True Detective Is Over, But Its Ghosts Remain
By
Roxana Hadadi,
a Vulture TV critic who also covers film and pop culture
Photo: Michele K. Short/HBO
Spoilers follow for “Part Six,” the True Detective: Night Country season finale.
In season finale “Part Six,” True Detective: Night Country gives us certainty about what happened to the men from Tsalal Arctic Research Station: The characters known on set as the “Justice Ladies” gave the men the deaths they deserved for killing Annie K. That mystery is solved, but “Part Six” leaves open two other questions that audiences must answer for themselves based on the evidence provided throughout Night Country: How does the series’ supernatural component play into the Tsalal men’s fate, and is Navarro dead or alive at series’ end?
Showrunner Issa López and actress Kali Reis have different levels of reticence about their personal readings on the ending. “I think that’s the beauty of this, where you can make it yours. And if I tell you what mine is, I’m going to be completely hacking yours,” López says. Nonetheless, they shared with Vulture their replies to both questions — though, in typical Night Country fashion, their answers still contain plenty of ambiguity.
Who is the supernatural “She”?
This season’s heavy incorporation of supernatural elements has been a talking point since its premiere and as each following episode has leaned further into horror with ghosts, possessions, corpses, and hauntings. Disparate moments hint at the same culprit: Kayla and Pete’s son draws a picture of a monstrous woman whom Kayla describes as “a local legend,” and Navarro hears a woman’s screams and senses her presence around town, including in the finale’s ice caves. The figure is the whispered-about She the scientists woke up with their experiments and pissed off by killing Annie K.; to Reis, She is “Mother Earth,” while López says she overlaps in abilities and aesthetics with Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the sea.
When López showed the actresses who played the “Justice Ladies” an early cut of their attack on the Tsalal men, “they were so happy; they were screaming, and we were all laughing because they were so excited to see themselves,” Reis says. The actress praises the Justice Ladies for their act of accountability and is convinced — as Navarro was — that they were helped by the “She” who leader Beatrice (Diane Benson) suggests “ate [the men’s] fucking dreams from the inside out and spit their frozen bones.”
“This is such an Indigenous story because we’re so matriarchal. Women are warriors, truth seekers, truth tellers,” Reis says. “I’m totally Team Navarro. I totally believe it. Whoever she is, Shorty awake and Shorty mad. She did that. She’s handling business.”
What is Navarro’s final fate?
After Navarro and Danvers learn what the Justice Ladies did,