Paul takes this as an invitation to double down on being a straight man because he asks her to marry him and have the kid. Because that will surely fix everything!

Whatever the visit with his girlfriend does, it apparently re-focuses Paul, who ends up with the biggest break in the cast since Caspere’s sex lair was discovered and Ray took buckshot in the chest for his trouble. It seems some of Caspere’s jewels and belongings were hocked at a local pawn shop and after finding the merchandise and confirming that it was indeed part of the jewelry stolen from the expired city manager’s possessions, it didn’t take long to track down the culprit.

Enter Lito Amarilla — local pimp, Mexican drug dealer and all around bad guy.

He sent one of his girls into the pawn shop to get some cash for a watch and some other jewelry so all signs are pointing towards an obvious conclusion — Lito’s girl was one of the ladies that Caspere frequented but when she saw his place and saw the kind of money he was carrying around, she decided to tell her pimp and he opted to torture the executive until he gave up every dime.

Paul and Ray’s partner Teague Dixon make the big discovery and he shares the spoils of war with his old pal Ani Bezzerides.

“Who’s your fucking Sherlock now?”

~ Teague Dixon

All the signs are there — low life pimp, his girl services Caspere, they decide to rob him, he won’t give up his stash so they have to torture and kill him and then they get all the loot. Except there are a few holes in this latest theory.

First off, it seems awfully convenient that the cops in the Vinci police department urged Ray to pin this crime on some scumbag pimp who would never be missed so they could finally get this state investigation off their backs. Second as Frank points out when he hears about this new suspect — if he’s floating around with $5 million of his money, why would he need to pawn anything right now?

It’s all wrapped up with a nice little bow on it, but if this show has proven anything through two seasons — nothing is what it seems so don’t believe what you hear and whatever you do don’t believe what you see.

It’s All Connected

Ray and Ani pick up from last week’s dodge with death as they continue on the investigation into the car that was set on fire that transported Caspere’s body to that lowly park bench on the side of the highway. Now they know that it wasn’t the production assistant who quit the movie where the car was stolen, but they came so close to capturing whoever did this and he or she still got away.

Ani’s dealing with her own set of problems after that chase when awry because Vinci’s Mayor Chessani is raising hell about her interrogating his family without a warrant or permission to search his house. She wants to fight back, but Ray has to inform her of the real crux of this investigation and why it was never about Caspere’s murder.

Actually the murder was just the catalyst so the state could dig into his financials and see how much he was making the corrupt little city of Vinci so they could find a way to get a piece of the payoff. Ray says that Vinci has been doing these kinds of schemes for a hundred years and they’ll keep doing it because everybody wants a piece of the pie and eventually this entire investigation will get shelved after the state officials get some money in their pockets. And the wheel just keeps on spinning.

Ani’s not satisfied with that answer so she starts digging into Chessani’s daughter, who seemed to be the only person living in that fucked up mansion who didn’t looked like she was on equal parts of uppers, downers and three different kinds of alcohol.

This is where things get interesting — it seems Betty’s mother (Chessani’s ex-wife) was diagnosed as a schizophrenic by her doctor and sent to an asylum where she eventually hanged herself. Her doctor was none other than Dr. Pitlor — the same physician who was treating Caspere before he died.

Since Pitlor mentioned to Ani when she visited him before that he knew her father, she also pays a visit to his commune where she discovers even more information that links all of the powerful men involved in this conspiracy together.

It seems many years ago, Pitlor and Chessani were part of the same commune with Eliot Bezzerides and now they are connected again with Caspere as the other piece of the puzzle that’s interlocking them together. Eliot even shows Ani and Ray a picture of all of them standing together before telling Ray that he has a beautiful aura surrounding him at all times.

Eliot: “You must have had hundreds of lives.”

Ray: “I don’t think I could handle another one.”

Things only get stranger when Ani and Ray find the land that Chessani had marked on a map that coordinated with the GPS belonging to Ben Caspere. The land itself is toxic —mining the area led to chemical leaks and the farmland in the area is dead and people have essentially given up on trying to live there. But both Caspere and Chessani had interest in this particular area of land, but why?

Ani’s day goes from investigation to being investigated unfortunately after she returns to her home station and finds out from her boss that Internal Affairs is digging into her after discovering that she dated Deputy Sheriff Way Too Clingy because no matter how you cut it, she is his superior officer. They also discovered her one night affair with her partner and until further notice she’s on suspension so they can complete the investigation. Ani is allowed to finish up the Caspere case, but other than that she’s benched.

She’s convinced if these same things happened to a man no one would question it, but her captain disagrees and says the only thing that would be different is a less argumentative tone from anyone else but her.

Case Closed

While Ani was arguing about getting booted from the force for having sex with a colleague just a couple of days after being told by her superior that if she has to let Ray Velcoro think he’s going to fuck her to get the job done then so be it — she’s not falling behind on the investigation she was supposed to be spearheading.

While Ray and Ani were looking into land deals and a decades long relationship between the victim, the mayor of Vinci and a mind altering psychiatrist, Paul and Dixon were out pointing the finger at the man they believe is at fault for this entire debacle. Lito Amarilla’s prints were found on the watch that got pawned along with Caspere’s and the hooker and with that much evidence it looks like case closed.

The cops storm into downtown Vinci where they try to circle the wagons and arrest Lito for the murder of Ben Caspere. The bad news is when they arrive, Lito is either waiting for them or really prepared for cops to approach his building because Ray, Ani and the rest are caught in a hail of gunfire from a machine gun on the third floor of the building. The bullets tear through everything on the street while killing a few cops and even putting a shot directly through Teague Dixon’s head, leaving him dead on the sidewalk.

Finally after a firefight and a fourth floor meth lab explosion that caught the attention of everyone in about a five mile radius, the Mexican gang led by Lito makes an escape in an SUV, but not for long before Ani, Ray and Paul track them down and watch as they crash into a city bus.

Lito and his boys aren’t going without a fight and so they open up gunfire on the streets, killing or wounding anything and everything in their path. The back and forth gun battle continues until Ray and Paul finally get the upper hand, but only after Lito kills a hostage and they unload a dozen rounds in his chest for the trouble.

As disastrous as this raid ended, the result was exactly what the Vinci police department wanted — a culprit with enough record to believe he could be involved with this plot and now one who can’t talk and tell his story because he’s dead. The civilians and cops who got massacred during the shootout also might be just the ammunition the cops need to get rid of Ani Bezzerides after she already had an investigation pending and now she led the police into shootout that left a lot of people dead.

The simplest answer is supposed to be the best one in a murder investigation but when it comes to Ben Caspere’s death it seems everyone involved just wants the case closed so the digging can stop and no one finds out what’s actually buried underneath a mountain of secrets. Maybe Ani was getting too close so what better way to get her off the case than to discredit her with a sex scandal and then find a patsy to take the fall so there’s no need to look into this murder again.

When you stop to think about it, all the puzzle pieces are in place for the cops to lose and Frank to suffer through another 20 years trying to make a living off of shakedowns and back alley card games.

But the one thing we know for sure is this death shook up the status quo and as much as everybody wants to watch Ben Caspere’s body sink into the ground where it belongs, there are three cops rejuvenated by a case like this and they aren’t going to let go until there’s no other string to pull at.

Tune into next week’s episode of ‘True Detective’ as the show moves into the final four episodes of season 2!