It’s all over now.
True Detective: Night Country has come to a end after a season that brought audiences together and completely drew an invisible but powerful line between those who opposed the conclusion of the season and those who took Issa López’s approach as valuable and almost essential to the show’s survival. It was pretty apparent that, for the show’s return, the showrunner could not tell the same story all over. So what did she do? She took a detour that drove audiences somewhere familiar: a character-driven study that features interesting characters, a compelling storyline, and the twists and turns that all crime shows should function with.
However, the reception of True Detective: Night Country has been curious. The recent season of the show created by Nic Pizzolatto has been extremely divisive among fans of what’s already a franchise and newcomers who had to jump on a moving wagon that, even though it had been dormant for years, was clearly alive and running.
True Detective
- Release Date
- January 12, 2014
- Cast
- Mahershala Ali , Stephen Dorff , Carmen Ejogo , Scoot McNairy , Jodie Foster , Kali Reis , Matthew McConaughey , Woody Harrelson , Alexandra Daddario , John Hawkes , Colin Farrell , Vince Vaughn
- Seasons
- 4
For the new iteration of the show, many things have changed. First of all, Pizzolatto was taken out of the picture and now serves only as an executive producer, without the creative input he was sure to contribute from season one. López is now the showrunner, writer, and director of the show, and True Detective: Night Country feels like her creation. From introducing a duo of female law enforcement officers to a few plot devices that feel alien to the show’s concept but seem to have worked, nonetheless. Such a change was risky, but it paid off.
But again, in the last few days, we’ve seen a resurgence of a trend that doesn’t exactly fit into a welcoming attitude by fans and other figures in the industry. The first episode of Night Country promised something different, and in the end it was. But after the ending, there was a weird outcry heard throughout the dark hallways of social media and its residents. The season finale of True Detective: Night Country was very divisive, and while some reasons appear to be obvious, there’s much more to this strange and shifting reception to the conclusion of the show. Let’s go back to Ennis and check out why.
The following article contains major spoilers for True Detective: Night Country
Solving Not One, but Two Crimes
True Detective: Night Country, also known as season four of True Detective, works on a whole different level from past seasons. The writers are different, the setting is different, the characters are completely new, and from the very first episode, it felt innovative in terms of genre rules. At the center of the story, police Chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster in a superb performance) is trying to solve the disappearance of eight scientists from a research station located in Ennis, Alaska, on the first day of its long streak of darkness. There aren’t many clues, but there’s one reminiscent of a crime in the past. Alaskan Native trooper Evangeline Navarro believes the severed tongue belongs to Annie Kowtok, a Native woman who was brutally murdered and whose case was never solved.
Sure, the scientists show up, but in a structure known in current pop culture as a “corpsicle.” We will spare you the details in case you haven’t caught up with Night Country, but it’s at this exact moment that the show takes up on its horror element and builds something from that. The main plot is about this case, but López’s script never lets go of the other case and frames the season’s drama under the conception that both of them have to be linked.
In the end, they are. And even if some questions are logically answered, the script tends to fall short on this connection. Sure, as viewers, we are supposed to accept what we’re being told, but Night Country feels more oriented towards the satisfaction of its fandom than its logic. It’s a great miniseries, but only if you can extricate it from its necessity to comply with some connection. There were two crimes, but think for one minute if their respective solvings were as important as their connection with each other and other elements of the show’s concept. The curious thing about this is that if the show had focused on a single crime, perhaps the outcome would have been the same. It’s a lesson whose notes will hopefully be addressed in the near future.
Trying to Link the Plot with Season One of True Detective
The biggest problem with Night Country, and the reason why it’s been so divisive, is that it desperately attempts to fulfill a connection with season one. The weird thing about this narrative move is that maybe it wasn’t necessary to do so given how successful True Detective‘s return was:
- It sits at 92% on Rotten Tomatoes in the Tomatometer (critics) and 58% in the audience score.
- 8,9/10 at IMDb.
- 81 on Metacritic.
Season four was actually the most-viewed season of True Detective so far. We’re talking more than 12 million viewers per episode, and 3.2 million catching up on the season finale. When compared to season one, the numbers are pretty similar, but what’s important about this is that Night Country is a fourth iteration of a concept that had lost all credibility because of its last seasons. They each have their own following, and they’re valuable in some aspects, but the numbers and ratings speak for themselves. Season four was a major comeback that not many believed in.
