[This story contains spoilers from the season four premiere of True Detective: Night Country.]
Within its first major sequence, True Detective: Night Country loudly and proudly bellows its mission statement: “Shake it up, baby!”
The fourth season of the HBO crime anthology series comes from a brand new team helmed by director Issa Lopez, with stars Jodie Foster and Kali Reis taking on the titular detective duties. A new lineup of talent on and behind the screen absolutely shakes up the True Detective formula, offering something that feels entirely new, while also providing a bone-chilling narrative that feels most aligned with the Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson-starring first season.
Emphasis on “chilling,” too, considering the premise of Night Country is that it’s set in an Alaskan town in the throes of a long all-nighter. The sun is setting for the winter months, and in the midst of the perma-dark permafrost, an evil lurks.
The premiere sets up the mystery of the season on a couple of different fronts, beginning with the disappearance of a group of scientists, discovered at the end of the episode in a gnarly tableau of frozen death. What happened to these men? Who — or what — is responsible? The task for figuring that out falls to, well, us, in a manner of speaking, at least. Half the fun of a new True Detective season is trying to puzzle out the mystery alongside the characters, and the premiere gives the Reddit detectives enough ammo to start putting major pieces together already.
Just as importantly, though, are the two true detectives at the heart of the title: Foster as Liz Danvers and Reis as Evangeline Navarro, two law enforcement officers with little love lost between them, for reasons still not entirely clear.
Gallery: Kali Reis as Evangeline Navarro.
Michele K. Short/HBO
“She’s a very interesting, deep, badass with a big heart,” Reis tells The Hollywood Reporter about her take on Navarro, an Indigenous and Dominican ex-military officer who is new to the town of Ennis, Alaska, at least relatively speaking. “She’s very connected to her spiritual side. She has a dark side, too, but it’s actually part of her light side. She’s very calculated, but also unpredictable. There are so many contradictions when we meet her.”
Danvers, meanwhile, is a bit more of a meat-and-potatoes cop — or, more accurately, a Tinder-and-fantasy-football kind of cop. Initially, Foster was reluctant to join the cast of True Detective, not for anything having to do with the quality of the piece.
“It wasn’t an easy yes,” Foster tells THR. “I loved the script — loved the script — but I didn’t feel like I was right to play Danvers. The character was written very differently,