Unearthing a Friend—True Detective: Night Country (2024) Impressions
After recently, finally, watching the new season of True Detective, I wanted to put together some thoughts, but I’m going to call these “impressions” rather than “thoughts” since I’m not approaching this assessment as really comprehensive/final. If I was to write such a thing, it would probably need to come after some time has passed. I just revisited season three prior to watching season four, and I found my feelings about it significantly improved after some time away. I would assume my evaluation of Night Country could similarly change with time.
Honestly, I’m a little driven to write this now out of relief—My Twitter feed was nothing but negative reactions to the show at the time of its airing, and I was actually surprised that it performed so well in terms of ratings based on the impressions I was seeing. Certain big complaints seemed consistent: that the mystery wasn’t compelling (or didn’t progress in a compelling way), that the show was too overtly supernatural in contrast to the previous seasons, and possibly that the music was worse, though my memory is that the first two were emphasized more. I did wonder for a bit if I had imagined the hate, but having since seen that same vitriol in the YouTube comments for songs featured on the season’s soundtrack, I decided that it was still worth taking the time to put together this Take. In the spirit of Internet Content Creation, I’m going to address my personal feelings about each of those potential issues with Night Country as items in a clearly delineated list.
These impressions will contain spoilers for all seasons of True Detective, to one degree or another, and I’m also going to assume familiarity with the plot of Night Country so that I don’t have to devote space to summary.
GRIPE ONE: THE CASE
Put simply, I did not see the pacing issues with the show. The singular spot where I felt it drag a bit was actually in the last episode, during the interval where Danvers and Navarro are back at the Tsalal station during the storm. It’s where the show… digs in and where it feels like answers are coming or should be coming, but it just seemed to me like either they weren’t coming, weren’t coming fast enough, or weren’t satisfactory. This impression dips a little into gripe two, but I think I was very much on edge about the solution to the mystery surrounding Annie K’s murder and the death of the Tsalal researchers only being answered supernaturally. I wanted the story to show me its hand, but it was still holding back at that point, despite the protagonists finally getting their mitts on the elusive Raymond Clark and this being the finale.
I’ll return to the supernatural elements in a moment, but what I do want to emphasize here is that I’m satisfied with The Case. I don’t think you can quantitatively assess the quality of a mystery/thriller (number of twists per episode? exactly how many members of the conspiracy?), but I’m willing to concede that maybe this case is simpler than the ones from the previous seasons and just has certain elements of obfuscation drawing it out, but I’m also going to argue that I never felt like no progress was being made. Each episode contributes something, and, also, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this mystery not being… mathematically comparable to the others, or something. True Detective has always placed heavy emphasis on character and mood, and while I’m no genre savant, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s probably broadly true of this sort of narrative.
We all know there are only so many stories to be told, so the particulars of who did what exactly have to be embellished in other ways to make familiar beats compelling. You can do that with a playful narrative chronology, which this series has used in the past to great effect, but you can also do it with interesting imagery or through characterization. A big part of what made season one so compelling was not the ritualistic murder: It was the two kind of divergently shitty men who were trying to solve it, and how they interacted with one another. The performances and characterization are a huge part of the appeal. It was about the ways in which the people investigating the case were fucked up, which is both probably a staple of the genre and also a consistent element of this specific series. Night Country is arguably as much about Danvers and Navarro and young Peter and his dirty cop father, Hank, as it is about the case, but that’s in keeping with “tradition,” as far as I’m concerned.
Hank, especially, has this whole sub-plot about getting scammed in a “mail-order bride” sort of deal that has no bearing on the central mystery, as near as I can tell, but that just humanizes him. Ditto the story he tells about when an even younger Peter fell through the ice and had to be saved. When he’s finally holding a gun on Danvers while Peter holds a gun on him and we know he (Hank) is going to die from how he finally reveals his involvement in moving Annie K’s body (but not in her death), I felt something for him because of the work done with his character prior to that moment. The guy is corrupt and maybe abusive, but the goal is to make you feel bad for him anyway when his time in the main plot is up. Thus, we see some investment in him as an individual on the side.
Certain character-specific things, like Navarro’s sister’s struggle with mental illness, have a tangential, potential relevance to the central mystery because of how it is suggested that they flirt with the same supernatural elements or forces. It’s a good “excuse”—which I personally don’t need but that I can understand being seen as a plus for storytelling purposes—to make sub-stories feel more important and less like digressions.
