True Detective: Night Country premiere: Chillingly good TV

It’s been a long time since True Detective was on TV—and even longer since it was Much-Watch TV. A whole five years after the third edition of the HBO crime anthology, we’ve got a fresh new chapter of True Detective tales, with the first episode of Night Country bringing with it many of the elements that made the McConaughey-Harrelson original so addictive. There’s a starry detective duo with fraught pasts, both separate and mutual; a “dead” investigation mysteriously given new life; a setting simmering with tension and turmoil; and a healthy dose of supernatural spooks to top it all off.

But the differences here are conscious and, more importantly, compelling. Speaking of the elements, where the first season sweltered with the stifling humidity of the American south, the fourth bites with the briskness of the arctic north. We’re 150 miles above the polar circle, in an Alaskan town so icy and isolated, its tagline is “The End of the World.” It’s already been dark for three days—the frosty frontier unsettlingly engulfed in its annual period of perma-night—when Chief Liz Danvers (Oscar winner Jodie Foster) is called in to investigate the disappearance of an entire staff of scientists at Tsalal Arctic Research Station, a hub of geological study on the distant edge of an already desolate town.

The men’s vanishing is giving major The Leftovers vibes: the deli meat is still reasonably fresh on sandwiches left half-eaten, and Ferris Bueller is still crooning “Twist And Shout” from a blaring television set. “It’s like they went to take a leak and never came back,” Danvers proclaims. Except, there’s a human tongue on the carpet and a whiteboard menacingly scrawled with the sentence: “WE ARE ALL DEAD.”

That tongue likely belonged to a local native woman, the detective surmises, based on markings that mimic the repetition of licking a thread while fixing fishing nets. And her old partner, an Iñupiaq state trooper named Evangeline Navarro (Catch The Fair One’s Kali Reis), has a hunch about exactly who the tongue came from: the indigenous victim of a brutal murder that the now-estranged duo worked on together six years prior. That unsolved case caused a rift between the polar-opposite officers—Danvers, all blustering sarcasm, and Navarro, soulful stoicism—but this being True Detective, they’ll have to unite to uncover the mystery of what happened to the scientists, especially after their bodies are found naked and frozen together in a nightmare-inducing “corpsicle” by the episode’s end.

In between that glacial gore and a sprinkling of jump-scares—a polar bear pays a shocking visit to Navarro one night on the road and a child’s hand can be seen creepily ghosting over Danver’s shoulder as she sleeps—the two women also contend with slightly less gruesome events in the season opener. Liz is struggling to wrangle her rebellious step-daughter Leah (Isabella Star LaBlanc), who was caught taping a sexual encounter with a fellow female teen, as well as the town drunk, who just DUI-ed her truck into a street pole yet again. And Evangeline is trying to support her mentally ill sister Julia (Aka Niviâna) while navigating her own personal demons, agitations she relieves with late-night visits to the bedroom of a hunky local home brewer (Joel Montgrand).

The premiere introduces us to some of the male townsfolk populating this frigid land—Liz’s put-upon young deputy Peter (Finn Bennett), as well as his father, veteran cop Hank (John Hawkes)—but Night Country is made by and about women, a Mare Of Easttown–meets-Yellowjackets thriller that subverts the male-dominated structure we’ve come to expect from the True Detective world.

Along with its leading twosome of Foster and Reis (the latter of whom, though better known as a champion boxer, is a searing new screen presence), the female focus extends behind the scenes. This is the first True Detective season sans creator-showrunner Nic Pizzolatto. Instead, Issa López—the Mexican director who spooked filmgoers with the 2017 horror masterpiece Tigers Are Not Afraid—has taken the reins on the series, directing and writing or co-writing all six episodes of Night Country.

Lopez uses her horror bonafides to infuse that otherworldly Alaskan terrain with a foreboding dread, not only in the mysterious case of the missing researchers but in the town’s everyday conflicts, like the clash between the indigenous community and the white settlers who’ve come to mine their land. (Danvers, whom Foster has described as “Alaska Karen,” seems particularly prickly where native identity is concerned.)

From the true-crime bleakness to the unnerving supernaturalism, there are more than enough chilling elements for our leads to chip away at over the next five episodes. (And, no, we don’t see the delicious novelty of having Jodie Fucking Foster back on screen as a steely detective wearing off anytime soon.) With a snowy tundra and a severed tongue, True Detective Sundays are officially back.

Stray observations

• There’s an ominous little subplot with Fiona Shaw’s Rose Aguineau, a mysterious survivalist woman we meet while she’s gutting a wolf. Rose is afflicted with visions of a barefoot dead man named Travis who leads her out into the snowy wilderness to watch him dance in his long johns like he’s in a Fatboy Slim music video. We don’t entirely understand how those flailing moves ultimately lead Rose to discovering the researchers’ frozen bodies, but we won’t be listening to “Praise You” the same way anytime soon.