5 unanswered questions from the True Detective: Night Country finale

Danvers’ discovery of a severed tongue at the Tsalal station was the first piece of evidence that the case of the missing research scientists was somehow tied to the unsolved murder of Annie Kowtok six years earlier. Without waiting for the DNA results to come back (which do eventually prove that the tongue was Annie’s), Navarro jumps at the excuse to reopen the case and start investigating again. In the final episode, after Bee (L’xeis Diane Benson) finishes telling the story of what happened to the Tsalal researchers, Navarro (Kali Reis) stays behind and asks her who put Annie’s tongue there. Bee has no idea what she’s talking about. “That’s not part of our story,” she says. She could be lying, of course, but what reason would she have for not being truthful at that point? She’s already admitted to worse crimes, and Danvers and Navarro have made it clear they aren’t going to take the case any further. So if the women didn’t plant it there for Liz to find, who did? The episode gives us one clue. When Danvers is in the station’s kitchen having a snack, an orange rolls off the table and she leans down to pick it up. Under the table, in the same spot where she found the tongue, she sees a wet footprint. We never find out who the footprint belongs to, though. Or if it’s even real. We’ve seen physical manifestations of spiritual objects before, like the gold cross necklace, so it could be supernatural. Another option is that Raymond Clark left it there, but he was hiding under the hatch when the police were searching the station. And how could he have gotten it anyway?

We learn early on that ghost sightings and other supernatural phenomena are common in Ennis. Viewers have been speculating throughout the season that the real cause of them was a hallucinogenic toxin in the town’s drinking water. The finale didn’t necessarily contradict this theory, but it didn’t confirm it either. Danvers speculated in that the mine bankrolled Tsalal to push out bogus pollution numbers, but in the end we found out it was actually the other way around. Raymond Clark confirmed that the researchers were pushing the mine to keep contaminating the water because it helped soften the permafrost and aided in their research “by multiples of hundreds, thousands.” In his confession video, Clark says that the pollution levels in the region are “11 times higher than those currently acceptable by the Vienna Convention and the UNFCCC. The pollution knowingly created by Silver Sky has caused cancer, stillbirths, birth defects, and irreparable genetic damage to both the human and animal population…” The recording cuts off there, and we don’t hear the rest.The mass hallucination theory among humans and animals would explain a lot, not just the ghost sightings, but the caribou leaping to their deaths at the beginning of the series, the polar bear wandering into town, and many other strange visions. It doesn’t clear up everything, though. The series intentionally blurs the line between what’s real, what’s a dream, and what’s imagined.

While he was mapping the cave system 25 years ago, Otis experienced the same symptoms as the Tsalal scientists—ruptured ear drums and a burnt cornea—but somehow he survived the ordeal (at least physically). We know that the scientists were forced out into the cold by Bee and the other native women, but we never find why Otis was spared. Did the female entity inhabiting the “night country” take pity on him after he disturbed her down in the caves? Or was he just lucky? Clark sought him out to ask him the same question, hoping the answer would help him survive as well. But he never found out. Neither did we.

When Danvers and Navarro find the research site in the ice caves under the station, they see a skeleton of some ancient creature frozen in the ice above their heads. It’s the same creature that could be seen in Annie’s final video. The skeleton is arranged in a spiral shape, similar to the symbol that has been showing up all season (and connects back to the first season of True Detective). Are we seeing the origin of the spiral symbol here? In , Rose tells Navarro that the symbol is very old. “Older than Ennis. It’s older than the ice, probably.” The Iñupiaq women draw it on the forehead of one of the Tsalal men before they leave them in the cold to die, believing it will call a female spirit, possibly the sea goddess Sedna, to take her revenge for what the men did to Annie. “When they killed her daughter in there, they woke her up. If she wanted them, she would take them.” So are the goddess and the skeleton sea creature connected? And are its remains the source of the DNA the men were studying?