The new season, starring Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, moves north of the Arctic Circle. Unsurprisingly, the crimes are as bleak and chilly as the setting.
Season 4, Episode 1: ‘Part 1’
In the absence of any other connective tissue, the “True Detective” series continues to move forward on bad vibes and attitude, a darker-than-dark noir ambience propped up by gruesome crimes, hard-living sleuths and philosophical discourse that dances on the edge of self-parody. When Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), a state trooper in the Arctic hinterland of Ennis, Alaska, is asked whether she believes in God, it doesn’t seem very “True Detective” for her to affirm that she does. “Must be nice,” says her inquisitor. “Knowing we’re not alone.”
“No,” she answers. “We’re alone. God, too.”
There we go. Some franchises have Freddy and Jason. This one has existential malaise.
In this first episode of “True Detective: Night Country,” the series’s new showrunner, the Mexican filmmaker Issa López, succeeds in making Navarro’s words ring true. (The show’s creator and previous showrunner, Nic Pizzolatto, is no longer creatively involved, retaining only an executive producer credit this season.) As another imposingly dense mystery starts to unfold, with past and present horrors cross-contaminating one another alongside supernatural events, López sketches a vivid, menacing community that lives in darkness.
Her Ennis is the mirror image of the daylight noir of the 1997 Norwegian thriller “Insomnia” and Christopher Nolan’s 2002 Hollywood remake, which took place in a season where the sun never set and the endless days exacted a psychological toll. Here, in permanent darkness, the town “at the end of the world” lives up to billing.
There are many questions, some of them metaphysical, to sort out after this premiere, but it’s a promising sign that the backdrop is at least as compelling as anything that happens in the fore. As the two main characters, Navarro and Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster), the current police chief, delves into two cases simultaneously, López gives Ennis interesting dimensions of its own, pausing to watch the town drunk slide across the intersection to collect her latest D.U.I. or noting the tenuous state of the drinking water. Most of the population in this working-class outpost is the native Inupiaq, who coexist uneasily with settlers who have turned a mine into a pollutant and cash cow.
On the fringes of the fringe, 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle, eight researchers go missing from the Tsalal research station, and it’s made to seem like either black magic or an extremely ill-advised walkabout. We get a few glimpses into their last moments together: One scientist kicking back to “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” with a bowl of popcorn, another doing a video call in Spanish, and still more on a treadmill, in the laundry room, in the lab or constructing a ham sandwich. Then we see another man shake uncontrollably and utter the words, “She’s awake.”
Later, when a delivery truck pulls up with supplies, the driver finds an empty building. The camera finds a tongue on the floor.
As Danvers, Foster can’t help but suggest a thoroughly disillusioned version of her most famous character, Clarice Starling in “The Silence of the Lambs,” but there’s a little of Kate Winslet’s “Mare of Easttown” to her cynical, slightly discombobulated regional sleuth. She’s Liz of Snowtown. At the research facility, she’s able to estimate the time these men disappeared based on the mayo consistency in the uneaten ham sandwich. (“Mayo doesn’t go runny until a couple of days out of the fridge, but your processed cold cuts will survive the apocalypse.”) When she examines the severed tongue, the one piece of unsettling evidence they have, Danvers can deduce by subtle striations that it belonged to an Indigenous woman who licks the threads of fishing nets. She’s good.
Navarro is skeptical of Danvers, to put it mildly — not so much her skill as her initiative. While serving as a detective, Navarro obsessed for months over the savage murder of a young Indigenous activist who had attracted a lot of “haters” for her protests against the mine. Danvers inherited the case and let it go so cold that one of her deputies, Hank (John Hawkes), wound up keeping the file box tucked away in a spare bedroom. Hank’s son, Peter (Finn Bennett), Danvers’s baby-faced protégé, smuggles it out the window to get it to her.
In classically grotesque “True Detective” fashion, the two cases are connected by the severed tongue, which was an aspect of the earlier murder that was kept from the public. So when Danvers starts laying out photos from the research facility on the floor, the old file gets cracked open, too, and sized up like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that were in the wrong box. She finds a possible thread in a patch that was torn from a parka, but that’s enough to pique her attention and settle Navarro’s concerns about how much Danvers cared about the investigation that derailed her career. Their frosty partnership is already starting to thaw.
The same cannot be said of the frozen bodies found jutting out of the ice in the episode’s final moments. How they got there and the manner in which they were found are among the many loose threads left dangling for Reddit subthread conspiracists to tie together. The supernatural aura of the season so far may well be explicable, tied to the fears and anxieties of a community that spends the winter padding around in the dark. But López isn’t in any hurry to dispel the illusion, not when she can leave us jumping at shadows.
Flat Circles
The wildlife doesn’t seem to have it any better in Ennis, judging by the herd of howling elk that rumble off a cliff or the one-eyed polar bear that parks itself in front of Navarro on the street.
The Billie Eilish song in the opening credits, “Bury a Friend,” written from the perspective of a monster under her bed, has a line in the chorus that doubles as the title of her debut album, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” Seems like a sound thesis for the season.
“WE ARE ALL DEAD” on the whiteboard seems notable. Include that in your case notes.
An underdressed young man named Travis showing Rose (Fiona Shaw) the bodies in the ice also seems significant, in that Travis is dead.
John Hawkes is a character actor ringer for any TV show or movie, and it’s exciting to see him cast here against type as a flawed, lonely, seemingly dull-witted cop with a mail-order fiancée en route from Vladivostok.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
