True Detective Recap ‘Other Lives’: It’s Never Too Late to Start Over Again

In the latest True Detective recap, things jump forward after the shootout from last week and the four main characters are all in very different places….

By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer

66 days.

That’s how long ‘True Detective’ jumped forward from the first episode of the series to the latest episode titled ‘Other Lives’ following a massive shootout between police and Mexican meth cooks who were in possession of some of the stolen goods taken from the house of murdered city manager Ben Caspere.

Two months later we pick up with all of our characters walking a different path than when we last left them.

Ray Velcoro decided to leave the Vinci police force and go to work for Frank Semyon as one of his debt collectors. When his former lieutenant comes calling and wonders why Ray got out when he did considering the state attorney general closed the Caspere case after the shootout and then immediately declared his candidacy for governor, the former cop knows this entire thing stunk to high hell but he also knew getting out while the getting was good was best for him in the long run.

“State came in. Better to walk before they make you run.”

~ Ray

Now Ray spends his days picking up rent money from illegal immigrants while trying to regain some custody rights for his son while cleaning up his act and giving up drugs all together.

Ani Bezzerides has been busted down to evidence room clerk and stripped of her detective’s badge. She also has to attend sexual harassment courses made special for cops and when things get a little too sexist during her session with a few fellow peers, Ani turns the situation on its head and really goes for the gut punch to prove a point about her position of power.

“I mean what can I say I just really like big dicks. It’s not just length, everybody’s always talking length but it’s fine. I mean girth, too. I really wanna have trouble handcuffing the thing.”

~ Ani

Frank has moved from his previous house and now lives in Glendale with humble surroundings, a wife who admits to him that she’s probably the reason they can’t have kids after she failed to disclose a couple ‘operations’ she had before they met, while he’s barely hanging onto his sanity as he slips further and further back into the old life he desperately wanted to escape just a few months ago.

The last thing Frank wants to hear right now is how he’s some kind of back alley gangster, shaking down business owners for a percentage of their profits while pimping out anyone and anything that will turn him a dollar. It’s a word he doesn’t enjoy hearing, especially when it’s coming from his own wife.

“I didn’t ask for this world. I took it. Gangster? I was born drafted on the wrong side of a class war so fuck that gangster shit.”

~ Frank

And finally there’s Paul Woodrugh, who was promoted to detective after the shootout but now sits behind a desk working on insurance fraud while trying to settle the case with the Hollywood actress he allegedly tried to coerce. In his spare time, Paul is knocking back spiked iced tea while trying to deal with a mother-in-law who wants to move in with him and his fiancée to help once the baby arrives. To make matters worse for him, Paul’s mother spent the $20,000 he had tucked away after doing whatever he had to do in Afghanistan to make that money and now he has no nest egg for his future wife and kid.

In many ways the 66-day time jump somehow took our four characters from the edge of the cliff and actually dumped them in the mire, still victims of their own circumstances. That said, there are still plenty of unanswered questions from the Caspere case and a convenient answer about who murdered him just for the sake of sweeping it all under the rug is leaving a bad taste in a few mouths and it’s coming time to wash it out.

With that, let’s recap the latest episode of ‘True Detective’ titled ‘Other Lives’:

Nobody Cares

When she’s not signing in and out evidence from the lockup, Ani is still spending as much time as possible working on the Caspere case because something never felt right with the way the state closed things down after the shootout and conveniently pointed the finger at a group of Mexican thugs who allegedly killed the city manager for a few petty baubles.

Ani’s gut seems to be on the right track after she talks to the sister of the girl she was searching for back in episode one — the girl who apparently worked parties with wealthy clients and went missing but never turned up again. Vera’s sister has given up almost all hope that she will be returned in one piece, but she did receive an envelope recently with some information that may put the cops on her trail.

The letter didn’t arrive in timely fashion after the family was evicted from their home, but once she got it, Vera’s sister found a ton of pictures and an invitation to a secretive gala with admission for one.

The sister shows the photos and the other stuff to Ani because she’s already convinced the other cops don’t care and never cared in the first place. Ani is immediately drawn to it when she spots one picture of a state senator from California and another with Caspere. She also sees four blue diamonds, very meticulously photographed, and they are the same jewels that were found inside of Caspere’s safe deposit box after he died. Now mysteriously those same diamonds have gone missing from the evidence room and Vera went to a lot of trouble to photograph these particular gems before sending them to her sister.

As Ani starts to dig a little deeper, she finds out that the last known call Vera made to her roommate came from a location that was also in Caspere’s GPS before he died. Ani wants answers because it’s becoming more and more evident with each rock she overturns that no one really wanted her to dig in the first place.

