By Carten Cordell
The inaugural season of TV’s hottest show, HBO’s “True Detective”, came to a close Sunday night, leaving fans both enthralled and somewhat bewildered with its finale.
While the merchants of Internet zeitgeist continue to dissect the meaning of Carcosa, The Yellow King and the philosophical musings of Rustin Cohle (Matthew McConaughey), much speculation has surrounded what season 2 will look like.
As the series is expected to develop new characters in a different location, we decided to muse on what a “True Detective” season in Northern Virginia may entail.
The detectives: Virginia Alcohol Beverage Control detectives Todd Fitzpatrick and Graham McGiven are called into investigate a raided keg party in Clarendon after a large store of unlicensed, homebrewed beer is discovered by police.
The party hosts, six Capitol Hill interns living in a three-room apartment, reveal to Fitzpatrick and McGiven that the beer came from a black-market wholesaler.
The beer’s labels, filled with the heavy use of irony and oblique literary references, point to an obscure cult of hipster homebrewers out of Portland called the Ira Glassians.
Fitzpatrick, who spent years as an undercover agent in the web of prep school lacrosse clubs of Northern Virginia, begins to tap old contacts for information.
Jaded, enigmatic and possessing enough Vineyard Vines to choke a mail-order catalog, Fitzpatrick relentlessly follows up leads, tracking suspects to film festivals, Urban Outfitters and coffeehouses around NoVA.
In an effort to top the much-discussed six-minute tracking shot in season 1, producers place our heroes in a two-hour “car chase” on Interstate 66, where the suspects are a few car lengths away, but are unreachable due to rush hour traffic and blinding sun glare.
Fitzpatrick is eventually suspended after clogging phone lines during an NPR pledge drive with questions about the meaning of references used in “This American Life” episodes.
Frustrated by his partner’s increasingly bizarre theories on the pairings of bowties and khaki shorts, McGiven leaves the force to start his own detective agency.
Five years later, the former partners pair together again when a clue leads them to a skinny-jeaned club of homebrewers living in a townhome on U Street in D.C.
Would this proposed scenario match the suspense generated from season 1? Let’s just say we’re not waiting by the phone for HBO to call us.
