Understanding True Detective : Night Country
* this analysis contains spoilers for True Detective : Night Country *
I like True Detective more than the average person.
Not only I've watched the first season twice a year since it first aired, I also have a tattoo of Rust Cohle quote from episode 3. It was subsequently ran into the ground over the following two seasons, but I was happy that HBO finally put its big boy pants on, banished creator Nic Pizzolatto to an executive producer role and gave someone else a shot at saving the concept. Because it was a concept worth saving and newcomer Issa López managed to do so with the new chapter True Detective : Night Country.
This latest season transported us to fictional Ennis, Alaska to investigate the case of six mysterious scientists found naked, frozen, terrified and very much dead. Chief of Police Liz Danvers (freakin' Jodie Foster) and policewoman Evangeline Navarro (ex-boxing world champion Kali Reis) are both drawn to this spectacular case for their own reasons, which sprawls deep into Ennis' darkest secrets. Nothing ever happens in Ennis, so when it does, you can bet your ass it's all connected.
Two weeks after the finale, I can say that I liked it less than I originally thought I did, but it's still the second best season of the show by far and it managed to keep its ideas alive for further seasons down the line. It was renewed again, by the way.
What True Detective : Night Country did right
Gothic Horror, baby!
Right off the bat, True Detective : Night Country was more assertive about what it tried to be than any of the previous seasons at the risk of coming off as less sophisticated than its previous iterations. One thing Nic Pizzolatto is great at is using elements from different genre in order to create a narrative that feels unique, but he also bordered on plagiarism at times. Issa López didn't even try to go there. She wrote a straight police procedural with less subtle horror elements
She also fucking nailed it.
She nailed a type of horror very near and dear to my heart: gothic horror or the horror of place. She made places scary without even having monsters in them. The best example of what I'm talking about is when Danvers and Navarro investigated a sighting near an abandoned dredging machine. Just wandering in such an alien looking structure looking for something or someone they don’t know, leads you to interpret any sound or sighting they might come across.
This is how good horror works. Whatever it is you’re afraid about is always scarier than what's actually happening and Issa López had the brilliant idea of using this idea on her characters as well as on the audience. The psychologically more fragile Navarro in particular becomes vulnerable in situations where her demons are free to wander and surface. The scenes aren’t subtle, but the psychology of character is. Night Country was the scariest season of all four because of that.
I mean, making Ferris Buehler's Day Off creepy is an achievement in itself.
The Excellence of Execution
True Detective : Night Country kept it simple, but it shined in executing its idea with great timing and inspiration. Take the scene where Lund wakes up in the hospital in season three. Everyone has seen at least once scene where a demon possesses an unsuspecting soul to make them say something creepy. But when it happens to the thawed scientist, it happens right after everyone BUT Navarro leaves the room, leaving her alone and vulnerable to such an otherworldly vision.
As I'll explain later, I believe that Danvers & Navarro are overall weaker characters than who Nic Pizzolatto came up with in season one, but they were executed perfectly. Danvers is this petite, bitter, aging woman and a stickler who can find the proverbial needle in a haystack and Navarro is a physical specimen who takes on three dudes at once at some point in the series, but she carries psychological trauma that makes her more fragile where Danvers is strong. They complete one another.
Navarro is pulled off particularly well and shines in the more tender moments she shares with bartender Qavvik (a quite convincing Joel Montgrand) who accepts her for who she is and what she can provide. I would've taken more scenes of their blossoming romance, but I was glad with what I got. The sharpness, the precision, the economy of language between both wounded souls. It was awesome. They’re two people who don't talk much, trying to communicate.
Easter Eggs & Open Doorways
The Easter Eggs from season one were the talk of the internet when Night Country was on air. At some point, we all expected our boy Rust Cohle to make a cameo, but it's probably better that it didn’t happen. Issa López left a lot of stuff unexplained and I believe the series is better for it. For example: we know that Billy Lee and Edwin Tuttle were behind the TSALAL station research and since they’re nefarious occult weirdos, we can only assume it was for some fucked up purpose.
But we don't know. It's better that we don’t know, because it'll allow the series to go on for further seasons in a quasi-anthology fashion like Nic Pizzolatto first conceptualized . Night Country’s duty was to tell us that it was all connected. Further series will tell us how and why it was all connected and who knows, maybe we’ll get a Rust miniseries at some point? My point is: we have something to look forward to for the following season. We have a reason to be excited again.
What True Detective : Night Country got wrong
Characters
One thing became clear after two or three episodes of True Detective : Night Country. Issa López can tell a story much better than Nic Pizzolatto ever could, but Pizzolatto's gift was to write iconic characters. Even the cast from the maligned season two are memorable in their own right. Ray Velcoro was one of the funniest, most fun-loving scumbags I’ve seen on screen in the last decade. The cast of Night Country leans the more realistic way and I believe it was a mistake.
Part of me believes the six episodes format had something to do with it, but the series kind of also lost stream from episode three to five because it featured a lot of people dealing with semi-ordinary hassles and not people living through life-changing moments. For example, I didn't give a rat’s ass about Peter's (Finn Bennett) martial issues or Danvers' inability to connect with her daughter (or step daughter?) Navarro had interesting moments, but the show never looked too deeply into them.
I was super excited to see one of my favorite actors John Hawkes appear in this series, but the frustrated and conniving Prior just kind of revealed himself to be a co-conspirator at the end out of the blue, while he could've been a much richer antagonist figure than he ended up being. The explorations of the past was also frustratingly shallow. Characters are what we mostly remember from iconic shows and I only really cared for Navarro in True Detective : Night Country.
Some Lines Weren't Blurred Enough
Overall, I was comfortable with the explanation that most of the supernatural elements of True Detective : Night Country were because the characters' shaky mental health and Alaska being creepy in wintertime, but there were certain loose ends that bugged me. For example: what was the deal with the ghost of Travis Cohle? He was the only "real" ghost in Ennis? Did Rose also have a shaky mental health? The ghost DID show her where the cadavers were buried, though.
There was also barely any exploration of what Navarro went through in the military. Pulling the post-traumatic stress card by using an Iraq or Afghanistan deployment just feels cheap. Once again, how much of the blame can be put on the six episodes format. What about the polar bear? Was he also a hallucination even if Ennis is technically located where polar bears actually live? Some of these supernatural visions were just too blunt to work. It makes the conclusion feel cheaper than it should.