“This girl’s gone missing. Nobody cares. The interior’s poisoned and suddenly it’s worth millions and nobody cares? A bunch of people got shot to shit and nobody fucking cares.”

~ Ani

Pieces of the puzzle are starting to come together, but Ani and her fellow detectives have spent this entire season working from the center out. Maybe it’s time to finally build a few borders before getting to the heart of the case.

House of Cards

Frank’s criminal empire has flourished and floundered in the past two months as he’s continued to run a nightclub and a poker room while also sprinkling in a few illegal housing developments for good measure.

At his club Lux, Frank runs into two associates who apparently had a business deal in place with the former owner Santos, but he quickly brushes them aside and says he’s not honoring any previous agreements. This will surely come back to bite him at some point.

Frank is also curious about his associate Blake, who showed a great deal of ambition when the Caspere case from sprung to life, and he had to knock him down to pit boss just to make sure he didn’t act outside himself. It seems Blake has been doing far more than just showing ambition as he’s starting running girls out of the casino and while Mayor Chessani knows about it (and wants to get paid for it), Frank is none the wiser.

Frank puts Ray on the case to bloodhound after Blake to see what he’s into because the amount of people against him are starting to mount and at some point, he’s going to have to lash out and fight back. The problem is Frank isn’t sure who he should be swinging at and one miscalculation could cost him dearly.

“The enemy won’t reveal itself, Raymond. Stymies my retribution. It’s like blue balls in your heart.”

~ Frank

A little bit of information was also revealed this week about Frank’s previous ownership of a waste management company and the work they did to sprinkle the land with deadly metals where the upcoming rail line will be built. Remember a couple of episodes back where Ray and Ani met with the environmentalist who explained that the land was basically poisoned and no one could grow anything there so everyone just left. Well it seems that was a calculated project because then land gets abandoned, Catalyst (Ben Caspere’s partners in this venture) buy up all the parcels at pennies on the dollar and then when the rail line gets built, they sell it off at a massive profit.

Frank got wise that things were going off the rails (so to speak) when the guy he sold the waste management company to suddenly got drunk and drove and died. This is the same guy Frank knew forever and never saw him so much as finish a beer.

So Frank goes to see McCandless — the boss at Catalyst — to ask once again about getting him involved in the land ownership deals around the new rail line.

When Frank mentions his knowledge about the heavy metal tampering the waste management company did to the land surrounding the rail line, which obviously plummeted property values, McCandless is suddenly more in tune to work with the Vinci capitalist.

McCandless makes Frank an offer to get him back in the land game — remember that hard drive that got stolen from Caspere’s love den? The one that got taken after Ray took a shotun blast to the chest?

Well it seems Caspere had some interesting home movies stored on there and McCandless wants them back. If Frank can recover that hard drive, he gets five parcels of the land ownership he should have had anyways if not for Caspere pilfering his $5 million, and he can once again exit the gangster business he’s re-building in Vinci.

Blue Diamonds

Ani’s attempts to get Ray back involved with the case more or less fall on deaf ears although he admits when she called he realized he had been thinking about her. She wants to dig back into the case, but Ray wants to leave well enough alone.

He’s trying to narrow down the times he fucks up per week.

“I try to limit the people I can disappoint and I try to know the difference between my obligations and somebody else’s.”

~ Ray

Ani decides to go another route and pulls in Katherine Davis, the lead cop who was trying to bring down Vinci in the first place, and she calls on Paul and Ray to complete her trio of investigators. Katherine knows the way the attorney general swooped down and closed the Caspere case just before he declared himself for governor was the clearest case of collusion and corruption that she’s ever seen, but right now the burden of proof lies on them before any action could be taken.

So she decides to go off the books and bring in Paul as a special investigator, she’ll use Ani as an undercover investigator, which keeps her involvement off the record, and she finally offers Ray the chance to work under the attorney general’s office to help solve the case. Katherine’s plan involves an attack where she finds these blue diamonds that have suddenly gone mission, finds out about these parties where Caspere and others were attending and she wants to find the missing girlfriend of the Mexican gang banger, who was the won to pawn from of the dead guy’s jewelry, before the shootout ensued and she’s been gone ever since.

Everybody is on board except for Ray, who still needs a little convincing. Katherine offers him a chance to see get partial custody of his son because the attorney general’s office will step up in support if he helps them solve this case. Ray reluctantly agrees and says he’s going to go after the hard drive that was stolen the night he got shot in Caspere’s sex castle.

“It’s never too late to start over again.”

~ Ani to Ray

Before Katherine leaves, Ray asks why she’s suddenly so trusting after doing everything in her power to nail him to the wall while he was still part of the Vinci Police Department.

