True Detective (TV Program)

This week’s episode finally answers some questions that have been teased out for a long time.This week’s recap is posting earlier than usual because the episode premiered Friday on Max.Season 4, Episode 5: Part 5She’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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Danvers wrestles with her demons. Navarro does, too, but hers appear to be of a different sort.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.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Danvers and Navarro both must face some cold realities about who and what they represent in a community being poisoned by its biggest employer.Season 4, Episode 3: ‘Part 3’By Scott TobiasIn the first two episodes of “Night Country,” we knew Annie Kowtok as a dead person, a young Inupiaq activist who was stabbed 32 times and whose memory haunts the living every bit as much as the hallucinations that seem to slip in their minds during permanent darkness do.And so it’s especially powerful to meet Annie when she is associated with life, thanks to a stealthily placed flashback in the cold open in which she is helping an expectant mother through a water birth. Navarro has turned up to arrest her in connection with trespassing and destruction of private property at the mine, but the officer is literally disarmed by the scene she witnesses and is enlisted to help with: Annie is defiant about bringing an Inupiaq baby, the next generation, into the world.In perhaps the season’s strongest hour to date, the episode moves the procedural elements forward as expected, but the one common thread is the tug Annie and the town’s Indigenous population has on the consciences of our two lead characters. It starts with that flashback, in which Navarro has been put in the awkward spot of enforcing the law on the mine’s behalf, only to be put in a situation where she is disrupting an Inupiaq birth. For as much tension as we’ve witnessed in Danvers’s relationship with Ennis’s Native population, the show reminds us that Navarro, too, has complicated feelings about her place in the community. An Inupiaq herself, she has been hiding away from her own identity. Her sister has the kakiniit tattoo on her chin. Navarro, conspicuously, does not.To be a police officer in Ennis is often to represent the interests of the town’s biggest employer. Navarro and Danvers are not in the business of administering environmental justice or blowing the whistle on polluted groundwater. If there is tension around the mine, they’re the ones squelching protests or arresting activists like Annie for breaking the law. That, inevitably, puts them on one side of a stark racial line.The discomfort for Navarro is more acute, given her roots, but there is a lot of evidence in this episode that Danvers has been fighting her own conscience — and is perhaps starting to lose the battle. She rages at Leah to wipe the temporary tattoo marks off her face, perhaps as a protective instinct, but they’re on Annie’s face, too, and the weight of it seems to stir her sympathies.Meanwhile, the law is being administered much less delicately. It is a sharp narrative strategy to cut from the flashback with Navarro and Annie to a scene in which Hank is rounding up a civilian army to “search” for Raymond Clark, the missing scientist who had a secret affair with Annie. The term “search” is in scare quotes because Hank seems to have deliberately gathered a collection of armed-to-the-teeth yokels for a bounty hunt. He tells them that Clark is armed and dangerous and sends them on their way. When Navarro turns up to remind Hank that they want Clark alive, he replies, “Do we?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