Writing-wise, I did feel a difference in episode one that is very hard for me to pin down, but that feeling ultimately disappeared. I came to love these characters in much the same way that I did the casts from previous seasons: Danvers and Navarro are fucked up in very recognizable ways and for very familiar reasons, but there’s enough style here (via the writing and the performances and so forth) that I became very fond of them.
Jodie Foster delivers some of Danvers’ most crotchety or antisocial lines in ways that I found very funny, and the fact that the character is still sexually active (to the point of it being a professional liability) despite her age and her status as a Bereaved Mother felt like a reasonable subversion. Kali Reis is equally great as Navarro for her own subversive reasons—She’s both The Muscle of the pair but also very sensitive and ironically vulnerable. John Hawkes’ Hank is dirty but not in the same quintessentially slovenly way that W. Earl Brown’s Teague Dixon was in season two. There’s a reserve and neatness about him that is simultaneously more and less suspicious. I had a special fondness for Finn Bennett’s Peter, however, and he might be my favorite character if I had to choose, because of his inexperience. We’ve seen floundering or failed cop relationships and marriages in the series before, but I think his youth makes his struggle with a very familiarly uneven work-life balance more interesting. This season is sort of about the “corruption” of Peter under Danvers’ mentorship, and seeing him arrive at that lowest point in “Part 5” is a big… part of why that might be my favorite episode of the season. Peter’s slow going and/or absence from “Part 6” also contributes to my more mixed feelings about it and how it draws things out.
(Side note: My biggest problem with the writing is the titling of each episode. It’s hard to get excited for “Part 3” in contrast to something like “The Big Never.” Maybe that’s an intentional stylistic break from the past, but I always liked having the Literary titles to go with the show’s marginally pretentious overall style.)
The season could actually have been drawn out further (perhaps to the “standard” eight episodes) and the case rendered more complex-feeling had they gone with a mixed chronology again, like in seasons one and three; however, I think Issa López and her collaborators made the right choice in not going back to that well again. Season one had primarily two timelines, and season three largely focused on three, and I think trying to further escalate that, or else retreading the same ground, would only have made season four feel more derivative. Instead, we have a more conventional narrative structure with rare flashbacks. We receive information about past events from characters in the present and fill in gaps as we go. It’s conventional, but so are the majority of stories. Here, as there, the thrill comes not so much from the underlying structure as it does from the particulars fitted to that frame.
This, as I said before, was my biggest fear: That I was going to get to the end of the season and find out that Annie K’s ghost really did kill the Tsalal researchers. And maybe she did still do that—maybe only metaphorically by inspiring the act of revenge on her behalf in non-literal spirit, or maybe literally instead, since the coalition of armed women sent the men out into the snow and ice to see if they would be taken or if they would survive. What precisely happened out there is still an unknown even after “everything” is revealed. Maybe Annie or some other entity actually did get them. What we are given overall, though, is what I would call “enough.”
While True Detective has always had some element of the supernatural, that was previously almost strictly flirtation. It’s more of a vibe, if memory serves, in season one, but Ray Velcoro has a near-death experience in season two that accurately predicts his own true death in the finale. Season three has these sometimes uneasy, sometimes sad moments where Wayne Hays seems to be aware of himself across timelines, almost like a self-haunting. There’s always also been plausible deniability, is my memory, too, though: In the last example, in particular, the excuse for the occasional trippy-ness is Hays’ degrading memory. As he loses himself in memories and also loses those memories, he’s breaking down, internally, so things get smudged and overlap. That’s the excuse. And season four does still have excuses, even if the flirtation has escalated to, like, sexting or maybe going to first base with the supernatural.
Not everything has a rational explanation (one element the show itself emphasizes being the mystery of how Annie K’s tongue showed up at Tsalal so long after her murder), but I think there’s still “enough.” That first murder and its follow-up act of revenge both have sensical explanations, and the supernatural is left to elements more so on the fringe, which I think was the right call, lest Night Country become an entirely different show. I’m willing to accept that… ratio of explainable to unexplainable events. Furthermore, certain supernatural elements could still be explained away, if you so desire, because of mental illness, strain, wild coincidence, imminent death from exposure to the elements, or maybe avalanches. For me, trying to resolve everything post-viewing has been an ongoing little diversion that I’ve enjoyed.
