Issa López Wants You to Decide
The showrunner calls True Detective: Night Country’s ambiguous ending “my gift and my curse” to the viewer.
By
Roxana Hadadi,
a Vulture TV critic who also covers film and pop culture
Photo: Lilja Jons/HBO
Spoilers follow for True Detective: Night Country finale “Part Six.”
There are three ways to read the ending of True Detective: Night Country, says showrunner Issa López. The real story: A group of Native women exacting revenge for the murder of Annie Kowtok sent the Tsalal scientists to their deaths on the ice. The fake story, a cover-up: The mining company secretly funding the research station and lining cops’ pockets blames a freak avalanche for the corpsicle. Both stories are narrative certainties in Night Country’s season finale, but the third reading, one in which a supernatural power — a ghost, a god, a force of nature, something else — met the scientists in their final moments is just as plausible: There’s an entity in Ennis we might not understand but some characters certainly feel. Ensuring the scripts had an ambiguity that allowed each viewer to decide just how realistic or fantastical they wanted Night Country to be was “my gift and my curse,” López explains. “To walk a tight line between genre and realism is my favorite hurdle to try to surpass,” she says. “My favorite option is a little bit of both.”
How do you write ambiguity? I’m assuming you’re not writing a story and then going back and saying, “Let’s put a ghost in here!”
I inhabit quite a divided psyche, and it has to do with my upbringing. I come from an agnostic, atheist father and a deeply Catholic mother, and both are gone from my life. But I do believe both walk with me. “No one ever really leaves” is my way of seeing things.
I don’t write and then look back on places to insert one or the other; as the story comes to me, the supernatural weaves itself in it. Interpretation is always in the point of view: What character is perceiving this reality, and what relationship does that character have with the supernatural? When Navarro hears voices, we know she comes from a long family history of mental-health issues and a sensitivity to the beyond. Is this really happening, or is this Navarro’s perception? Danvers is an absolute skeptic — but is she? When she’s thinking, she plays white noise to cut out other sounds. She has dreams where her dead son visits her. But are they dreams?
Season one did it. It’s hard to tell if it came from the writing or the directing, but it was definitely in the final mix, which is all that matters.