Director breaks down ‘True Detective’ finale
Season conclusion leaves viewers with questions, answers
The darkness has lifted, “True Detective: Night Country” has come to an end, and some of us may never look at an orange in the same way again.
Written and directed by Issa López, the latest incarnation of the anthology mystery series relocated the action to the fictional town of Ennis, Alaska, and follows two women — Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster), the local police chief, and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), a state trooper, as they investigate the mysterious death of a group of scientists at an Arctic research station — all while trying to heal the wounds of their past.
Invoking familiar “True Detective” imagery (creepy swirls) while introducing all-new eerie iconography (one-eyed polar bears), “Night Country” put a welcome, feminist spin on the franchise after a fouryear hiatus.
Leading into the finale, many unanswered questions remained, starting with who — or what — was responsible for turning the Tsalal scientists into a corpsicle, who really killed Annie K., and how her tongue ended up at the research station six years after she died.
Over the course of the New Year’s Eve from hell, Danvers and Navarro make one bombshell discovery after another, learning that: 1. the scientists at Tsalal were pushing the mine to pump out more pollutants because it made it easier for them extract DNA from the ice; 2. Annie found out about it and destroyed their research; 3. the scientists killed her in a collective fit of rage; 4. members of the cleaning crew discovered
the ice cave, where they saw the evidence of Annie’s murder; 5. they returned to the research station, forced the scientists out onto the ice in the middle of a storm, made them strip and left them there in an act of revenge that proved fatal to them all; 6. except Raymond Clark, who hid in the abandoned ice cave for weeks until Danvers and Navarro found and interrogated him; 7. and he wound up becoming a corpsicle, too.
Phew. Got all that? The episode ends on a decidedly ambiguous note, however. An epilogue skips ahead four months to May. Navarro has seemingly vanished and Danvers faces questioning by investigators about the events of the previous December. She is evasive when asked about reported sightings of Navarro — whom we see walking onto the ice, alone, then standing on a porch next to Danvers in the parting shot of the season. Is it really her? Or just an apparition? It’s impossible to say. “This is Ennis,”
Danvers tells the investigators. “Nobody ever really leaves.”
This interview with López has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: It turns out the women of the cleaning crew were responsible for the deaths of the scientists at Tsalal — or at least they are the ones who drove the men out into the cold. Did you always know that would be the outcome?
A:
I knew from the very beginning. Being Mexican and having moved to Los Angeles some 10 years ago, it’s interesting to see how behind every scene there is someone you would never notice. I’m Mexican, and most people in California are Mexican or Latin American. They’re the person that washes the dishes, the person that cleans the office after you leave. They’re really invisible. However, they’re everywhere, they have access to everything, they know everything. Invisibility is a superpower. It can be terrible. And it can
be conducive to horrors like missing and murdered Indigenous women. But at the same time, it can be a superpower. Why not flip that coin and use it for power?
Q: The scientists turn out to be the bad guys in this story. They’re willing to kill Annie and pollute the town in the name of scientific progress. How did you decide to make them the villains?
A:
That’s a tough decision for me. I’m a massive believer in science. If there’s a religion for me, it’s science. The idea that ancient DNA can be used is not impossible, it’s not madness. But it would be very hard to extract. All of that is factual. The pursuit of knowledge or any greater good without a moral compass, I think, is the question of our age, as we look at what’s happening with AI and so many technologies that put the human race in a place that we never imagined. In the traditional Greek tragedy, the mistake of the hero is
always taking endeavors that go beyond the human. When you overstep human capacities, it ends in tragedy. So I just went with the Greeks on this one.
Q: I’m still trying to figure out how literally I should interpret the final shot, with Danvers and Navarro on the porch. Tell me about that.
A:
I think the entire series has two readings. One of them is that everything is connected to the supernatural. The other one is, there’s absolutely nothing supernatural happening. The dark brings its own madness and neurosis to some characters. The men walking onto the ice — you can go with they froze to death in a flash freeze and they had paradoxical undressing and delirium because of hypothermia. Or (you can believe) they walked onto the ice and faced the thing they woke up by being in the wrong place. It’s up to you to decide which one of those readings you are going to embrace.
Q: Clark says “time is a flat circle,” a callback to what is probably the best known line of dialogue from the original season. How’d you decide to bring that line in the episode? And did you have any anxiety about such a recognizable callback?
A:
Here’s the thing. I never set out (like) “Oh, let’s put everything we can that references Season 1.” I believe in the idea of letting the story speak to you. I decided that Alaska was a super interesting setting for this series. I rewatched Season 1 and I realized Rust Cohle’s father had lived and died in Alaska. It would be crazy to never mention it. It’s the same universe.
Q: The other unresolved mystery is the tongue. How does that fit in?
A:
Same story. If we’re going to go with the supernatural story, Hank is the one that dumps (Annie’s body) and cuts out the tongue. He leaves the tongue there, and the tongue disappears. No one ever finds it until six years later. In the moment that the scientists face their fate, the tongue reappears because it’s the time to tell the story that was silenced before. Was it Annie’s ghost?
If you’re going to go rational, Hank cuts the tongue and leaves it there. And then the body is found, not by Navarro — Navarro is the first cop at the scene — but by the community.
In my mind, the women find Annie and they cannot take her body, but they can keep her tongue in a gesture of kindness for their friend. Danvers says it has some unusual cellular damage, it could be from freezing. They keep the tongue, they freeze it and when they go into the research station (to attack the scientists), they leave it there. Full circle. Time to pay. You can decide which one you believe.