Time is a flat circle: All of Night Country's connections to True Detective season one

The first indication that this season would be closely related to the first comes right in the first few moments of season four. Before we even get to Ennis, a quote appears on a black screen: “…For we do not know what beasts the night dreams when its hours grow too long for even God to be awake.” That line, besides being thematically tied to the season, is attributed to “Hildred Castaigne,” a character in the short story “The Repairer Of Reputations,” from Robert Chambers’ 1895 collection The King In Yellow. Hildred goes insane after suffering a brain injury, compounded by reading the cursed play that gives the collection its title. The first season of True Detective famously has multiple mentions of “The Yellow King” and a mystical place called Carcosa. Those exact words haven’t been said in season four so far, but the use of this quote at the top of the premiere indicates that it was on López’s mind.

In the first season, we learn that Rust is originally from Alaska. When he goes off book in episode four to follow a lead to Reggie Ledoux, he takes a leave of absence from the force, claiming he has to return to Alaska because of his father’s leukemia. The detectives interviewing Marty find holes in Rust’s story, though. Their research did not turn up any hospital records for Travis Cohle. In fact, at that point, no one had seen him in 30 years. While Rust’s reason for leaving was made up, it turns out that it may have some basis in truth.At the end of the , a ghost named Travis leads Fiona Shaw’s character Rose to the horrific pile of frozen bodies now known as the “corpsicle.” In a scene with Evangeline Navarro () in , Rose provides the backstory that connects Travis directly to Rust’s father. “He knew he was dying and he didn’t want the leukemia to take him,” she tells Navarro. After spending one last night with Rose, Travis drowned himself in the ice. It was Navarro who found him. “One last gift from Travis Cohle,” Rose says. “I got to meet you.”

The crooked spiral symbol that made its debut on the back of murder victim Dora Lange in the first episode of the series became a recurring motif throughout season one, popping up in association with Carcosa, the Yellow King, and the cult responsible for a series of child murders across southern Louisiana. In season four, the symbol comes back as a motif, again and again. It can be seen on the forehead of one of the victims, and both Annie K. and Raymond Clark had it tattooed on their bodies. It’s also painted on the ceiling of the creepy trailer where Annie and Clark would meet up. What’s more, there’s a glimpse of something in that shape embedded in the ice in the video of Annie’s murder.López has talked about the spiral as a symbol of Carcosa. To her, it’s a symbol of the liminal space, where the boundary between this world and the spiritual world is at its thinnest. Could Carcosa and “the night country” simply be regional names for what amounts to the same thing? It certainly seems that way after the fourth episode, in which strung-out cartographer Otis Heiss utters the line, “We’re all in the night country now.”

In the first season, the powerful Tuttle family are part of the cult of the Yellow King. Their members include religious leaders and even the governor of Louisiana, and their rituals involved the sexual assault, torture, and sacrifice of dozens of children. Both the original suspect in the Dora Lange case, Reggie Ledoux, and the actual perpetrator revealed at the end of the first season, Errol Childress, were members of the cult. In season four, we get another mention of the Tuttle family: When Peter looks into the funding for the Tsalal station, he finds a series of shell companies that lead directly back to a company called Tuttle United. Seems like this family of pure evil has continued to prosper in the 10 years since we last saw them, eh? Could they have even deeper roots within the community of Ennis?

The first season of True Detective jumps around in time a lot, framed by interviews taking place in 2012 (present day, at the time) in which Rust and Marty discuss the details of a case they first investigated in 1995. The reason for revisiting the case is a possible connection to another murder, which seems to indicate that the real murderer might still be out there. Rust already suspects as much and pulls Marty into his ongoing investigation. There’s a parallel there in the way the deaths of the Tsalal scientists are connected to the unsolved Annie K. case that still haunts Navarro, when Danvers (Jodie Foster) finds her tongue at the scene. Like Rust, Navarro can’t let the past go and move on without answers.The two cases are also linked by video evidence. In a harrowing scene from season one, Rust shares a videotape of one of the cult’s ritualistic child murders with Marty, who can’t bear to watch. Later, they force a hostile suspect to watch the tape in order to get him to cooperate with their continuing investigation. In season four, we get the modern version of that, a cell-phone video recorded by Annie K. just before her murder. In both instances, the video record of a horrific crime is a vital clue that brings the detectives one step closer to solving the case.

The dark plays an important part in Night Country, both literally and thematically. The citizens of Ennis live in perpetual darkness for days at a time every winter. The long night seems to bring other kinds of darkness with it, the kinds that infect the soul and perhaps invites the supernatural. But there’s light in Ennis, too. We see it in the Christmas lights and in the members of the community who support each other, provide warmth, and fight to keep their way of life, like Annie. As Rust says in the season-one finale, “It’s just one story. The oldest … light versus dark.” To which Marty responds, “I know we ain’t in Alaska, but it appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory.” Rust considers this and delivers the final line of the first season, ending on a surprisingly hopeful note, “Well, once, there was only dark. If you ask me, the light’s winning.”