"True Detective" Season Four Premiere: Darker, Colder and Cooler
True Detective: Night Country feels like one long dream.
The first opening scene in True Detective in five years tells us, very quickly, that there’s a new sheriff in town.
We’re in a barren, icy expanse on the edge of a cliff, and a Native hunter is crouching behind the snow, stalking a herd of caribou. Before he can take his shot, one caribou — then, suddenly, all of them — detects something awful. They’re sniffin’ the air like crazy, darting around, shifting on their little hooves and otherwise behaving like a bunch of teens playing beer pong in Kyle’s garage … who just heard Kyle’s mom pull into the driveway. The man leans back, abandoning his hunt, because this is a man who can recognize deer in the throes of a crisis. Then, the sun sets over the horizon, drenching the cliffside in black. Right on cue, the entire herd promptly charges off the edge of the cliff.
It’s a disturbing, striking and supernatural sequence, and a fitting start to the premiere of True Detective: Night Country — the first entry in the True Detective canon in five years. The first season of True Detective premiered in 2014; it’s regarded as one of the best seasons of television and remains HBO’s highest-rated freshman show since Six Feet Under. (It also showed us that women can be anything — dead, naked, dead and naked … the possibilities are endless.)
Then, in what’s becoming Shakespearen in this cursed streaming era, HBO asked Pizzolatto to crank out a second season ASAP, and he did, and it was completely convoluted and collapsed under its own weight. This was a criminal offense, because that season included Rachel McAdams playing a woman who keeps a punching bag in the middle of her apartment, and you shouldn’t waste opportunities like that. Season 3 was solid, but nothing’s come close to capturing the magic of that first season.
Issa López makes it clear that she’s uninterested in attempting that in season 4. Instead, she’s remaking something in her own taste. The series’ original creator, Nic Pizzolatto, isn’t closely involved in Night Country and there isn’t a whiff of the swampy gothic noir that defined Pizzolatto’s series. López’s True Detective is set in Ennis, Alaska, a fictional mining town above the Arctic Circle that experiences weeks of total darkness in the deepest part of winter. That setting just naturally informs so much of the show’s tone — things feel brooding and otherworldly, like the tiny town is perpetually on the verge of being swallowed whole by the dark. Even the opening credits feel like a stark departure from Pizzolatto’s True Detective. Not a single naked lady or brooding male hero is found; instead, we’ve got Billie Eilish’s “bury a friend.” I’m going to repeat that incredibly clever one-liner from the top: there’s a new sheriff in town.
López is a deeply accomplished Mexican filmmaker; right now, she’s working on projects with Guillermo del Toro, Noah Hawley and Jason Blum. Much of her work weaves magical fantasy into gritty, modern realism; in Night Country, there’s a similar blending of the mystical with Alaska’s brutal, unforgiving terrain. A dead man appears, barefoot, as an apparition on a frozen lake; a one-eyed polar bear walks into the middle of the road and stares down a state trooper with menacing intent. During one scene that feels pulled straight from a horror movie, a man fails to see some crouching, nonhuman figure scuttling behind him in a bleak, fluorescent hallway.
True Detective is at its best when it leans into its strangeness — I mean, the first season was an exploration of pessimist philosophies dressed up as a detective show. The show’s always been interested in the psychic forces that infect a place and its people, and López knows that’s a key part of its magic. In Night Country, the unending darkness removes any sense of routine or consistency. You can’t tell if somebody’s drinking a beer at 5 o’clock or at eight in the morning. López makes zero effort to calibrate us to any sense of day or time. It all just runs together: an endless night, or one long dream.
The premiere’s caribou sequence takes place on the last sunset of the year. After that scene, we jump ahead three days, and land in the Tsalal Arctic Research Station. Half a dozen scientists live there while researching the origins of life preserved in the ancient ice. It’s a cozy picture of domesticity — one scientist works on a dry erase board, another jogs on a treadmill; two more bicker over whose turn it is to finish up the laundry. But things get decidedly less cozy when a researcher has some sort of standing seizure in the kitchen, becomes perfectly still, turns around and declares, horrified, “She’s awake.”
The next time we’re at Tsalal, it’s with our swaggering police chief Liz Danvers (Jodi Foster! Jodie Foster swaggering!). Two other cops are there; Hank Priors, Danvers’ second-in-command, and Pete Priors, a junior officer and also Hank’s son. (This is the show’s way of saying, “This town is even smaller than you thought.”) Neither Hank nor Danvers attempt to hide their casual contempt for one another; Danvers takes jabs at Natasha, Hank’s mail-order fiancée from Vladivostok (“who’s coming for Christmas,” he says defiantly). Pete clearly respects Danvers more than he respects his father.
Needless to say, the vibes at Tsalal are, uh, loaded. The researchers haven’t been seen in days; a man delivering food to the station found it empty. He also found a human tongue in the kitchen! Danvers quickly discerns that this is a Native woman’s tongue, because she recognizes the specific kind of scarring that comes with years of licking thread to fix fishing nets.
When Danvers heads back to the station, we meet Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), a state trooper who, we can immediately tell, is a good and conscientious cop (too bad those don’t exist in the real world!!). Navarro thinks the tongue could be connected to the unsolved murder of an Indigenous woman; her killers cut out her tongue. That happened six years ago, so while it’s unlikely this tongue was in that mouth, a possible connection seems obvious … right? But Danvers isn’t entertaining this theory, and she makes a racist joke about Navarro’s “spirit animal” leading her astray. It’s clear Navarro isn’t going anywhere, though — the murder haunts her; also, no music festivals in Ennis that weekend.
The premiere ends with the aforementioned apparition of a dead man, whose name happens to be Travis, wordlessly guiding a woman to the center of a frozen lake. And, viola, there it is: a grotesque frozen statue of the missing researchers, all of them wearing expressions of primal terror.
Night Country feels much more like a procedural than True Detective ever did; at times, I found myself missing Rust Cohle’s (Matthew McConaughey) lyrical soliloquies on the pointlessness of life. Some of the dialogue feels stiff and cliched, or at the very least tropey (Danvers: “What are they looking for, digging that ice up?” Officer: “I think the origin of life?” Danvers: *wry chuckle* “That thing?”). But, honestly? That’s the only difference that feels like a net loss. If True Detective felt hazy and humid, Night Country is cold and sleek. It’s less about its lead detectives as it is interested in a whole tapestry of characters, and the worlds those characters inhabit, too. The relationships feel richer and more uniquely complicated; that Night Country takes place in a town too small for anonymity imbues most characters’ relationships with a sense that they know each other really, really well.
López also seems deeply interested in telling a story centered on Native and indigenous experiences. Native people aren’t just in the show — they’re central to the show, and I’d bet they’ll inform many of the deeper themes explored through the season. Navarro is Native, and she tells Danvers that the cold case wouldn’t be cold if the victim had been white (naturally, Danvers disagrees). Before she was murdered, the indigenous woman was an activist, protesting the mine that keeps Ennis on the map. Pete’s wife is Native; she playfully tells him she “can’t believe she fell for a white boy,” which feels lighthearted and also a little true, maybe, given the politics between the town’s Native and white populations. And Danvers’ adopted daughter is indigenous, though “daughter” may be a strong word — Danvers took the girl in, but we aren’t sure why yet.
In the finale of True Detective’s first season, Cohle has an epiphany, finally seeing a glimpse of hope in the bleakness of existence. “Once there was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning,” Cohle says, looking at a starry night sky. Is Night Country even in the same world as True Detective, though? Because as far as we can see, there isn’t a star in the sky in Night Country, and little evidence the light’s winning.