“It’s always the same damn story with the same damn ending. So we told ourselves a different story, with a different ending.”
Spoilers, naturally.
So, I finished it. Like 3.2 million people, I watched the season finale of True Detective: Night Country. I’ve spent the last 36 hours hooting and hollering and I think I finally got it out of my system, so now I think I’m in a space to offer up some more sober thoughts about the show writ large as well as the episode on its own.
As seems to be the case with just about everyone talking about Night Country, I must first reestablish my Nic Pizzolatto-fellating bona fides: “season 1 is one of my favorite seasons of television ever and left a deep impression on my personality as it did scores of early-20s ‘cishet’* boys.” Does it matter that Pizzolatto all but plagiarized the best parts of Season 1’s dialogue from people like Thomas Ligotti? Does it matter that Cary Joji Fukunaga was a sex pest for a large portion of True Detective’s production cycles? Yes, I’d argue both these things do matter very much, but at the same time, you know, uh, like, it is what it is? I don’t have to defend either bozo, but I did get profoundly impacted by True Detective Season 1.
And so now that all is out of the way, let’s talk about what we have in front of us: six long episodes of True Detective starring Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, directed and written by Issa López, filmed in Iceland and Alaska by Tár cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, and returning to the same broad narrative universe that season 1 was set in. Throughout Night Country we see numerous references to the spiral tattoo, the Tuttle family, Rust Cohle’s father, and other textual and background nods to the first season. I’ve argued in a past piece that the show might’ve been better off without that baggage; by the time I finished the finale, I felt very strongly that that was still the case.
What we don’t see very much of, if anything at all, in the back half of the season are references to Carcosa, the King in Yellow or any other mention of the specific metaphysical or supernatural shit on display in True Detectives (2014). Instead, we see a one-eyed polar bear, oranges rolling to the feet of a specific character out of the darkness, whispers in the night, bleeding eardrums, and the kind of hallucinations one might expect from living in a desolate tundra where the sun doesn’t rise for a solid month. I’m fine with this, to be perfectly honest with you. I actually prefer watching a show that forges its own identity, even as it is forced to operate in the framework of a prior televisual darling, and I thought that López and company did an excellent job taking great care to craft a world that made internal narrative sense here – even if, in my prior piece, I complained of too much explanation and no-selling certain spooky elements.
Mainly what I’m most impressed by is the way the show weaves together its indigenous queer and femme community largely in the background – not only by occasionally showing us glimpses of painstaking care work done exclusively by Iñupiaq women, but also by showing us the ways in which “mainstream (white)” Ennis fails them regularly, across different institutions and even down to interpersonal relationships. It’s no accident that this dynamic of a strong parafamilial community unafraid to take matters into its own hands underlying the weaker top layer, plays heavily into the season’s ending, which now has my favorite explanation of a whodunit ever.
This isn’t to say that the show had no weaknesses. Christopher Eccleston’s character, Commissioner Ted Connelly, basically only shows up to be bribed or influenced by Silver Sky Mines and force Danvers and Navarro to shut their investigation down. Peter and Kayla’s relationship felt superficial basically at all times, an unfortunate side-effect of the fact that Peter was Danvers’ errand boy and did… quite a lot of the “detecting” this season to the detriment of his family life. But beyond that, their relationship felt kind of tropey at times, and the finale only reinforced that feeling. Missing Tsalal scientist/suspect Raymond Clark is certainly neither Reginald LeDoux nor Errol Childress, and his recitation of The Line from season 1 (Time is a flat you know what I’m talking about jfc) elicited a groan from me. The whole reason why any of what’s happening in the show had to take place might be one of the most brainless “utilitarian” science schemes I’ve ever heard. I could go on: why did we call a veterinarian to do a preliminary examination and then base our investigation angle on that? why did it only take Danvers seemingly 15 in-show minutes to warm up and dry off after falling into the ocean? why did we need to establish that Silver Sky Mines was funded by Tuttle United? who knows; who cares?
But man. Night Country could – and did – hit hard when it wanted to. Julia’s death. Navarro’s memorial for her. Henry’s ultimate heel turn after everything in his life was stripped from him. The realization that Silver Sky was likely going to succeed at burying Danvers. Peter’s final deduction test. Navarro’s fight with the miners, succeeded by her fight at the protest against her fellow cops. The chase through the dredger. The standoff in Danvers’ kitchen. The Clark interrogation. The visit to Bee’s house. The bulk of these scenes, sometimes taking up huge chunks of the season’s runtime, were both poignant and satisfying.
Anyway, I uh, I liked True Detective: Night Country quite a bit. I thought it was at the very barest minimum a very solid season of television, and at its heights it managed to really weave together an unexpectedly radical tale of community self-reliance. It might not have been what everyone was expecting – but it sure did deliver what I needed.