This is wading into murky waters, but I don’t know if an American director could make something as merciless and systematic. I take that back, maybe the Soderberg of Contagion? But it’s not a mode we do well.

It got discussed down thread but I have to go with Frank being a dead man no matter what (as I said you dont drive someone into the desert to not kill them). So he decides to end it with his own actions. The gangster asking him to give up his suit is just a humiliation. He knows hes going to die, but he will not be humiliated.

you dont drive some one out into the middle of the desert to not kill them.

And not just the Flakka infused cannibals either!

‘Johnnie To’s Drug War ‘

YES. Drug War is so amazing. Its the crime movie so many american directors have tried and failed to make in the past 10-15 years. (see also A Prophet).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUlgN__Jrxk

my personal favorite version of the song from Jools Holland. Love the way the guitar stabs when it finally comes in.

‘though I would have preferred just her, without the earlier hallucinations’

I really liked the other hallucinations because it was as much origin story as we needed for how he became a gangster. We dont need a long winded exposition, just the quick sharp pressures that formed him.

Ani sensing Ray was dead is a great capital-R Romantic moment, and the first thing it made me think of was Jane Eyre, of all things, where Jane feels the fire at Rochester’s house from miles away. I don’t get tired of that kind of ambitious display of character, emotion, and fate.

This season made the first seem overly intellectualized, like you said, about the search for meaning. Here it was about life, and marked by all the new lives at the end: where the first season was about the loss of Rust’s daughter, this one was about welcoming Paul and Ray’s children into the world with an origin “written in blood.”

On reflecting (holy shit, has it been a year?) what I love most about Pizzolatto is that largeness to his characters, and it was much more present in this season, the kind of big-gestured people that deserve that kind of big ending like Frank’s final walk or Ani just knowing that Ray is dead. It’s not realistic, and one more time, realism just doesn’t cover enough of reality. It’s occasionally ridiculous, and I’m pretty sure some dead French guy said that’s what you risk. It’s the same kind of largeness we see in Buffy, American Vampire, The Shield, and Justified, and it’s gonna last.

Gena and Ray’s father separately grieving for Ray, and Gena taking in the knowledge that Ray was Chad’s father before neatly packing it away along with the rest of their life together, were emotional beats that worked really, really well for me. Ditto Jordan in the white dress at the end of Frank’s long walk through the desert, though I would have preferred just her, without the earlier hallucinations–I liked the spareness of the image of just him and his trail of blood against all that flat, uncaring landscape, and it would have been great to have her be not only the conclusion of it but also the only relief from it. (And to have the brutal confirmation that he was dying–indeed, already essentially dead on his feet–come swiftly, rather than lingering not just through the shot of all that space but also through the images of his mind slipping away from him.)

I was glad to see Ani, Jordan, Nails, and the boy together at the end. If season one was about making meaning, this season was more brutal: you survived, and if you survived, you made your meaning from that. (Like you point out, it’s mostly just the women, and that has its own meaning.)