True Detective: Night Country Finale Recap: Did the Answers to Season 4’s Mysteries Leave You Cold?
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True Detective: Night Country’s sixth and final episode gave us answers in the Annie K. case and about the Tsalal scientists — and yes, they might have some of the same answers.
Sunday’s finale opens with Danvers and Navarro chopping a hole in the ice to find an entrance to the ice caves. They walk through a corridor lined with gleaming walls of ice, and they both seem to hear voices as they get deeper inside. (“You feel it too, don’t you?” Navarro asks Danvers.) Navarro leads them down a narrow crevasse, convinced this is the right path — and falls through the floor, landing in another passage. Danvers falls, too, and they’re soon face-to-face with… Raymond Clark! They chase after him and find a secret subterranean science lab with a weird animal skeleton in the shape of a spiral on the ceiling. They also find a ladder that leads to a hatch that opens up inside the Tsalal lab.
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While Peter cleans up the evidence and stuffs the dead bodies of his dad Hank and Otis Heiss into his truck, Danvers and Navarro search the lab for Clark with guns drawn. Danvers walks into a sealed specimen freezer, and Clark locks her inside. Then he clocks Navarro with a fire extinguisher, knocking her out cold. Danvers yanks off a long handle and smashes through the freezer door to free herself, but by the time she arrives to save Navarro, she’s already awake and pounding Clark bloody. They tie him up and interrogate him, and he doesn’t want to talk at first, but he admits he did love Annie. So Navarro grabs her phone, puts the video of Annie’s last moments alive on a loop and tapes headphones to Clark’s ears, making him listen over and over again until he talks.
Leah shows up at Danvers’ place just as Peter is finishing cleaning up, and he offers her a ride over to Kayla’s so he can go see his family. Once there, Kayla gets into his truck and demands to know what’s going on. He can’t tell her, he says, but he asks her to understand: “I have to do something… I’m fixing it now.” Back at the lab, Danvers and Navarro fix themselves a snack before going back to Clark and asking him if he was there when Annie was killed. “Not at first,” he begins, explaining that he and the other scientists were digging in the permafrost for DNA from a microorganism that could potentially save the world. They could get it, too, but only because the pollution from the mine helped soften the permafrost. In fact, they pushed the mine to create more pollution to help their research. Annie found out and started smashing up their lab equipment, and Clark heard her screaming, running down to find Anders stabbing her to death to stop her. The other men joined in, with Clark finally finishing her off in a mercy suffocation.
Annie set their research back two years, Clark says, but Navarro reminds him they stabbed her 32 times and cut out her tongue. He didn’t cut out her tongue, though, Clark insists, so Hank must’ve done that when he moved Annie’s body. An enraged Navarro pulls out her gun and points it at Clark, and Danvers leaves the room to let her pull the trigger. She doesn’t, though, leaving him alive — although we learn that Navarro shot William Wheeler in cold blood after arriving at that crime scene. Clark thinks the ghost of Annie killed the Tsalal scientists: “I knew she’d come back.” When the lights went out in the lab, he locked himself inside the underground lab, sealing the hatch and holding it closed, even while someone (or something) pounded on it. Annie was in the caves “before she was born, after we all die,” he rants. “Time is a flat circle, and we are all stuck in it.” (Gee, that sounds familiar.)
Danvers warns Navarro not to let Clark sleep before grabbing some rest of her own. But she wakes up to find the power out and snow coming in from outside, with Navarro standing by Clark’s body outside after he walked into the snow and took his own life. Now they’re trapped by a blizzard in a freezing lab with no power, and Navarro has visions of a dead body while Danvers hallucinates a hubcap rolling down the hallway. Is the madness getting to them? They huddle together by a fire for warmth, and Navarro tells Danvers she had a vision of her dead son Holden, the little boy with the stuffed polar bear. Danvers snaps at her: “You leave my kid out of it! Or I will rip you apart. I am not merciful. You understand? I’ve got no mercy left.” That night, Navarro has another vision that leads her to walk out onto the ice (and finally learn her true Native name), and when Danvers tries to bring her back, she falls through the ice, flailing helplessly in the frigid water until Navarro reaches in to pull her back to the surface.
While Peter takes the dead bodies to Rose, who helps him slide them into the ice, Navarro nurses a shivering Danvers back to life by the fire. Danvers has visions of the car wreck that killed Holden, and when Navarro tells her to keep breathing like she’s blowing out a birthday candle, she sees Holden blowing out candles on his own cake. Danvers finally wakes up, asking Navarro what Holden told her. “He says that he sees you. He sees you, Liz,” Navarro tells her, sending Danvers into sobs. The blizzard finally ends, and Danvers tenderly tells Navarro that if she ever does disappear, like she said she wanted to, “try to come back, OK?” But then Danvers has a moment of inspiration, pouring chemicals on the top of the hatch and looking at it with a UV light. She can see handprints, including one with two missing fingers — like Blair, the abused girlfriend who worked at the seafood processing plant at the start of the season. A-ha! “We weren’t asking the right question,” Danvers declares.
They head to the home of Beatrice, the old woman who worked at the plant and also cleaned the Tsalal lab, and Blair is there, too. Beatrice found evidence that the men at the lab killed Annie K. when she discovered the hatch while cleaning, and she knew the cops wouldn’t do anything about a dead Native woman. So “we told ourselves a different story, with a different ending.” She and the other women stormed into the lab with guns, taking the scientists hostage, all except for Clark, who escaped down the hatch. They herded the men into a truck at gunpoint, drove them out onto the ice, had them strip naked and walk out into the cold — and let Annie’s ghost decide what to do with them. “I guess she wanted to take them,” Beatrice decides, but “it’s just a story.” More women stand behind her as she asks what happens next, and Danvers says they just came by to inform her that the scientists died due to a slab avalanche — and the case is now closed. (Oh, and they claim they didn’t put Annie’s tongue in the lab. So maybe Annie did that herself?)
Danvers later testifies about Hank’s disappearance, telling the cops that Otis Heiss’ body was found in Hank’s trunk and theorizing it was a drug deal gone bad, with Hank suffering some kind of accident. They ask her about Clark dying the same way that the Tsalal men did, and she concedes it’s odd, but: “Some questions just don’t have answers.” They ask her what happened to Navarro, and we see Danvers going to Navarro’s place and just finding a bare mattress with a stuffed polar bear on it. She also found a phone with video of Raymond Clark making a full confession about the mine’s pollution and how it caused the cancer and stillbirths in the Native community. The mine was later shut down, and she claims not to know Navarro’s whereabouts, but “I don’t think you’ll find Evangeline Navarro out there on the ice.” Then we see her and Leah driving and laughing together, and Danvers standing on a patio and looking out on a picturesque lake — where she’s joined by Navarro. “This is Ennis,” she tells the cops. “Nobody ever really leaves.”
True Detective: Night Country’s case is officially closed, but what did you think of the finale? Give it — and the season — a grade in our polls, and then hit the comments to give us your thoughts.
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