True Detective: Night Country finale: Revenge is a dish best served cold

We’ve had a breakthrough—literally. The season finale of True Detective: Night Country opens with Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) cracking through the ice and descending into the caves that will finally reveal what happened to those Tsalal Arctic Research Station scientists, to Annie K (Nivi Pedersen), and to all of the Ennis residents who’ve been haunted by mine controversies or mass psychosis or whatever else has been making things go bump in the polar night.

We won’t deny, we doubted showrunner Issa López leading into this last episode, given all of the stray storylines and perplexing theories (Navarro as Sedna?!) that still needed tying up. However, with the final edition of her Night Country saga, López has honored her vision while still making this chapter feel very much a part of the greater True Detective universe.

Unsurprisingly, the vibes are bad down in the caves (though the surroundings themselves are beautiful, glimmering tunnels of glacial-blue rock candy that look downright delicious). And they quickly go from vaguely supernatural (Navarro is hearing voices, natch) to actually precarious when both Liz and Eve fall through the ice to an even frostier level below…where they find Raymond Clark (Owen McDonnell). In pursuit of their primary suspect, the detectives discover what fans have been theorizing for weeks: an underground laboratory where Annie was likely killed (they find a star-shaped weapon that matches her wounds), with a ladder system that leads directly to—you guessed it—Tsalal station.

We’re back where we started: an eerily empty research station with “Twist And Shout” roaring over an abandoned TV. Except now the women have to contend with Clark, who very much does not want to answer their questions. (He traps Danvers in an outside passage and knocks Navarro out with a fire extinguisher.) They do eventually manage to strap the bastard to a chair to interrogate him, but even that success is tinged with uncertainty: There’s a storm whirling around them, and there’s no WiFi and no radio. “We’re stuck out here.” They might get answers but will they make it out alive to reveal them?

Clark does eventually start talking. Annie had found notes that revealed exactly what he and the researchers were up to at Tsalal: digging for the DNA of a microorganism contained in the permafrost that could potentially “save the world” and cure disease. Great stuff, except the scientists needed Silver Sky to amp up their pollutants—i.e., more waste in the water—to soften the permafrost and make it easier to extract that DNA. Hence, the cancers and the stillbirths and all of the other medical horrors being inflicted on the people of Ennis.

Annie tried to destroy Tsalal’s underground lab, but Anders Lund and the rest of the men discovered her and killed her. Did Clark participate in her murder? As with the Wheeler scenes, what’s said conflicts with what’s shown, and a distraught Raymond can be seen suffocating Annie to hasten her death. Clark quickly descends into mania following Annie’s murder: “I kept seeing her and hearing her voice more and more. I knew she’d come back. I knew she’d come for us.” During one night—the night—he rushed down to hide in the tunnel below after hearing voices and held the hatch closed for a week while the men above were attacked. By who, Annie’s ghost? By another vengeful spirit?

Navarro and Danvers don’t get that part of the story just yet, because Eve lets Clark die by suicide, walking out onto the ice and freezing to death just like the rest of his Tsalal comrades. Consider justice served there, but the women still have to deal with no power, no heat, and the weight of their own grief. When Navarro brings up Liz’s late son, she rages: “You want to follow your ghosts and curl up in a ball and die out on the ice out there, you go ahead, but you leave my kid out of it or I will rip you apart! I am not merciful, do you understand? I got no mercy left.”

And yet, when Navarro does follow her ghosts out into the torrential snowfall, a concerned Danvers tails her. And when the latter terrifyingly falls through the ice, Eve is the one to pull Liz to safety, to warm her by the fire and comfort her in her loss. Seems there’s still some mercy left in Ennis, after all.

While the women face the elements and their own demons at Tsalal, Peter Prior (Finn Bennett) is having his own New Year’s Eve rager back at Danvers’ house: scrubbing blood off the floors, ripping rogue molars from the walls, and bagging up the bodies of his father and Otis Heiss before a remorseful Leah (Isabella Star LaBlanc) can come home wanting to make amends with her mother.

