Is True Detective Better as a Supernatural Story? Signs Point to No

Spoilers ahead. You know the drill.

The first season of True Detective rocked the shit out of me. Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson were incredible as two scumbags with badges on different sides of the shitpile trying to solve a fucked up murder in a place the rest of the world forgot. McConaughey’s Rust Cohle, an existential philosophy-mangling miser whose love for humanity is only matched by his capacity for good cheer, acts as a perfect foil to Harrelson’s Marty Hart, a “family man” whose perfect suburban life creates cover for a deeply anxious, hypocritical and jealous adulterer.

Across eight wild hours of television Cohle and Hart uncover a cancerous growth at the heart of Louisiana politics and social life, and despite their best efforts, first as officers of the Louisiana State Police and later as vigilantes, find themselves unable to completely burn it away. The fact that we’re left with Cohle crying on the lawn of a hospital, looking up at a sky full of stars and realizing that even if his work is all for naught it was still worth something, and then we never return to these detectives or this case again, made this first season truly special. It had an energy, a je ne sais quoi, that no other season of True Detective – with all of its star power and pretensions toward auteurism – has ever been able to match.

That is, until this month. With the release of True Detective: Night Country, not only are we returning to a place society forgot, with its fair share of shitty and crooked cops, but we’re at least partially returning to the cosmology of True Detective Season 1. From the beginning, we see see the specter of Travis Cohle, father of Rust, guiding Rose Aguineau (Fiona Shaw) through the snow and ice to a pile of frozen bodies – dead researchers from a nearby scientific research facility, Tsalal Station. From there, Ennis, Alaska police chief Liz Danvers and Alaska State Trooper Evangeline Navarro uncover the same spiral sigil found on Dora Lange scrawled into the forehead of one of the researchers – coincidentally also tattooed on the back of Anne Kowtok, a murder victim at the center of a cold case that has haunted Navarro for years. In Episode 2, we get a reference to a shell company funding Tsalal Station run by the Tuttle family – the family at the heart of Season 1’s nightmare.

With Episode 3, the supernatural elements are reaching new heights – but I’m starting to wonder if that’s actually a good thing?

True Detective Season 1 struck a delicate balance between hallucinatory fantasy and the desert of the real. Much of the original Lange case is told to us through the unreliable memories of men who had a vested interest in not telling the whole truth. We only really see the veil parted halfway into the season, to show us the difference between what Cohle and Hart tell LSP detectives Papania and Gilbough in 2012 and what really went down during their botched takedown of Reggie and Dewall LeDoux in 1995. Cohle admitted he saw things that weren’t there on occasion, “neural misfirings,” a result of his drug-addled time as an undercover narcotics agent prior to the show. The psychedelic horror show Cohle is subjected to during his battle with Errol Childress in so-called “Carcosa” in 2012 could be said to be more of these misfirings, caused by the trauma of his injuries as well as the pure adrenaline surging through his brain and body as he defends himself from a serial murderer of nigh on 30 years. What makes this exciting to watch is the fact that we as the audience can never know. It is intentionally subjective and unclear. We find ourselves compelled to find meaning where we can and make shit up where we can’t. It is a setting ripe for fanfiction, but at the same time this essence eludes those who would make the attempt.

Night Country, directed by Issa López, plays in that fan-fictive space but dispenses with Season 1’s ambiguity entirely. When Aguineau sees her dead lover, the elder Cohle, beckoning to her on the ice, it is treated less like a startling hallucination and more like the pretense for fulfilling a rote obligation. “Oh, of course Travis is here! That scamp.” When Navarro watches as the mangled, triple-amputated body of Anders Lund is possessed by a spirit who tells her that her mother is waiting, she does so with an appropriate degree of horror—but not surprise. It is happening. This is meant to be normal. We might find ourselves making comparisons to Twin Peaks – because of course – but when David Lynch and Mark Frost showed us a specter there wasn’t an attendant sense of the routine, the expected, to go with the haunting imagery. Here in Ennis, the dead walk the ice after dark and sometimes stop by for dinner, and we’re supposed to take this as given.

I just don’t know that this works. Watching each episode as they come out, gauging the reactions on social media (a harder task than it was in 2015), reading people’s thoughts on culture websites about it, the sense I’m getting is that True Detective: Night Country is a fantastic show on its own that is being hamstrung by the thing that we all thought would buoy it. Believe me, I was all-in: I wanted just as much as anyone to find out how the Yellow King, Carcosa, the spiral, time-as-a-flat-circle, and so on made their appearance. And one-by-one, as these images and ideas show up on cue, their semiotic power – given to them by obfuscation, initially – diminishes almost into parody. It could be that I’m jumping the gun in my analysis but something – call it a premonition – gives me the feeling that I’m not.

There’s more than enough meat in Night Country to keep me chewing through the next three episodes for the supernatural stuff – and even the Season 1 connections – to be wholly unnecessary. I’m in love with Kali Reis and Jodie Foster’s performances as Navarro and Danvers respectively. I want to see just how fucked up Cpt. Hank Prior (John Hawkes) gets — there are shitty-ass good ol’ boys even in the frozen wilderness, apparently — and I’m fascinated by the show’s depiction of real life Indigenous-led protest movements like the water protectors and MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women). I kind of want to know how or even whether Prior’s son, Peter, breaks the ugly cycle that has entrapped his dad and Danvers, and becomes a good father and husband for his family. I want to see Danvers’ adopted queer Iñupiaq daughter, Leah, embrace everything that Danvers is trying so hard to keep away from her. Shit is going to hit the fan – in shows like this it always does – but whether that shit is spectral or garden-variety in nature I guess remains to be seen. I’m chill with it either way.^[1]“hey Kaile what the fuck I thought you said you were cutting back on cop stories in 2024” listen, I already said this one time on Bluesky but I’m saying it here: this was already on … Continue reading