Into the Cold, Cold Depths

I recognize I’m a little late in getting to True Detective: Night Country. The fourth season in the True Detective franchise debuted in January of 2024 and that came right after I lost access to HBO MaxThe oldest and longer-running cable subscription service, HBO provides entertainment in the force of licensed movies along with a huge slate of original programming, giving it the luster of the premiere cable service. Now known primarily for its streaming service, HBO Max (formerly Max, HBO Max, HBO Go, HBO Now, et al). (which became Max and will now be HBO Max again very soon), so I didn’t immediately catch the season, even though I intended to, and with so much TV coming out on so many different streamers, it’s hard to keep up with everything even when I actually do want to make sure and see something. Life is busy and priorities are what they are.

Thankfully I have HBO Max (or whatever you want to call it) again and so I can now come back to the series and see what I missed (and, helpfully, Max prompted me to do just that). And, yes, the show is great. That’s not just because True Detective is generally great (I even like the second season which, yes, isn’t as good as the first but is still solid television in its own right). This season is really solid on its own, and frankly could have been called just about anything and I think people would have flocked to see it. Jodie Foster playing an Alaskan cop dealing with a mysterious murder and supernatural elements in a limited series? Please, sign me up.

But, sure, the True Detective name likely did garner some extra eyes. This is the first season of the show developed without any involvement of series creator Nic Pizzolatto (who seemingly was busy with production on his next film, Easy’s Waltz), but the series doesn’t feel like it needed him or his input to continue on telling good stories. If anything, bringing on new series lead Issa López to handle writing and showrunning duties actually freed the series up to focus on a new direction: strong female characters. Considering all the stories told up until now, many of which featured a certain amount of violence upon women, having a woman in charge of the series to bring no focus and attention to the subject makes a lot of sense.

In Night Country (the first season of the show featuring a subtitle) we’re introduced to our two main characters: Ennis, AK Chief of Police Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and State Trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis). Years before the case in question Danvers and Navarro (when Navarro was on the Ennis police force) worked a murder case about a dead woman, Annie Kowtok (Nivi Pedersen), who they think was killed because she was a vocal protestor of the local mine (which has been polluting the land and waters of Ennis for years). There was no evidence, though, not even a clue about the weird murder weapon that was used to stab Annie multiple times (leaving behind strange, star-shaped wounds), and eventually the case had to be dropped.

Now, years later, a new, strange case has occurred. A bunch of scientists that were working at the Tsalal Research Facility, studying the permafrost to see if they could find “the ultimate cure for everything” went missing. They were found later, in a naked mass out in the snow, frozen together. But evidence back at their research center (including a tongue of a Native woman left there seemingly for no reason) points Liz to think this is all connected to the Annie K. case. And if it is, Navarro has to be looped back in as well since she’d never let the case go. Digging around the case, though, would lead to many other mysterious discoveries, and the danger to the two women could mount in ways they never could expect.

In devising Night Country, Issa López wanted to craft something that felt like, in her words, a dark mirror of the first season of True Detective. That first season focused on two men, telling a “dark and sweaty” tale about a serial killer stalking women and leaving strange, spiral designs all over the place. A similar tale comes in this fourth season, but also very much flipped around. It’s two women leading the case, tracking down someone that killed a bunch of men in a strange way seemingly all because of the death of a woman years earlier, but in a dark and cold setting the (heh) polar opposite of the first season.

Honestly, this really does work. This season doesn’t just feel different from the first, it feels different from all the others that came before. In each case the seasons were about men, getting into crimes, fighting crimes, and dealing with murderers. The focus was very male, as if to say that women couldn’t be “true detectives”. Switching the view doesn’t change the basic function of the story – it’s still a police procedural with artistic intentions – but it does shift the perspective. Women would view the murder of a woman differently (that’s logical) and having them in charge of the case means that the same beats we’d expect in True Detective will hit differently simply by who is delivering them.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the show roped in Jodie Foster, one of the great living actresses of our time, to play co-lead on the series. She rightfully won an Emmy for her performance here, and you can see why every time she’s on screen. She plays Danvers as both a gruff and rough chief of police as well as a mother trying to do right by her step-daughter. She doesn’t know how to be both caring and strong, and she often fails at connecting with people because she has to always be “on” as the chief. It’s a deep and nuanced performance that lets Foster show a lot of range as Danvers.

Not that Kali Reis is bad, as she’s also great. Navarro has her own stuff going on, from a guy she likes but also acts shitty to, to a sister who is clearly a little crazy (or is stuck communicating with the dead, and it’s never clear which is which) that she’s trying to care for, all while working as a State Trooper in a tiny, Alaskan town. I don’t know that Reis is able to bring the same depth and nuance to her performance as Foster, but then, how many people could? Her acting is solid, and there are moments with her and Foster where you forget the two are playing characters at all. She’s a solid pairing for Foster and the two make this show feel lived in.

I like the artistic direction of the season as well. I think changing the show out from hot, Southern locations to the dead of Alaska changes not just its location but the very vibe of the show. It’s dark, it’s cold, it’s primarily blue. The palette shift leads to a different energy for the season as well as different dangers for the characters to navigate. Plus it stops it from feeling like just another Southern yarn, a tale we’ve seen before in some form, morphing it into something new despite it still being True Detective. You feel happy to watch this from the comfort of a warm couch because the setting, as seen through the screen, feels so cold.

If there’s any qualm I have with the show it’s that the end mystery doesn’t feel quite as robustly set up as I would have liked. While the show sets up some little clues here and there, not enough is put out that I feel like you. Could figure out the mystery on your own. The show has to spend a lot of time in the last two episodes explaining what we should know to us, doing the “killer reveal” in a way that doesn’t feel set up or justified. Not really. That might be because the show sets such a strange mystery at the start, and then toys with expectations so much that I don’t think solving it on your own was the intent, but it does undercut the mystery some. The point of a good mystery yarn is for you to be able to figure out some stuff so that when it’s all revealed you have a good “ah ha” moment, and I didn’t get that with Night Country.

Did the solve (which I won’t spoil here) work? Sure, it lined up with what we knew once everything was explained to us, but that’s also the issue. It had to explain everything to us so we’d know the truth instead of assembling it in pieces ourselves. It doesn’t feel as satisfying when the show has to stop dead to detail it all for us at the end, and that’s basically what this fourth season had to do to finish out the show.

It doesn’t ruin the whole experience, mind you, because I like the settings and the characters and the whole vibe. I just wish there was a little more setup, a little time for us to figure everything out ourselves. It’s a solid season of programming that just barely misses the mark right at the end. I still think it’s a solid set of episodes that any fan of the series will enjoy. I just think this little flaw right at the end holds it back from being as good as the first season. But only just barely.