True Detective Season 2 Is Dropping Its Occult Angle

By: Kyle Pinion Friday, May 8, 2015 0 comments

Last year, as a part of the description that had surfaced for True Detective Season 2, one of the areas I zeroed in on was that it would center on the "secret occult history of the U.S. transportation system". That idea was a fascinating angle, and would have lent this new story some of the same mystique that the terrific first season was coated in.

But, according to Showrunner Nic Pizzolatto in an interview with Medium, this part of the plot has been excised:

“There’s definitely bad men and hard women, but no secret occult history of the U.S. transportation system. That was a comment from very early in the process, and something I ended up discarding in favor of closer character work and a more grounded crime story. The complexity of the historical conspiracy first conceived detracted from the characters and their reality, I felt, and those characters are ultimately what have to shape the world and story. So I moved away from that.”

According to the same interview, the narrative will be much more linear than the first season and have an identifying eeriness of its own:

“The gothic horror suggested by Louisiana’s coastal landscape didn’t feel appropriate in this place. These new landscapes have their own unique voice and their own unsettling qualities. While there’s nothing occult in this season, I think there’s a disconcerting psychology to this world, and its characters have other kinds of uncanny reality with which to contend.”

True Detective returns to HBO on June 21st.