Could be the best episode so far of a series that seems better than the book it’s based on.
Backstrom is less anti-PC, less clownish, less a joke or the butt of jokes, and more House-like than he has been.
No comedy this time, but the outcome in which Backstrom is shown to have erred by overestimating the evil at hand is only an aspect of the show’s numerous weekly and sometimes seemingly ambivalent concessions to an American audience that requires God, an afterlife, and the triumph of good at the end of every hour, even when the title character is an atheist with a considerably darker view of things than that.
(Remember the cowardly and dramatically absurd ending of the first season of True Detective?)
In that regard the show is almost as flabby as Inherit the Wind, a brilliant and relentless attack on American Protestant fundamentalism with a disappointing ending in which the religious liberalism of Bert Cates (a fictionalized John Scopes) triumphs in the person of Henry Drummond (Clarence Darrow) over the atheist nihilism of E. K. Hornbeck (H. L. Mencken).
Our culture may be getting less Christian and more secular every day, but it may turn out that while we will surrender God, the Devil, human immortality, and the soul we will never give up our view of human life as an epic of moral conflict in which the righteous ultimately win all or most of the episodic battles, or anyway those we are forced to watch.
Powerful testimony to the enduring, if partial, dominance of a mythic view of the world as old, at least, as Zoroaster.
When we give that up, if ever, we will finally have given up the myth of meaning.
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