Time Is a Flat Circle After All
By
Jen Chaney,
a TV critic for Vulture and New York
With True Detective: Night Country, Issa López has taken a masculine text and subverted it to tell a story about women.
Photo: HBO
Spoilers follow for True Detective: Night Country finale “Part Six.”
When True Detective: Night Country begins, Ennis, Alaska is entering its darkest season, a two-week stretch where daylight ceases to exist. During the finale, light finally begins to peek through the endless night, first via the glow of the aurora borealis as New Year’s Day 2024 dawns and, later, in the brightly lit police station where Chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) speaks to investigators on May 12, the longest day of the year.
That dark-to-light arc reflects the natural cycle of things in this part of the world and a bend toward something close to optimism after a palpably chilling season of television. It also serves as an allusion to the finale of the first season of True Detective. In its concluding moments, cops-turned-private-detectives Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) discuss the stories Rust used to tell himself as a younger man, looking up at the skies when he lived in Alaska. “It’s just one story,” concludes Rust, still recovering from injuries sustained while capturing serial killer Errol Childress. “The oldest. Light versus dark.”
Callbacks to season one pepper Night Country’s six episodes: the omnipresence of that spiral symbol; the appearance of the ghost of Travis Cohle, father of McConaughey’s Rust; the mention of Tuttle United, a business that shares a name with season one’s influential, cult-operating family. While some viewers questioned the point of all these allusions, it’s clear by the end of season four that showrunner, director and co-writer Issa López hasn’t just been recycling details for the hell of it or attempting to rearrange our understanding of season one’s narrative. Night Country has resurrected the familiar to highlight history’s tendency to repeat itself, also a running theme in season one, and to emphasize the differences between telling a story focused on women versus men.
Season-four finale “Part Six” has a whole pile-up of moments designed to give the audience a strong sense of season-one déjà vu. In both finales, the protagonists discover weapons that match the wounds on victims in long-unsolved murder cases. In True Detective, Rust walks through tunnels to reach Carcosa, the underground lair where he confronts Childress, aka the Yellow King killer. Night Country matches that encounter by sending Danvers and Navarro (Kali Reis) into the bowels of the ice caves where they track down Clark, the surviving Tsalal scientist who reveals (mostly) how Annie Kowtok and the scientists died.