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True Detective
Part 1
Season 4
Episode 1
Editor’s Rating
Photo: HBO
Welcome back to the eerie world of True Detective. It may look a lot like the old True Detective — dour cops in a forbidding backwater solve a mystifying, multifaceted crime — but the shop’s under new management. Nic Pizzolatto is no longer running the show that was so successful in its first season that the finale broke the internet. The next couple of seasons proved less popular, with critics and audiences, and the series took a long hiatus. Five years later, it’s now back — rebooted? — with Issa López as writer, director, and showrunner.
True Detective: Night Country is set in the fictional town of Ennis, Alaska — a mining outpost so close to kissing the North Pole that one December night, the sun sets for the last time, leading into weeks of endless night. In a noteworthy departure from past installments, López has put two tough-as-nails lady cops in charge of keeping the peace: Jodie Foster is ornery police chief Liz Danvers, and boxer Kali Reis plays Liz’s colleague/adversary, Evangeline Navarro, a state trooper haunted by the unsolved murder of a local Iñupiaq woman. Whereas Pizzolatto’s entries were sinister and humid, Night Country is icy, dark, and playful. Even the chosen theme song — the delicate, violent murmurs of Billie Eilish’s “Bury a Friend” — announces the series’ revamped tone.
Now, the first thing that Night Country would like you to understand about Alaska, which it takes pains to explain over the course of its opening minutes, is that it’s a very cold, wild, and inhospitable place. It is also, because of the age of the ice, a scientific treasure trove for people researching the origins of life on earth. That’s what they’re supposedly doing at Tsalal Station, a clandestine research lab where a staff of eight men suddenly goes missing. The one early clue we’re offered as to how and why is that a researcher whispers — prophetically, hauntingly — “She’s awake.” The next time we see Tsalal, the men have vanished and the only evidence of wrongdoing is a severed human tongue on the floor under the kitchen island.
The baffling case belongs to Liz and her bitter second-in-command, Hank Prior (John Hawkes, an actor I have never once seen miscast). Beating them to the scene is junior officer Pete Prior, Hank’s son, who has more respect for the chief than he does for his pop. It’s the third day of perpetual darkness in Ennis and the seventh since anyone has heard from Tsalal’s international crew. Their TV is still blaring, the men’s cell phones are scattered. If someone hadn’t scrawled “WE ARE ALL DEAD” on a whiteboard, you’d think they were about to walk back in at any moment, demanding to know why the cops are here without a warrant.
Hank — a lazy thinker who is also a misogynist — believes this is what’s likely to happen. Liz calls in search-and-rescue choppers. Besides the HUMAN TONGUE LAYING ON THE FLOOR, she deduces that the men have already been missing for days because the mayo on an abandoned sandwich has gone runny. And because she’s a mom who has cleared old sandwiches from the back of her truck, she knows the process of mayo turning runny is a quick one. Hank doesn’t know this because he’s a negligent dad who puts Pete down in front of their boss. The politics here isn’t subtle: Liz doesn’t happen to be a woman in a position of authority. It’s her experiences as a woman that qualify her above Hank. Hank, meanwhile, really believes he’s going to marry some woman from Vladivostok that he’s never met but promises to visit real soon, for Christmas.
If it feels familiar to see Jodie Foster investigating crime, Night Country also wants you to understand she’s no bumbling Clarice. She has the depth of knowledge and methodical curiosity of Hannibal Lector; she knows immediately that it’s a Native woman’s tongue, scarred from licking thread to mend the fishing nets, on the ground.
And Hank is not her real partner on the case, thank God. Neither is Prior Jr, though he’s a good egg and a fast student. By the time she gets back to HQ, Navarro is waiting for Liz in her office because it doesn’t take long for rumors of a severed human tongue to travel. The cold case that torments Evangeline is the murder of Annie K, a local activist whose dead body was found without its tongue a few years ago. Liz insists it’s a coincidence, but there’s no way of knowing that; she just wants Evangeline out of her office. The truth of their shared history comes in fits and starts across the first episode: They used to work together on the force until Navarro was forced into the trooper’s office. Liz spouts some racist shit about Navarro’s “spirit animal,” but you can tell she’s not really putting her back into it. Whatever she has against Evangeline is more personal than that.
Once Evangeline leaves, though, Liz asks Hank for Annie’s case file because, of course, it’s her tongue. How many tongues go missing in your average small town? Hank has been keeping some records at home, though, and he drags his feet about finding it. It’s unclear whether he has some reason for wanting Annie K’s case to stay unsolved or if he’s just relishing the opportunity to stick it to his boss. Liz enlists Pete to jack the files from his dad’s bachelor pad after working hours, which causes him some strife with his wife, a Iñupiaq nursing student named Kayla. Pete and Kayla share a son, Darwin, and it’s clear that Pete is trying desperately to flip the family script on fatherly involvement. In the end, though, he risks his wife and son’s disappointment to follow orders.
Parenthood is a recurring theme across the episode. Liz is called away from work by an Ennis mom angry that Liz’s stepdaughter, Leah, was making a sex tape with her 16-year-old daughter (Leah’s age is unclear). Liz’s parenting style is tough love with a side of disinterest. She’s screaming at Leah in the cab of her truck when they hit an ice slick — a moment that reveals mother and daughter both have some baggage when it comes to auto collisions. Leah worries they’ve hit something when they clearly haven’t; as Liz approaches a vehicle that has crashed, the approach triggers a half-memory, perhaps of the last time her feet crushed the ice on the way to a similar scene.