Well according to Katherine, her opinion changed when she learned that the man who raped Ray’s wife wasn’t dead, but instead just recently got arrested and charged with multiple assaults. It seems he popped up after another assault and his DNA matched the same man who attacked Ray’s wife all those years ago.

Like another shotgun blast to the gut, Ray realizes that the man he killed, which started him on the downward spiral that lost him his wife, his son and basically his entire life, wasn’t even the guy who did it. And don’t forget who put Ray on the case of the man who raped his wife in the first place — Frank Semyon.

As for Paul, he tracks down a pawn broker who deals in rare gems and he recognizes the blue diamonds from the picture provided to him from the missing girl.

It seems this pawn dealer saw these same pictures once before from a cop who came looking for them before Ani and Ray found them in the safe deposit box. It was Teague Dixon — Ray’s now dead partner — and he left specific instructions that if the diamonds popped up that the jeweler should contact him directly. It seems Dixon was on the case for somebody other than the police and likely the person responsible for Caspere’s death. Too bad Dixon is dead or we might get some answers.

Ani calls on her sister for help with her part of the investigation. Ani wants to attend one of these exclusive parties where high profile men can pay to sleep with a lot of expensive prostitutes. It’s not an easy invitation to land, but Ani wants to go undercover to see what these parties are all about and the kind of men who attend them.

It’s All Connected

Before Ray finds out about his wife’s rapist being caught (and not murdered by him), he follows Frank’s lieutenant Blake to see what he’s been up to in the hours he’s not working at the casino. It seems Blake is the person running girls along with Mayor Chessani’s son, Tony and their partner — big reveal — is Russian mobster Osip, who repeatedly turned Frank down for help as he was trying to keep his head above water after Caspere disappeared.

The other person at the meet with the girls, Chessani, Black and Osip is the creepy psychiatrist/plastic surgeon Dr. Irving Pitlor — the same guy who committed Chessani’s first wife to an institution before later treating Ben Caspere as well.

Ray decides to pay Pitlor a visit so they can play a game of show and tell and it works like this — Ray is going to show the doctor unmerciful pain if he doesn’t tell him everything he wants to know.

A few punches and smacks with a club later and Pitlor starts spilling the beans.

It seems Tony Chessani has political aspirations but he’s also a pimp on the side. So he would bring girls to Pitlor and with his surgical expertise he would turn them from 8’s into perfect 10’s. The girls would then work parties organized by Chessani and Caspere, but getting the highest rollers into a room full of hookers wasn’t enough for this ambitious duo. No instead, Chessani and Caspere would video tape their party goers doing all manner of crazy shit with intention to use this later for blackmail. It seems Chessani Jr. acted alone and dear old dad had no knowledge of this happening, much less that he ever attended these parties.

So now in one fell swoop Ray has uncovered motive for a lot of powerful people to want Caspere dead. He had information that could bury them in the public spotlight and it likely led to his murder.

Meanwhile, Ani and Paul track down that location where Vera made her last known call and it’s the same place Caspere visited before he died. When they arrive, Ani and Paul find a cabin locked up with no one around. The inside looks pristine and untouched, but a few hundred yards away, Ani can’t help but notice that there are a large gathering of buzzards circling around the same area.

They hike out to the spot where the birds are flying overhead and sure enough there’s another small, abandoned cabin. This time Ani and Paul find something — a very disturbing something.

It’s a kill room — complete with a chair where someone was tied, a ton of blood on the floor and arterial spray all over the walls. Whoever was sitting in that chair got tortured and likely bled out right where these two cops were standing. For every answer given, there’s at least one more question being asked.

Who was murdered here? Was it Vera or somebody else? Is this just a kill spot with multiple victims and who’s the one swinging (the hypothetical) axe?

One last thing — before we say goodbye this week Ray shows up on Frank’s front doorstep saying they need to talk. Ray believes that Frank set him up with the man who allegedly raped his wife so that he would be indebted to him forever. For the past decade it’s worked in Frank’s advantage, but it tore Ray’s life apart.

It caused Ray the kind of pain that doesn’t go away just because a culprit was vanquished. It’s the kind of pain that’s irreparable and not repairable. It’s the kind of pain that doesn’t stop just because you want it to. It’s the kind of pain, as Ray explains to his son in one of his recorded messages, that won’t stop unless you stop it.

“You might find cause to ask yourself to ask what the limit is to some pain you’re experiencing. You’ll find out there’s no limit at all. Pain is inexhaustible. It’s only people that get exhausted.”

~ Ray

Ray’s been dealing with this intense, searing pain for years and now it might be time for Frank Semyon to face the same.

Only three episodes of ‘True Detective’ left to go this season so make sure to tune in next Sunday night at 9pm ET on HBO to watch it unfold.