There’s no accounting for everyone’s personal taste, however, so I’m not saying I can prove with science that the season’s extra emphasis on spiritual phenomena(?) has to be acceptable to everyone. I’ve long been a fan of realism tinged with a certain degree of the fantastical. I like ghost stories and the Gothic sub-genre of horror. In fact, the hyper-specific hook that really got me to buy into Night Country during that initial viewing is what could be considered a throwaway line very early in the season comparing the Tsalal men to monks. Monasteries and monks are staples of Gothic horror (see, for example, Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk), and feeling that link was what endeared this season to me back when I was still getting a feel for the characters and writing and music. I had that impression in the back of my mind for the whole season, and it came to the forefront hard when we finally see the Tsalal researchers kill Annie K as a group. It wasn’t one of them—It was all of them, which emphasizes their shared zealotry and brotherhood, their weird and perverted monasticism, that feels so Gothic to me. Seasons one and three could be classified as Southern Gothic, so there’s an associative link for me here that might not be felt by everyone.
It also has to be acknowledged that the supernatural elements of the season dovetail with its increased focus on what could be summed up as “Exploring Indigenous Themes” (to use the name of a special feature from the physical release). The inciting crime is the murder of a native woman by non-natives who have a conspiratorial relationship with a mining company, harming lands they’ve colonized in the name of profits and science. However, I don’t want to speak too authoritatively on this subject, as I’m one extremely white boy. There’s Stuff to be written in this vein, for sure—how indigenous lives were being essentially sacrificed for these men and their corporate partners to create a potential cure for death that would, undoubtedly, have not been shared freely with their victims even if it could have been accomplished.
As for how this fits with the previously established iconography of the creepy spiral and the theme of time and names like “Tuttle” and “Cohle”: I either groaned aloud (or considered it) when Clark actually brought out the “flat circle” thing in his raving (which has always been a bit cringe/try-hard, tbh!), but I’m otherwise fine with the rest. I would prefer that the series be a True Anthology and have each season as its own, separate entity, but López only walked through a door Nic Pizzolatto himself opened already, particularly in season three. There, one potential solution to the mystery is that it’s part of the same conspiracy from season one, but this is a red herring for the audience. It’s one of the clever things about that season—that it looks and feels a bit like a regression to season one after the backlash to season two, but rather than outright “playing the hits,” it tricks the audience a little bit and instead has its own much smaller and more personal (and sad) conspiracy surrounding the disappearance of its missing children.
Somewhat similarly, Night Country toys with what the spiral even means. It may be a traditional warning about thin ice, and it might be older than human beings. That’s part of the cosmic horror, but it also ties in with the “indigenous” theming: something about the appropriation of native icons, landmarks, and the like. Nominally Christian Tuttle and co. are trespassers in a realm they don’t understand. Maybe it’s Cthulhu, or maybe it’s just the old, very real historical theft we live with every day in this country.
GRIPE THREE: MUSIC, IN ONE SENSE OR THE OTHER
The music is fine? I would perhaps concede that the season has a vaguely “pop-ier” vibe than the previous ones. Perhaps having Billie Eilish for the opening theme feels too “contemporary” and sets a tone the rest of the licensed score can’t shake. You could possibly use math and research to decide if the licensed tracks are too frequent now or too new(?) to be “appropriate” for True Detective, but I have next-to-no noteworthy negative feelings about the specific composition of the soundscape. In fact, I’ve found myself listening to certain songs on my own time as well. I was originally going to point out that I only noticed one on-the-nose needle drop, but a second viewing did reveal more of that sort of thing. Though if having overly literal needle drops is some kind of deeply disqualifying measurement of quality, then there’s a lot of media out there with the same “critical” issue.
What I’m going to twist this final item to be about instead is a “make music together,” collaborative or creative, sense of the word, an admittedly loose association—less the singular element of music and more the end-result of the combined effort behind the show, because that was itself a major element of the discussion around Night Country when it was airing.
