Premiering almost exactly 10 years after the launch of the first season and almost exactly five years after the Mahershala Ali-centric third season — time being a flat circle, as the now-punchline goes — True Detective: Night Country is perched precariously in conversation with, and in contrast to, the show created by and steered by Nic Pizzolatto.
Created by Issa López, who wrote or co-wrote most of the season and directed all six episodes, Night Country is, in some ways, a throwback to the first season, bringing back the uncomfortable intersection of true crime narrative and supernatural undertones. The season also includes direct nods to imagery and dialogue from the first season — generally unnecessary citations that feel like a sop to the Pizzolatto-worshipping corner of the fandom, since otherwise Night Country is at odds with the previous seasons in terms of theme and overall perspective.
True Detective: Night Country
The Bottom Line
A potent, if truncated rebirth.
Airdate: 9 p.m. Sunday, January 14 (HBO)
Cast: Jodie Foster, Kali Reis, Finn Bennett, Fiona Shaw, Isabella Star LaBlanc, John Hawkes
Creator: Issa López
Night Country pushes aside Pizzolatto’s trademark masculine brooding for a female-forward story that personalizes and internalizes the anthology’s typically convoluted plotting in a way that’s refreshing and frequently potent. But as the first True Detective season not to tell its story over eight episodes, Night Country comes off as needlessly truncated in key areas, lacking the opportunity to truly inhabit its most distinctive elements.
It’s December 17 in Ennis, Alaska, the final sunset of the year before months of prolonged darkness. Located 150 minutes north of the Arctic Circle, Ennis is a midsized town in which the local mining company and the Indigenous community have been clashing for years.
At the nearby TSALAL Arctic Research Station, home to a small international team of scientists engaged in mysterious geological pursuits, something very bad has happened. The entire staff has disappeared, and when they’re found, it’s a nightmarish frozen tableau, a chilly Hieronymus Bosch conception of hell. There’s very little evidence, but several details — an eerie spiral symbol, a tongue — connect the investigation to a dead Native woman whose murder has been left as, pun intended, a cold case for six years. It’s a tragedy that still haunts local cop turned state trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), who quickly pesters estranged former partner and current Ennis chief of local police Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster).
Danvers wants no part of exposing these old wounds, in part because she’s haunted by her own ghosts; as several characters mention, in Alaska — especially Alaska in the endless winter — the dead and the living are in frequent contact. Danvers has tangible concerns as well, including an increasingly rebellious stepdaughter (Isabella Star LaBlanc’s Leah), a surly senior officer who keeps undermining her authority (John Hawkes’ Hank), and that officer’s wet-behind-the-ears son (Finn Bennett’s Pete). Plus, Danvers’ position in town is fragile because a string of bad sexual choices have left her less-than-popular with the town’s most powerful people (mostly cuckqueaned women).
Over a couple of weeks, Evangeline, Liz and Pete have to sacrifice the joy of the holiday season to dredge up painful traces of the past, going deeper and deeper into the darkness, the inhospitable landscape and … get ready to point at your screen … the night country.
While men and their insecurities sucked all the oxygen out of the first three seasons — frequently with full intent — the new season is dominated by women, shaped by demons as unsettling as those that warped and drove Rust Cohle and Ray Velcoro and Wayne Hays in the earlier installments. The outlaw fantasies of the Arctic and Antarctic reaches tend to be coded as masculine — the realm of uncouth men with unruly beards — but Ennis (a name that itself captures truncated manhood) is a female space.
Like López’s ultra-spooky breakout feature Tigers Are Not Afraid, a horror/coming-of-age hybrid set against the backdrop of Mexico’s drug war, Night Country is an unsettling piece in which the supernatural elements are as present and concrete as you choose to believe they are. General spirits and specific Indigenous superstitions could be directly steering the action, or they could be byproducts of an unnatural and disorienting living situation in which day and night, past and present, living and dead lose clear definition.
Of course, with True Detective fans, this is a dangerous uncertainty to foment. Much of the disappointment from the first season came from viewers convinced that the Yellow King and all of the season’s pagan minutiae were building to a crazy finale filled with goblins, monsters and Lovecraftian entities, when instead it was “just” a murder mystery rooted in natural evil. In Night Country, there are frequent jump scares and a pervasive sense of unearthly dread, but there’s as much talk of mental health and the deleterious effects of this shadowy environment as well as the poisoning associated with the mines. So it’s possible that everything in Night Country is paranormal, just as it’s possible that everything is entirely rational. The story builds to a finale and resolution that I found simultaneously silly and consistent with the messages of the show I’d been watching, though I’m sure it will polarize — pun also intended, I guess.
I was less disappointed in the first True Detective finale, because I didn’t expect the emergence of Cthulhu in my mystery resolution. When it comes to the fourth True Detective season, I could have used more of the grounded and less of the fantastical. It makes sense to me that the more time the series spends immersed in the Iñupiat culture — not enough — the more organic and less sensationalized its treatment of their mystical traditions feel. The more we learn about life in Ennis — the broader strokes of the mining business and the nitty-gritty of, like, price gouging at grocery stores — the more the location feels like a character (and the more opportunities for LaBlanc’s Leah and Fiona Shaw’s enigmatic outsider Rose Aguineau to feel like real characters).
Filming in Iceland, True Detective captures a mood spectacularly, though not always with freshness or depth. The setting should be a point of total differentiation, but instead I found myself constantly thinking of all the different end-of-the-Earth genre stories that Night Country is similar to, from Insomnia (more “Day Country”) to Whiteout to 30 Days of Night to Max’s The Head to FX’s current (and more entertaining, but less ultimately satisfying) Murder at the End of the World. For all the True Detective references and branding, what Night Country ends up feeling like is The Terror meets Mare of Easttown.
And if you’re treating Mare of Easttown like an anthology in which a grimly determined Oscar-winning actress solves a regionally specific mystery with the help of a callow male sidekick while dealing with a rambunctious teenage daughter, Jodie Foster is an exceptional Kate Winslet proxy. As the piece’s dedicated skeptic — “Dead people are dead. There’s no heaven. There’s no hell,” Danvers says, one of several times she chides the story’s most outlandish elements — she’s all rough edges and impulsive decisions, a contrast to the searing, if quiet, intensity conveyed by Reis. It isn’t always clear how much “acting” Reis, who got her start as a champion boxer, is doing, but good gracious she has a compelling presence.
With Foster and Reis capably fulfilling the required two-hander True Detective structure, the men are left in a bland secondary capacity. Bennett is likably earnest in the Evan Peters Mare of Easttown role and Hawkes always delivers complexity, but at a certain point the season breaks down between the gripping material with Danvers and Navarro and … everything else. Even an actor as reliably interesting as Christopher Eccelston can’t do much with a part that boils down to Danvers’ boss and occasional lover and nothing more. The best male performance of the season comes from Joel D. Montgrand as Qavvik, a gruff bar owner who just wants to love Navarro, not tame her.
The streamlining of the overall storyline in the Night Country home stretch — a process that apparently required three to four writers per episode — weakens the overall season, but at least increases momentum toward a conclusion that worked for me conceptually. Since I’m not sure any True Detective season has actually had a wholly satisfying ending, that’s a plus — albeit a rushed plus — for Night Country.
