True Detective: Night Country Season-Finale Recap: Ghost Town
Part 6
Season 4
Episode 6
Editor’s Rating
5 stars
Photo: Michele K. Short/HBO
Episode five of Night Country ends on a precipice of interpretation. You can believe that Hank intended to commit suicide by patricide or not. (Ultimately, I don’t.) You can believe Navarro’s cover-up plan is justified or not. (Hell yes.) You can believe the ends justify the means or not. (Poor Otis.) You can believe something supernatural has come awake in Ennis’s long polar night, or you can believe that men’s eyes play tricks on them in the dark.
I worried that an hour-long finale couldn’t resolve these dichotomies, and, to some extent, I was right. The series actually gives itself 75 minutes to wrap things up. It also — crucially — side-steps the show’s most searching question about what happens after we die. In the end, how gratifying you find the finale will depend on your willingness to forgo objective truth in favor of a notion more slippery and less satisfying. That there can be more than one answer to even the most straightforward question: Whodunnit?
“Part Six” begins on New Year’s Eve and remains narrowly focused on Danvers and Navarro for almost its entirety. It’s a quest episode, really, and it kicks off with the cops cracking a hole in the ice and recklessly throwing themselves into the labyrinth below. “It’s safe,” Navarro shouts to her reluctant partner, but nothing about this place feels safe. The caves resemble a frozen intestinal tract; it’s as though the women have been swallowed whole by an Ice Age beast. I was anxious that Danvers and Navarro weren’t leaving breadcrumbs by which to retrace their path, but it’s quickly made clear they won’t need to. There’s a presence lingering nearby. It could be the ghost of Annie K. reaching out to Navarro, or it could just be that the cops sense Raymond Clark lurking.
They chase the AWOL scientist through the caves into a subterranean ice laboratory not entirely unlike Mr. Freeze’s Snowy Cones Ice Cream Factory (Joel Schumacher’s version). There’s a spiral of prehistoric bones, same as the ones from the Annie K. video, frozen into the ice above the women’s heads. Where has Clark disappeared to (again), and where are they now? In the abandoned lab, Danvers finds a star-shaped ice-drill bit that looks more than capable of making Annie’s wounds. Behind storage shelves laden with ice tubes, Navarro finds a ladder leading up a tall chute. The cops climb it and end up back in Tsalal Station, where “Twist and Shout” is still blaring from the Ferris Bueller DVD that restarts every time the power cuts. Danvers yanks the DVD player from the outlet this time because some ghosts you can quiet. Meanwhile, Navarro follows wet footprints, the same as the ones she pursued through the dredge in Part Four.