I’m somewhat dancing around saying “Nic Pizzolatto’s unprofessional behavior” or maybe “It must really piss Nic Pizzolatto off to see ‘Created by Issa López’ in the opening credits for what is technically the fourth season of ‘his’ show.” What I don’t want to do is get lost in the weeds and/or do a bunch of summarizing (and research!) recounting the, frankly, troubled history of this series. The fact that season one aired in 2014, season two in 2015, three in 2019, and four (with a subtitle and attendant reboot-y vibe) in 2024 says enough, hopefully. While the streaming era of serialized TV-style storytelling has made multi-year gaps between installments more commonplace, this erratic release schedule was once a sign of troubled development or simply would not have been a thing. Season three’s pivot back toward season one, even if only superficially or presentationally, further speaks to the difficulty underpinning this enterprise.
Art in this world is unfortunately, invariably bound up with industry. Pizzolatto could have made True Detective season one a novel and kept more control, but he made it a TV series instead, which made it no longer only his. My opinion is that the show should have had a true creative reset each season, that it should have been a full anthology with a different guiding hand each year. I’m going to go so far as to say that I would welcome a comedy version of the show: Run the full gamut of detective archetypes and mystery sub-genres, with perhaps certain constants, like the emphasis on character and the interplay between at least two leads who are investigators of some sort. But the series has also seemed to struggle with having a consistent creative vision per season after the first, unless you count Pizzolatto’s involvement. This isn’t uncommon for regular television, but it’s felt to me like something of a failure to make good on True Detective’s more artsy side. Whether you agree with López’s vision for the show or not, her name is all over Night Country in a way that I think feels right for the series on a conceptual level. It’s still a collaboration, but you can claim, at least on paper, that there’s an identifiable hand consistently on the wheel in a way that surpasses even season one, with its split between Cary Joji Fukunaga’s directing and Pizzolatto’s writing. If the soundtrack is different than before, then, I’d consider that part of the vision and accept it as such.
We’re past the point now where I think feminist pop-cultural analysis of this sort of media can begin and end with “more women = good” (if that was ever truly acceptable), but it’s hard to ignore that we have a Mexican woman steering the show and suddenly we’re seeing not only a lot more women in prominent roles, but also women with more diverse appearances and backgrounds. Women are a major part of detective/mystery fiction, even if they’re archetypes, but Night Country spotlights, digs into, sits with, and listens to women in a way the show simply hasn’t before.
The standout scene for me is the opening of “Part 3,” which is one of the rare flashbacks and thus incredibly precious for it: Navarro shows up to arrest a still living Annie K, only to get pulled into a birthing. Her presence is initially a discomfort for the pregnant woman, and Navarro herself, to her cop-ly credit, seems uncomfortable too. Over the course of this scene, she sheds her jacket and then her hat, becoming a smidgeon less cop-like. There’s a tension between her role as law enforcement (there to arrest Annie, specifically, and more broadly as an agent of the white supremacist government and corporate entities oppressing these women), as a woman herself, and as someone with an indigenous background who feels a bit alienated from it. She’s close to it and moves with a certain confidence, but a major pain point for her is that she never learned her Iñupiaq name from her mother and so is still cut off in this very personal way. When the woman at the center of all this attention gives birth, there’s an interval where it’s uncertain if the child will survive. Dread builds and builds, but ultimately the baby is ok. Navarro is visibly relieved, and while we don’t see the full interaction with Annie K post-birth, we can assume that maybe she didn’t walk out in cuffs after all.
It's a wildly different scene from anything previously put into the show and something Pizzolatto probably either couldn’t (or wouldn’t?) write, at least based on the available precedents. This is what people who scream about the horrors of “DEI” and such racist nonsense are willfully excluding from their media landscape and from the narratives they expose themselves to: a different perspective, to be blunt. Fucking empathy! I’m not a woman or indigenous, but I’m drawn to the drama and the intimacy and the characterization that occurs in this scene. It has its particulars but still speaks the universal language of pathos. Alienation, sister/brotherhood, love. It’s also very plot-relevant (if you must) given how the increased threat of stillbirths is directly related to the mine and Tsalal. It is compelling “music.”
The highest praise I could offer from my particular experience with Night Country was that I had been watching it one episode at a time during my workouts, which was also how I rewatched the third season, but I watched the last two episodes in the same sitting without any distractions because I wanted to be fully present for them. And, after finishing this (slight?) season, I went back to the beginning and started over. The fact that I was doing this writing probably influenced that choice, but I also wasn’t ready to move on from the characters, the mood (music included), and the mystery just yet. And rewatching the season gave me a better appreciation for how even some smaller things are knit together. It still feels very deliberately constructed and cohesive to me, even if the whole has disappointed some people.
