Martin Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rustin Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) were Louisiana State Police officers together from 1995 to 2002. Their first case, an occult serial killer that starts with a prostitute, was supposedly closed that year. Then they worked together for seven years, before things went "bad" between them, and now it's ten years after that, and they've both been pulled in to consult on what seems to be the same case, happening again.

That's the setup for the whole season, which is the whole story, because this is one of those where this is all we get and then next year it's about some other detective having some other detective problems. Based on this episode, those problems will be intense, because these people are super intense and their problems are gigantic, mostly related to acting weird:

1995 Rust is a dry drunk whose daughter died and wife left him shortly thereafter, who pulls this nasty case and is forced to have dinner with his partner's family (Marty has two daughters and a wife, Michelle Monaghan who I love), and like a million other fucked-up things on this one day, which is also his dead daughter's birthday, so he falls off the wagon while questioning some hookers at a bar. It's a lot more charming than it sounds, now that I'm looking at it on paper. He has some kind of a way about him.

2012 Rust, seventeen years later, looks like hell in a fright wig and starts drinking at noon on every day off. He's a damn sight friendlier than his younger self, but also a whole lot ruder. The world has not been kind to him. And that's essentially the dossier on Rust: He flips back and forth between intuitive shaman psycho and smart-assy small-town "philosopher" -- the usual McConaughey, but here with an even more irritating gloss on the language due to the mannered -- not to say silly, but at the least precious; possibly snotty -- way the story itself is written:

Men are "rawboned," "possessed by ungovernable rage"; at one point a person actually says aloud, "Rust would pick a fight with the sky, he didn't like its shade of blue." If that doesn't make you want to choke Cormac McCarthy with Don DeLillo's dick, probably you will not hate this show. I didn't hate it, but it's... A lot. It's a fucking lot. Even having Woody Harrelson there to bitch about it doesn't take the entire sting out of hearing Rust -- a grown man, played by a beloved Texan actor -- saying shit like, "I can smell the psychosphere." I mean, you're begging the question. It's aggressive. (I kind of love it.)

2012 Marty talks a lot about the important of a family and home keeping you grounded, as opposed to his partner's anchorless, weirdo existence, but that could be clarity in hindsight, given the clues that he's cheating on the wife back in '95. He's a marble-mouthed good ol' boy, provincial and by turns mystified and irritated by Rust's ongoing prattle. His reactions -- both positive and negative -- to that nonsense do a good job of keeping you on course, tonally: It is never so top-heavy or gimmicky that he can't come in with his own brand of mugging and take it down a few notches. He is kind of wonderful, but that could just be the Woody Harrelson-ness throwing it off.

It seems like a complicated thing, maybe something so new we don't have a reference for it, or else just trying very hard. I can see it going either way. The accents and sheer amount of acting going on, eventually those things take a backseat to the details, which -- between individual acts of investigation that seem like just barely tuning up for this case, this week -- are mostly centered on showing us where these men came from and where they are going to end up. (And little prurient details of how wicked crazy the bad stuff is going to get.)

The men questioning them in 2012 seem just as interested in their relationship -- its twists and turns, its ending, its meaning -- as they are in the old case, so one wonders just how weird this is going to get. But with Marty in both time zones seeming equally fond of, resigned to, and enraged by his mentally ill partner, it's hard to know exactly what all that even means.

Is it personal? Wife-related? Do they get too close and then pull back, or always stay exactly like they are at the beginning and (framing) end of the story? If so, why is everybody so fucking intense about everything? And if not, where is Marty's presence of mind coming from? And how did Rust go from being almost entirely destroyed when we meet him, to 17 years later almost entirely destroyed in a completely different way? Is Rust actually a serial killer? Because how boring it would be to get serial killed by him, droning on about Classical Pessimism and planned obsolescence and free will and suicide and whatever.

Next Week: With replacements already breathing down their necks, the pair follows leads from cathouses to burned churches, and I guess Marty cheats on his awesome wife some more, and I guess Rust probably says some embarrassing shit nobody wants to hear, and maybe we'll find out more about what happened since they split up. I'm intrigued. Kind of annoyed, for now, but mostly intrigued. I wouldn't say I was -- I don't know -- possessed by an ungovernable rage about it, but then I can't really imagine myself saying that about ... anything.