True Detective: Night Country recap: The ice men cometh

Frostbitten corneas, ruptured eardrums, chewed-off limbs—it’s clear that the frozen scientists at the center of True Detective: Night Country’s main mystery were already going through it well before they coagulated together into the glacial gorefest that we now know as the Corpsicle.

And things get even bleaker for the ice men during this Sunday’s episode: As Chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and her officers do their best Ellie Sattler impersonation, trying to excavate those frosty fellas from that giant ice cube, one cop gets a bit handsy and rips a victim’s arm clean off. (Danvers’ exasperated “Wilson, what the fuck?!” delightfully adds to the slapstick morbidity.) That accidental amputation unleashes a roar from said victim that horrifyingly signals, no, not all of the Corpsicle compadres are dead.

That man is alive, albeit in need of yet another amputation and quickly placed into a medically-induced coma, which means he won’t be available to answer any of Danvers’ questions anytime soon, including what the hell those men have been doing out at Tsalal research station in the first place. (Really, outside of, you know, the whole being frozen alive thing, it did seem like those scientists were having a helluva time in their reclusivity, if those drunken karaoke iPhone videos are anything to go by.)

For that, Liz heads to the high school where one of her old paramours, a geologist, teaches, and he explains that the men were trying to sequence the DNA of an extinct microorganism that could potentially stop cellular decay, i.e. the kind of thing that would help cure cancers, autoimmune diseases, genetic disorders, you name it. Who, or what, would possibly want to stop that kind of progress?

Danvers gets called back to the precinct where she encounters yet another one of her booty-call buddies, Captain Ted Connelly (Christopher Eccleston), the very man who shipped her off to Ennis, Alaska in the first place. He informs her that Anchorage will be taking jurisdiction over the “shit bowl” Corpsicle case, but she cites a police handbook that says frozen bodies cannot be moved or manipulated until they’re “properly thawed” (gross), which means she has 48 hours until her authority melts away.

The only problem: Where to thaw ’em? An ice-skating rink, of course, after Liz begrudgingly gets permission from its owner…whose husband she may or may not have slept with. (Listen, a girl’s gotta stay warm up in the arctic, alright?) Cue that giant block of frozen flesh being trucked through town to the Beach Boys’ jolly “Little Saint Nick” and installed right there on center ice.

Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), for her part, has been spending time over at Rose Aguineau’s (Fiona Shaw) groovy abode, talking about Rose’s haunting late partner Travis (he disappeared into the ice because “he didn’t want the leukemia to take him”), Navarro’s sister Julia (who she brought to Ennis a year ago to try and ease her mental-health issues, which include having her own Haley Joel Osmont-esque visions of their dead mother), and the mysterious spiral symbol that Navarro spotted drawn on one of the scientists’ heads, which just so happens to perfectly match a tattoo found on Annie Masu Kowtok’s body. “It’s old, older than Ennis,” Rose says of the spiral. “It’s older than the ice, probably.”

It’s not a shock, then, when Navarro shows up rinkside to tell Danvers they need to collaborate on the Annie-meets-Corpsicle case. Ever-stubborn, Liz refuses but still has Peter Prior (Finn Bennett) look into the symbol. (It’s in trying to teach Peter to ask the “right questions” about what happened to the Tsalal staff—who left their clothes neatly folded by their bodies? Was someone out on the ice with them that day?—that we get our first overt invocation of Foster’s Clarice Starling, a connection that showrunner Issa López deliberately didn’t shy away from, as she revealed to The A.V. Club.)

However, asking those “right questions” leads Liz to discover that, yes, Evangeline was correct in thinking there’s a connection between Annie’s case and the Corpsicle. Digging into the scientist’s credit-card statements leads her to a tattoo parlor that reveals that Annie and the marked researcher were, in fact, in a relationship during the time of her death and the scientist had gotten the spiral tattoo in her honor.

And Navarro gets her own lead at Qavvik’s tavern, after one-half of a man-on-man bar fight—an escalation of the tensions between natives and miners over the town water supply—clearly recognizes a photo of the tattooed researcher. She manages to track the man down, and he points her in the direction of an RV that the scientist had purchased from his cousin. Evangeline calls Liz down to the abandoned trailer, which is covered in animal bones (seal and caribou, Navarro surmises), rough drawings, bound dolls, and a shrine to Annie above the bed.

And just as they’re contending with that creepiness, they get a call in about another: The ice men have thawed, and one of them—yes, the tattooed scientist—is missing. “He’s alive,” Navarro declares, just before the credits roll. “He’s out there.” The second episode had already unsettlingly plunged viewers even deeper into the mysterious world of Ennis—though the seemingly common knowledge that the town will make you “see dead people” does not seem like a tourism selling point—and the lives and regrets of its troubled inhabitants. But it’s a whole other thing to have one of said inhabitants roaming around the tundra nude and newly thawed from a human iceberg. Let the creepiness continue!

Stray observations

• Danvers’ stepdaughter being a hockey player and her girlfriend being a figure skater? We are very here for The Cutting Edge vibes.
• Speaking of offspring, we get nice insights into Leah (Isabella Star LaBlanc) and Peter this week as they both battle against their parents: she, over wanting to wear indigenous facial markings and connect more deeply with her heritage, and he, over swiping Annie’s file from his dad Hank’s (John Hawkes) house. (Hank, sweetie, maybe you should be more worried that your “long-distance fiancée” is 100-percent catfishing you for cash.)
• There were several great needle drops this week, including the aforementioned Wilson bros’ tune, but our favorite was Evangeline nearly zig-a-zig-ah-ing off a snow bank to Spice Girls’ “Wannabe.”
• “Arctic prices” is right—20 bucks for Oreos?!
• We’re gonna need an extended husky cameo every episode from now on, thanks bye.