Everyone’s history with each other is long in Ennis. That’s what makes the men missing from Tsalal such outliers. The driver of the crashed car is the town drunk who sometimes sleeps with Hank. Hank’s son used to babysit Leah, and now he’s her mom’s colleague. But that doesn’t mean the town doesn’t keep secrets too. Pete exchanges the files he grabbed from his father’s house for the first full account we get of the gruesome death of Annie K.
Annie was a young midwife and activist whose body was found “at the edge of the villages,” which is to say, abandoned in an ice-cold shipping container. Evangeline was first on the scene, where she found a woman who’d been kicked and stabbed over 30 times. Her tongue was removed, a horror that takes on metaphorical significance when you learn Annie was despised in some parts of Ennis for protesting the mining companies. The mines are the lifeblood of Ennis; without them, there are no jobs, no roads, no business. No town, really. According to Liz, Evangeline grew obsessed with the case until Hank, in charge of the squad before Liz’s arrival, benched her for pestering some of the mining execs. When Evangeline asked Liz to take the case up in her stead, Liz balked. “Ennis killed Annie,” Liz tells Pete, who seems to understand this cryptic idea as self-evident. That’s the kind of town that raised him, where he’s raising his own kid.
It’s hard at the start of a crime series to tell what’s going to be important later, even more so with True Detective, which doesn’t just focus on solving a crime but unlocking the psyches of the people solving it and the character of the place where a thing this awful could happen. How did Liz become the hard woman we meet in episode one? Leah offers up a clue, obliquely suggesting that her father was killed in a drunk-driving incident like the one they witnessed earlier that day. But something has undeniably been shaken open in Liz. She refuses to engage with Leah on the subject, but asleep at night, she loses her grip. She dreams about a small boy whispering, “Mommy,” his hand on her shoulder. She hears that same menacing incantation from Tsalal: “She’s awake.”
Evangeline shares Liz’s hardness, though its origins are less mysterious. She’s a military vet whose tours in the Middle East have convinced her that each of us, even God, is alone in the world. She’s responsible for her sister, Julia, who lives in town and suffers from delusions and other mental-health issues that Evangeline has seen before in their mother. For company, she has Qavvik, the local barkeep and Julia’s laid-back boss, but she treats him more like a distraction than a companion. She’s a commandeering and efficient lover, which Qavvik doesn’t seem to mind; he complains more about her stealing his SpongeBob toothbrush than her rushing him to orgasm.
In some ways, it seems like Annie’s case is what keeps Evangeline going. She goes to Annie’s brother, a miner, to ask if it’s possible his sister had any connection to Tsalal, but even Ryan has bereavement fatigue at this point. He’s been through all of this before. The water in his taps runs brown from the mining runoff, the same mines his sister fought to close. He doesn’t need more painful reminders of her.
Yes, everyone is alone in Ennis, “the end of the world.” But the world seems to circle back on itself here with spectral connections. Maybe it’s where the world frays into nothing but black and ice that everything else is more deeply woven together. Just as Liz wakes from her bad dream, Evangeline hears the same ominous whisper: “She’s awake.” Liz finds a child’s old and dirty stuffed polar bear at her feet just as Evangeline stops her car short of hitting a polar bear that’s wandered into town. Unable to sleep, Liz arranges the photos from Annie’s case alongside the photos of Tsalal into a Homeland-style collage. There it is, alongside the whispers, tongues, and bears: Annie’s pink parka being worn by a scientist called Raymond Clark.
Liz sets out into the darkness to investigate the lead only to find Evangeline is already at the crime scene. For all their animosity, it’s the ways in which these women are alike that already feel most prescient. Evangeline, who has been absorbed in Annie’s case for years, has never heard Clark’s name; now, she’s standing in his room, sure that this coat is the answer. Liz made it seem that Evangeline’s transfer to the state trooper’s office was a punishment; now, we learn Liz asked her to step aside. There’s more to Annie’s case lurking at Tsalal and there’s more to the story between these women than Annie’s unsolved case.
Because if Ennis killed Annie, then Annie’s murder is Ennis’s story too. The Iñupiaq who have always been here and the white people who moved here. The land and the mines. The mines and the town. The town and the police. Science and God.
Over the course of several short scenes dotted throughout the episode, a woman called Rose (Fiona Shaw) is seen gutting a wolf, as you do, when a man with no shoes leads her onto the ice and guides her to the naked bodies of the Tsalal researchers, buried in the ice that was the object of their discovery, mouths frozen open in horror, tongues still attached.
In the episode’s final moments, we learn that the barefoot man’s name is Travis, and that Travis is dead, but really we didn’t need to be told this last part. There’s no sense of dark magic afoot in Ennis, not really. No occult, or at least not yet. Just the shared understanding of the people who live there that it’s not like other places. That inexplicable things are possible where the world hits its natural limit, where a straight path north turns south, where day doesn’t dependably follow night. Where everyone is alone together.
“For we do not know what beasts the night dreams when its hours grow too long for even God to be awake.” That’s the epigraph at the beginning of the episode, basically the same question posed by Billie Eilish: “When we all fall asleep, where do we go?” It’s attributed to Hildred Castaigne, a name that meant nothing to me until I Googled it. It turns out to belong to the narrator of the same horror story some fans believe is a cipher for True Detective’s first season. It’s a fitting introduction, though I think I’d argue that the paradox López has swiftly established in Ennis is even more disturbing: God may be asleep, but what happens when night lasts so long man has no choice but to walk alongside the beasts.
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