So, if Night Country is its own thing, why does it try so hard at being a sibling to season one of True Detective? It doesn’t exactly need to, and though it’s exciting that they happen in the same universe, the references felt invasive and somewhat dissonant to the plot. We would have thought a completely different creative input was going to represent a whole shift in the themes explored in the show, but showrunner Issa López decided to add them anyway. The connections include: Rust’s father, Travis, shows up in Night Country;the spiral symbol is a major plot device; and yes, the line “time is a flat circle” also makes an appearance. Did they add something valuable to the plot?
Apparently, it wasn’t something that was planned from the get-go, but Nic Pizzolatto seems to be furious about the show’s result. First, he completely denied having something to do with Night Country and made some snarky comments about the new direction. And then, in the last few days, he tried to fight fire with fire, making more comments about the season finale. This only caused more division among fans and newbies to the True Detective universe.
The polarizing reception by viewers was almost predictable at some point because the new season introduces necessary changes to its structure of characters and its narrative. But what happens outside Ennis shouldn’t be a reason for downgrading a solid show. The connections? We could have done without them, and the result would have been the same. This only proves how good True Detective: Night Country is when it’s not compared to other seasons of the series.
The Supernatural Aspect Also Divided Audiences
In Night Country, there are countless winks to a supernatural theme that would never have made a presence in the show. At first, it was crucial to the show’s mood. It isn’t necessary to describe how essential that “corpsicle” was in order to highlight the fact that it became an exercise in horror at some point. The ghosts, the hallucinations, and the horrendous form of death made the show’s supernatural aspect a huge shift from what we had seen before.
However, did it add any spice to the ending? The show’s as sober as it can be when it decides to give closure, answer questions, and confirm that, in fact, there was nothing supernatural taking place in Ennis. The show’s meticulous and fancy exploration of its themes of time and memory is greatly reflected by the characters of Navarro and Danvers, and they don’t require any dressing to make them more poignant or relevant. In fact, it’s exactly what made season one so explosive at first. The fine line between realism and fantasy was never crossed and was always visible. In Night Country, it feels like cheating sometimes, and in other cases, it feels like an excuse to solve minor plot holes that aren’t really necessary to dig into.
Audiences weren’t exactly enamored with this big shift in the finale, when Danvers and Navarro are forced to solve the mystery. But López at least does a great job at making sure the important questions are answered. Note that they don’t have to be satisfactory. They just have to be there for you to digest.
Did True Detective: Night Country’s Finale Answer All the Questions?
The important answer here is if it actually had to. One of the show’s most important features is how it decides to solve its characters’ storylines without providing detail into the crimes beyond their “easy” solution. The scientists killed Annie, and the cleaning ladies designed a perfect vendetta to kill the scientist. Danvers listens and declares. Navarro vanishes, and that’s about it. What more did viewers need to satisfy their craving for a more logical ending? Perhaps there was never anything to be done in this regard, and True Detective: Night Country is supposed to be divisive in the new era.
It’s all over now. Or so we thought. True Detective has been renewed for a fifth season to premiere on Max sometime in the future. It’s still too early to tell more, but all we know is that the celebratory cheer was heard first by López, who confirmed her involvement by using social media to praise HBO for renewing the series one more time. All we can say is that if it’s as good as Night Country, then chances are the streak of a misunderstood show is now over. So is Pizzolatto’s injection of his creative vision into a show that belongs to him no more. His attitude toward trying to “hurt” the show is beyond bizarre, but perhaps there are minor facts we will simply never hear more about. In any case, it’s unheard of, and a conflict of this nature just puts him in a tough spot.
In the meantime, what’s important is that, even though the reception is divisive, the score of Night Country is promising, and it sheds light on HBO’s deal with Issa López. There are lessons to be learned, and hopefully, the players on the bench with negative remarks will just enjoy the earnings. If the upcoming season, to be released in 2025, is any half as good as Night Country and manages to be its own thing, fans will surely enjoy it. López just has to make sure to stay in an environment full of dread and terror, as that’s what keeps people coming back.
True Detective: Night Country and all the other seasons of the show are available to stream on Max.
Here’s a video about some duos that could work in a future season of True Detective:
