at the very end of the 1st episode, when Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch) was riding his motorcyle, seemingly on a bit of a suicidal bender, there was a quick edit (or two?) of an extremely black sky with teeny, tiny pricks of starlight breaking it up. My mind immediately connected it to the imagery and speech at the end of season 1, when Rust Cohle talke about all their efforts being tiny pinpricks in the blanketing darkness. This, of course, was after the main point of s1 seemingly being Rust Cohle finally gaining a vision and comprehension of the darkness that was Carcosa. He went as far as he could into understanding the universal madness, but somehow was still able to pull himself back.

So here we have Taylor Woodrugh seemingly staring at the same thing as Rust Cohle -- the darkness enveloping the night sky -- but to Woodrugh it's extremely dark. There's barely any light in it whatsoever.

Then in e2 we start learning some more things about Woodrugh. Woodrugh has some skeletons in his closet that he won't talk about, not too different from Rust Cohle's multiyear undercover stint where he essentially left the grid, mucking around in the worst of humanity while he was there. In the "break-up" scene, Woodrugh is amazingly detached and emotionally unmoved by his girlfriend's complaints, very Cohle-esque. And then somewhere in e2 we see another black night sky, I think as Woodrugh is leaving his girlfriend's house?

Which left me with the sense that perhaps Woodrugh is supposed to be some sort of amalgamation of a young Rust Cohle. He's an intelligent, sensitive person who is beginning to understand the darkness around him. He's in law enforcement, but he might not be the most rules-oriented law enforcement officer out there. Here he's being tapped for an investigative role, it's not clear why, but perhaps this season will show the sort of transformation that occurs as Woodrugh becomes motivated by the chase against the darkness, the search for the pinpricks of light. Woodrugh is lost, detached, a man without a clear purpose, perhaps just like Rust Cohle was prior to realizing his obsession was trying to understand and conquer the darkness in the world around him.

That might be a bit of a simplistic reading, obviously, but I was struck by the call-back of the pin-pricked night sky in e1, thought it might have just been a visual tick to tie things together. But then it DEFINITELY flashes across the screen somewhere in e2, and it's definitely related to the Woodrugh character (who went from being a boring beefcake in e1 to an intriguing young man in e2). So I don't think it's an accident and I definitely think it's a motif tying to Rust Cohle's s1 ending speech.

Anyway, was lukewarm after e1, but e2 made up for any lack of momentum through the first 60 minutes.