‘True Detective’ Season 4, Episode 4 Recap: The Monster Under the Bed

Season 4, Episode 4: ‘Part 4’

There’s a classic bit on “The Simpsons” where a panel of children are seated as a focus group for “The Itchy & Scratchy Show” and asked what they want to see from the long-running cartoon, which has started to flag in the ratings. After an exasperating series of responses, the moderator sums up his findings: “So you want a realistic, down-to-earth show that’s completely off the wall and swarming with magic robots?”

That’s what “Night Country” is starting to feel like as it heads down the backstretch. It is a realistic, down-to-earth police procedural that’s swarming with supernatural beings and lots of storytelling bric-a-brac. To an extent, that’s part of the “True Detective” brand, to flood the zone with enough symbols, Easter eggs and plot tributaries to keep the Subreddits humming all season with theories about which ones will pay off and which ones will wriggle off with the other red herrings. As the season’s showrunner, Issa López, and her writers start to bring the season to a close, there’s already some evidence that the show has spread itself too thin, despite an abundance of laudable elements.

Take the fate of Navarro’s sister, Julia (Aka Niviana). The image of this lonely, troubled young woman spending her last moments among the icebound wreckage before walking naked into the dark is a haunting one. One of the great strengths of “Night Country” — and the three Nic Pizzolatto seasons of “True Detective” before it — is how beautifully it can conjure these modern noir images from distinct locales.

And yet, so little narrative real estate was given over to Julia until this final episode that her death feels more like a device than an emotional payoff. In a pre-credits scene, we witness Danvers’s compassion in scooping her off the streets and bringing into the station, which brings her closer to Navarro. As for Navarro herself, the heaviness of this loss is a family curse that now threatens to swallow her, too.

The most touching moment in the episode is a much smaller one. When Navarro gets the call from the Coast Guard about Julia, she and Peter have just finished a harrowing mission back to the nomad encampment on Christmas Eve. She suppresses her devastation when Peter asks if everything’s OK and sends him off to be with a family that is still intact. Her emotional generosity is a subtle payoff to a relationship that has been building around these two interconnected cases; the further “Night Country” strays from the grit-and-grind of police work, the less resonant it becomes. The mysteries around Annie’s murder and the frozen scientists link up so beautifully to the tensions within Ennis that the continued sprinkling of specters, flashbacks and various uncanny events has gotten distracting. There are many questions still to answer and only two episodes left.

To that end, this week’s episode does address some of the business at hand. The “Blair Witch”-style video on Annie’s phone, presumably documenting the last moments of her life, includes whale bones frozen in the ice behind her, indicating an ice cave system the detectives are keen to locate. A team from Anchorage finally arrives to take the bodies away, despite Danvers’s desire to poke around them a little more for clues. (In sharing the news that the men were dead before they froze to Captain Ted, Danvers admits to doing “an independent pre-forensic evaluation,” which sounds better than saying that Peter’s veterinarian cousin looked at them.)