He drives her back to his house—under the guise that he doesn’t want Kayla and Darwin alone on New Year’s—and manages to reconcile with his wife before racing off to Rose Aguineau’s (Fiona Shaw) place to dispose of the corpses. “It’s gonna be one of those nights, is it?” Rose responds to dreadful predicament, just more proof that we needed way more Fiona Shaw on this show. As the bodies descend into the waters beneath them, the Aurora Borealis breaks out overhead, marking a new day.

For Navarro and Danvers, New Year’s Day marks the end of the storm but before they can escape Tsalal, Liz realizes a clue in Clark’s “holding the hatch” story. Using chemicals and a UV light from the researchers’ stores, they check the top of the tunnel hatch, which reveals not just handprints but distinctive ones: the pinky-less print of crab factory worker Blair Hartman (Kathryn Wilder), whose domestic violence case Navarro was called to back in episode one.

If you were one of the eagle-eyed viewers who thought Blair’s background appearance during that laundromat scene last week was weird, you were onto something. When the detectives go and question Blair at her house, they don’t just find her but also her coworker Bee (Diane E. Benson)—a fellow Tsalal cleaner and the woman who hit Blair’s ex-boyfriend with a metal bucket in the premiere—and a gathering of fellow indigenous women. Bee reveals that the women knew that “those fuckers killed Annie K.” but they didn’t report the scientists because “it’s always the same story with the same ending. Nothing ever happens. So we told ourselves a different story with a different ending.”

So how exactly does this story end? In retribution for Annie’s murder and for all that Tsalal has exacted on their community, Bee, Blair, and the native women rounded up the scientists, drove them out onto the ice, had them remove their clothes, and forced them to walk. They left the men’s folded clothes, in case they survived. “But they didn’t though. I guess she wanted to take them. I guess she ate their fucking dreams from the inside out and spit their frozen bones. But that’s just a story.”

Is “she” Mother Nature? Is “she” the spirits of all who came before? Is “she” the darkness itself? Bee doesn’t explain, and Navarro and Danvers don’t need to ask. They recognize the rage of the women, the unlawful but undeniable need to right oppressive wrongs. So they’ll willfully turn a blind eye to Bee’s story—one of justice and sisterhood, identity and reclamation—just as they did their own vigilantism during the Wheeler case, and instead will publicly put forward Connelly’s bogus slab avalanche story. They’ve opened the hatch, and now they’re free.

With much welcome-sunshine signaling a time jump, we pick up on May 12th, the first long day of the year. Danvers is being questioned about the ongoing investigation into Hank Prior’s disappearance: “Come summer, we’ll find him,” she tells the investigators. “We always do…unless we don’t.” It depends on whatever story’s told that day. In this story, the mine gets closed thanks to a taped confession Navarro got from Raymond Clark before his death. In this story, Danvers and Leah reconcile, and Prior returns home. In this story, Evangeline Navarro has reckoned with her ghosts and practically become one herself, leaving law enforcement and a SpongeBob toothbrush behind. But she’s never far. As Danvers says, “This is Ennis. Nobody ever really leaves.”

Stray observations

• “Some questions just don’t have answers,” Liz proclaims in the final scene of the season, a convenient catch-all for any of the stray bits left behind in True Detective: Night Country. What threads did you want tied up but weren’t in the finale?
• Speaking of, I don’t think it was entirely necessary to tie season four back to season one. The acts of justice from Navarro, Danvers, and the indigenous women nicely echoed similar moral tensions from the franchise’s previous protagonists—Rust and Marty with the meth cookers, Ray and Frank with the human traffickers—and those other Easter eggs (Tuttle cult, Travis Cohle) felt less substantial and more shoehorned by season’s end.
• Earlier this week, Night Country became the most watched season of the True Detective anthology, with 12.7 million viewers across all platforms. In our interview with Issa López, she said she’d be game for more if the network was. Your move, HBO. We’ll take one Rose Aguineau spinoff, thanks.