‘True Detective’ Season 4, Episode 5 Recap: Dots Finally Connect

This week’s recap is posting earlier than usual because the episode premiered Friday on Max.

Season 4, Episode 5: Part 5

She’s awake. The show, that is.

After last week’s episode spend too much time fussing over underdeveloped subplots and supernatural occurrences, this week’s hour snaps to attention like a procrastinating student who had been putting off a term paper. There have been stretches where “Night Country” has left the case untended, letting it thaw away in the background like the corpsicle at center ice. Too often, the show’s rich ambience has slipped into abstraction, leaving the detectives to wrestle with ghosts and lingering personal traumas while the more compelling tensions within Ennis are addressed in fits and starts. The forensics report on the scientists’ bodies only just came back this week!

There are few ruminative moments in this penultimate episode and the excitement of the premiere comes rushing back, because there are finally some answers to the questions that have been teased out for so long. Danvers and Navarro are getting closer to the truth of what happened to the scientists and Annie K., which triggers the conspiratorial forces within the town and presents them with a race-against-the-clock scenario that not only reignites the show, but deepens its themes. In the classic noir tradition, the procedural elements are telling a larger story about the powers-that-be, like Jack Nicholson following a routine infidelity case into a web of municipal corruption in “Chinatown.”

The mine has been the black heart of “Night Country,” pumping poison through the city’s water taps and government institutions. It remains to be seen what kind of threat Annie K. might have represented for the business, but Danvers and Navarro are more convinced than ever that the network of ice caves outside town hold the answer. Getting access to the caves, however, is no small matter. Their only feasible guide is Otis, a cagey German heroin addict with scorched eyeballs who once mapped the caves. They manage to get to base of the cave, but it is on mine company property and the entrance has been blown to pieces. Should they find another way in, they have to worry about the glass-like instability of the ice, to say nothing of Raymond Clark and other potential dangers.

Meanwhile, Danvers’s young protégé, Peter, has something else to show for all the hard work that has finally gotten him kicked out of his house. After delivering information on Otis last week, Peter offers another file definitively connecting the mine to the Tsalal Research Station, which had been receiving funding in exchange for dubiously rosy pollution data. When Danvers gets called to a meeting at the mine offices with its owner, Kate McKittrick (Dervia Kirwan), and Ted, Danvers’s overseer and third-rate occasional sex partner, she assumes it is going to be a dressing-down about a protest that had turned violent, even though policing the scene was not her responsibility. She tucks the file away like a gun in an ankle holster.

Danvers was right to expect an ambush. First, Kate presents surveillance footage of Danvers and Navarro scoping out the mine entrance and pumps her for information on why they were there. Then she cheerily offers the good news that the forensics team in Anchorage determined that the scientists had died en masse because of a freak weather event that kicked up when they were perhaps catching the last sunset before the long night. Danvers knows enough about the case by now to roll her eyes at this explanation, and she confronts Kate with the incriminating file, but Kate and Ted have another card to play. Ted knows the Wheeler case wasn’t a murder-suicide and suggests that Danvers and Navarro would be wise to stop snooping.