Time is a flat circle - Rust Cohle (Season 1), Raymond Clark (Season 3)
It’s a long fucking night. Even the dead get bored. - Wallace
There are likely two ways to have watched True Detective: Night Country, or at least two different lenses through which to view it. The first is to come at it as a police procedural with a mystery to solve and a case to wrap. The other is to see it as a character exploration with a murder case in the background. Whichever lens you chose likely dictated what you thought of the show’s six-episode run.
I suspect how much you liked or appreciated True Detective: Night Country had to do with your willingness to forgo answers. If it was just a mystery to unpack or tie a bow on, then there’s some chance the ending left you wanting a bit more. If it was about the characters first, then the show’s fourth iteration was nothing short of magnificent.
Much like Yellowjackets or Tana French novels, in Night Country, we are only given pieces of the puzzle, fragments of reality. After that, we are left to wonder if some of the supernatural elements are figments of the characters’ imaginations, mental health crises, or actual supremely evil fucked-up-edness out there happening in the world.
From this perspective, we are left living on the borders of reality, much like the characters, never quite understanding if what they (we) see or hear or feel is “real” or not. And in the end, it didn’t really matter.
At its core, Night Country is about the onset of the perpetual darkness in Ennis, Alaska, and all the weirdness that comes along with it. But really, the Night Country is more a reference to the continuous darkness the main characters find themselves in, unrelated to the rising or (always) setting sun.
Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) are both living with their own personal traumas. Whether it’s the loss of a husband and son or the aftereffects (PTSD) of military service coupled with a family history of mental illness, these two are in the throes of a darkness that appears all-encompassing.
It’s much darker inside than out. They’ve learned to “live with it,” but barely, fraying at the edges time and time again and experiencing things that probably aren’t all that real but are real enough.
For Liz and Navarro, trending dangerously close to the “losing it” plane is also what keeps them dialed completely in on solving the mystery. In this True Detective world, one really can’t happen without the other.
We saw as much in Season 1 with Rustin Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Season 3 with Wayne Hays (Mahershala Ali). Those characters drifted further outside the normal bounds of reality but into a place where they could eventually “see” all the angles even if it meant they were increasingly, and disturbingly, mentally compromised.
The same happens here in Night Country with Danvers and Navarro, though the traumas are at least a bit more explicit and well-defined. They are sad and scared, but really only of themselves, not the world around them.
This is an important distinction that Night Country weaves into its narrative arc. There are plenty of jump scares and creepiness, but never really on the part of these two. They are steadfast in their journey to uncover the truth of the Tsalal deaths and Annie’s murder. But they aren’t ever unnerved by the off-the-wall pieces that come along with it (one-eyed polar bears, rolling oranges, etc). This is important to understand because they are at the show's core.
While these pieces are part of the show’s Mystery (with a purposeful capital “M”) they aren’t part of the crime. These two understand as much and “dealing with it” comes at the cost of their own personal well-being. But it is crucial in their ability to figure the rest out. We might be scared (or curious) of the implications, but they aren’t at all. Both are much more afraid of their own minds than they are of shit that might go bump in the Ennis night.
I suspect your tolerance (or even enjoyment) of Night Country came down to how you viewed this interplay of mystical and mystery. For your willingness to blur the lines between the mind and the realistic without getting firm answers about each and every little thing. Your tolerance for the show failing to square every circle (or spiral).
Sure, there were answers in the end. On a narrative and mystery level, True Detective: Night Country wrapped a tidy bow on the murder investigation part of the story. We got a little Ennis midwife townie justice for the Tsalal crew. They were forced to walk out on the ice with their fate resting on the spirit of Annie “deciding” if they lived or died.
And this parallels the choice Navarro offers Clark, albeit unknowingly, at the station. Face your consequences or let the night cold take you. He chose the freezer section. So did the scientists. Did they have a choice? Not really.
Was it all a convenient way to get to the finish? Kind of, but not really. It made sense on a narrative and buildup level that these women would be the ones who cleaned up the Tsalal mess, so to speak. They’d been doing the town’s dirty work in other respects, so why not take care of these fucking creeps to boot. I appreciated the implications.
And drawing its story from Season 1 down to finer details (Rustin’s father, the spirals, the Tuttle Corporation, even the staged murder of Wheeler) anchored this season in place while also opening it up to new characters facing the same kind of problems. Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, like Matthew McConaughey and Mahershala Ali before them, are masterful in this respect.
They come full circle on their own struggles, right down to the final scenes in the Tsalal station, around the fire (both before and after the freezing), where the truth is laid out, stared at, and set free.
It’s gorgeous television, built specifically on what we knew about them already. They were two characters at odds, but not really. Too alike and broken to be there for each other, until they needed it most.
Night Country came down THIS moment by the cracking fire, this was the whole point. Both characters walked (or dove) to the literal edge of the night, the point of no cold return, fraying the very last pieces of their own sanity before choosing to ask the right questions about themselves. Whether they wanted to live and keep going, or pack it in and walk out onto the ice (literally and figuratively).
They both chose to live, though on their own distinct terms. Danvers knows Holden sees her. Navarro knows she can control her demons. They needed each other to do it.
We sped through the Tsalal murder reveal not for lack of time, but rather for lack of importance. It was secondary to the bigger struggle. The internal one. And for that, the show is a beautiful, sad, dark, light, warm, and cold triumph. It was a long night, but it's over now, maybe for good.
I appreciate a limited series, but the depth of the supernatural nuance of this series left me wanting more from this universe.