This week’s installment offered a lot of strong procedural work, suggesting that the season’s central mystery isn’t purely supernatural but can be solved.Season 4, Episode 2: ‘Part 2’During last week’s episode, as Liz and her team were puzzling over the sudden disappearance of eight scientists at the Tsalal Research Station, Hank mused, “Just the third day of darkness and it’s already getting weird.” Based on some of the mysterious events we witnessed that episode, like the gyrating spirit that leads Rose to a grisly tableaux of frozen bodies, a word like “weird” seems woefully insufficient. One question we might have asked ourselves was whether “North Country” would become a genuine ghost story or a hybrid, blending the noir sleuthing of previous “True Detective” seasons with mere intimations of the supernatural.This second hour throws a little bit of ice-cold water on the weird stuff, at least insofar as it pertains to the deaths of these scientists and the unsolved murder of Annie, a young Inupiaq activist. That’s not to say that the uncanny won’t be an important part of the show, but it seems more folded into the ambience of this sunless locale than a literal explanation for the violence happening within it. When Navarro asks Rose about Travis, an ex-lover who turns up to her as a spirit, it is blithely accepted that such ghosts can appear in the darkness from time to time.“I think the world is getting old,” explains Rose, “and Ennis is where the fabric of all things is coming apart at the seams.” In other words, “North Country” seems to be a waxing philosophical in the “True Detective” tradition, but the end-of-the-earth environs inspire thoughts that are tied more to Indigenous myths and frostbit hallucinations.As for the case itself, there’s a lot of strong, meat-and-potatoes procedural work in this episode that suggests it can be solved. And in the process of solving it, we can learn more about Danvers and Navarro, who remain inextricably at odds but have similar appetites for pursuing justice under terrible circumstances and blowing off steam with lovers they keep at arm’s length. The show no longer seems in danger of drifting into the inexplicable.The episode begins with the folly of small-town cops working a big-time crime scene, which requires both the delicacy of an archaeological dig and the inelegant prying of a chain saw that can carve through ice. Frozen limbs can snap off like brittle twigs, and Danvers’s dimmer underlings, who have never imagined such a spectacle, have to be told not to snap selfies. (“This is a crime scene,” she tells them. “Why don’t you pretend like you know what you’re doing?”)If Danvers had any sense of self-preservation, she would punt the case to Anchorage, not only because it has a forensics team but also because she won’t have to endure the intense scrutiny of sorting through such a vexing mystery. But it’s an itch that she absolutely needs to scratch, just as Navarro cannot let go of her responsibility to Annie.Their first priority is sorting through the mass of naked flesh that gets dug up from the ice, which Danvers darkly refers to as a “corpsicle.” In order to preserve whatever physical evidence they can extract from the bodies, the corpsicle must first be thawed out over 48 hours at 38 degrees, which can be achieved by transporting it to center ice at the local recreational rink. As this Edvard Munch exhibit drips away under the hot lights, Danvers and her young protégé Peter start thinking about the questions they need to ask: Why are the victims naked? Why do they seem to have bitten their own hands? Why were some of their clothes found neatly folded by the scene? And what’s with the spiral symbol that keeps popping up?That last piece of the puzzle seems to be the most crucial because it ties the dead scientists to Annie’s murder. One of the scientists, Clark, had the spiral tattooed on his chest, and when Peter and Danvers trace Clark’s credit record back to a Fairbanks tattoo parlor in 2017, they discover that Annie’s tattoo was the model for Clark’s and that he had it inked a few days after her murder. The spiral was also found drawn on the forehead of another victim, Lund, who had a secret, intimate relationship with Annie. Lund had spent $10,000 on a trailer that served as their ostensible love nest, and when Navarro discovers it buried in the snow, the interior is full of strange etchings, photos and handcrafted objects.But even as all these puzzles within puzzles start to reveal themselves — to say nothing of the research station’s mission and its vaguely sinister corporate ties — the episode ends with a smack in the face. When the corpsicle thaws completely, one body is conspicuously absent: Clark’s.Given his connection to Annie and Lund, that makes him seem like the obvious suspect in both of these open cases — which, of course, makes him an obvious red herring, too. What’s clear now, after the dreamlike abstractions of the premiere, is that “North Country” has an investigative path forward. That may strip the show of mystique, but it’s worth the added suspense.Flat CirclesAlso waiting in the weeds is the one survivor from the corpsicle, whose jump-scare scream before the opening credits is the most disturbing moment in an episode with plenty of contenders.Strange happenings at an Arctic research station naturally call to mind John Carpenter’s classic 1982 horror film “The Thing,” as does the “extinct microorganism” that the scientists had been working hard to isolate. Perhaps similar forces have been roused in the ice.Remarkably diverse selection of music in this episode, from the Beach Boys’s “Little Saint Nick” as the corpses are carted through town to Navarro reminiscing over Spice Girls’s “Wannabe” to the incongruously cheerful funk of K.C. & the Sunshine Band’s “Get Down Tonight.”One reason Navarro didn’t get the information on Lund’s trailer until now is the tension between the miners and the people in the town, like Annie, who rallied against the pollution coming from the mine. That has nothing to do with extinct microorganisms. That’s a conflict that continues to rage within Ennis.Poor Hank. Not looking likely that texting pics and sending money to “Alina” will win him a bride.Danvers’s fury when her stepdaughter, Leah (Isabella Star LaBlanc), gets kakiniit marks on her chin, even with nonpermanent marker, underlines another important fault line in the show between Indigenous and white residents of Ennis. Leah is curious about exploring her identity, but Danvers’s insistence on shutting her down speaks to a key disconnect between her department and the community. (“Don’t give me that, Laundromat Grandma,” is a fine insult, however.) More

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 CirclesThe 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. More