I’ve watched 67 episodes of “The Walking Dead” with no serious prospect of quitting yet I find the thought of another week of Farrell, McAdams, Kitsch, and Vaughn looking weary and not doing much of anything almost too much to bear. I’m going to force myself through it only because I know that I’m in for an eight-week commitment, max. And also because the show has to get better. It’s a television event, arguably HBO’s most prestigious drama after the critical success of season one. It’s got a big budget and a movie-star cast. There’s nowhere to go but up. And yet:

Seems the best way to continue enjoying True Detective is to stop thinking of it as serious noir and start thinking of it as highbrow camp.

— Sam Adams (@SamuelAAdams) July 6, 2015

We’re in a bad place if we’re grasping for “maybe it’s camp” rationalizations after three episodes, especially since campiness isn’t the problem. The Conway Twitty dream sequence last night had a nice moody David Lynch vibe to it. The problem is the rest of the show — slow pacing, uninteresting characters, stilted dialogue (“I’m apoplectic”), and a convoluted conspiracy that increasingly seems far-fetched even compared to season one’s. Camp is supposed to be fun. This is not fun.

Let’s stick to one big logistical question: Is there any answer to this complaint from the Atlantic?

Finally, regarding the chase with Ray and Ani: What is with this criminal conspiracy? Last week, they shot Ray with a couple of non-lethal rounds. This week, they make a point of following Ray and Ani so that they can blow up the getaway car almost directly in front of them. It’s like they want to get caught. Again, maybe some explanation for this will be offered later, but at the moment it seems pretty nonsensical.

The common denominator in Vinci is ruthlessness — graft, violence, hustling, even by the police — yet the two cops trying to unravel the key murder mystery are somehow the beneficiaries of a bizarre degree of restraint. The man in the bird mask in Caspere’s love den is armed, inexplicably, only with rubber bullets despite the risk that he might be outgunned. The man in the mask who set the car on fire and who obviously followed Velcoro and Bezzerides could have ambushed them on their way out of the witness’s house but chose to waste the car instead. It doesn’t add up. Why aren’t their enemies trying to finish them off? My best guess, assuming that this is not in fact highbrow camp, is that the conspiracy involves people who know Velcoro and like him enough that they want to scare him but not kill him.

I don’t think that includes Frank Semyon. He needs Velcoro around to help find Caspere and has no obvious reason to want to scare him. I’m thinking more along the lines of Vinci PD — maybe Dixon, the heavyset cop who investigated Caspere’s house with Velcoro in the first episode, or maybe someone else on the force. They need him on the case too to keep an eye on Bezzerides and the state PD investigators but they also want to scare him enough that he decides he’s not terribly interested in finding out who killed Caspere. (If so, it’s working. At one point after being shot, Velcoro asks to be taken off the case.) Maybe — here’s an out-of-the-box idea — the man in the bird mask was Velcoro’s own father, who grew disaffected with police work long ago. Everyone in Vinci seems to be wrapped up in criminal activity of some kind. Maybe he’s no different, and obviously he’d prefer not to actually murder his own son. (Remember, Velcoro notes after being shot that rubber bullets are a cop’s weapon, something his father presumably would have access to.) Or, if you want to go really far outside the box, maybe it was … Woodrugh, the cop who conveniently found Caspere’s body, seemingly by accident. I’d have to rewatch that scene from episode one to see how “accidental” it really was, but maybe he was involved with Caspere somehow, went to the love den to grab the evidence before Velcoro could find it, and had only a CHP shotgun with rubber bullets on him for whatever weird reason when Velcoro walked in the door.

Or maybe, a la season one, they’re never going to resolve this and we’ll be left to wonder why this absurd sparing of Velcoro’s life was necessary. Oh well.