True Detective: Night Country Is One of the Best Examples of a Very Particular Kind of Horror

Mild spoilers for all six episodes of True Detective: Night Country below.

As someone born in the Land of the Midnight Sun, and a longtime traveler through its wilderness, I noticed my ears perk up when the trailers rolled out for Issa López’s Max series True Detective: Night Country. The frigid setting of Alaska is near and dear to my heart; this season, which concludes on Sunday, also promised to combine some of my favorite genres—noir, suspense, and supernatural horror. To live in wintertime Alaska is to cultivate an affinity for extreme cold and darkness, or at least a stoic indifference. The oldest, most rural communities are akin to ice-bright stars in a constellation—geographically isolated, adrift upon a black sea. Reachable by radio wave, by sailing, by flight. Their streets and roads spiral from town center axes into surrounding hills worn to the gumline by eons of wind, connecting to nothing, vanishing like the ends of hemorrhaged veins into the vast empty. It’s a land where voices echo and the wind moaning across the tundra sounds an awful lot like ghosts. Season 4’s aesthetic captures the essence of loneliness, of estrangement, particular to the Arctic.

Where does Night Country land in the tradition of “polar” horror and suspense? One can trace this season’s roots to 19^th-century works The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1838) and Jules Verne’s An Antarctic Mystery (1897), via Night Country’s foregrounding of Tsalal Research Station, where eight scientists have vanished under exceedingly ominous circumstances. Night Country also joins a cinematic catalog that includes, among many others, 1951’s The Thing From Another World (and John Carpenter’s seminal 1982 remake); Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001); Smilla’s Sense of Snow (1997); 30 Days of Night (2007); and the more recent streaming series Fortitude (Season 1, 2015) and The Terror (Season 1, 2018). While Night Country bears certain hallmarks of these works (conspiracy, corruption, paranoia, isolation), an ethereal undercurrent of magical realism sets it apart from the pack. Despite the show’s heritage as the latest installment of a well-established series and its complement of inescapable references to a broader array of like-minded narratives, Night Country turns out to be as slippery as a seal and just as elusive.

Season 4 dispenses with the violent, broken, hypermasculine protagonists of Season 1, inverting the formula by centering women and affording them greater agency in what is otherwise classic mystery noir. Historically, this has been a male-dominated subgenre in terms of POV characters, which makes Night Country’s take refreshing. Smilla’s Sense of Snow—the 1992 novel by Peter Høeg, as well as the 1997 film, each of which featured an alienated, yet persistent female protagonist—certainly left tracks for López to follow. The thing about noir is that irrespective of gender, everybody’s generally in crisis. Characters react to trauma along a predictable spectrum. They self-medicate via sex and liquor, or stronger. And when push comes to shove, hash is bound to get settled with violence.

Rather than a 180-degree reversal, divergences between Seasons 1 and 4 tend to be a matter of mirroring and jagged, splintered refraction. The detectives at the heart of this darkness drink, fornicate, fight at the drop of a deerstalker hat, and brood with the best of male hard-bitten protagonists from Alaska to Scandinavia. Jodie Foster’s Liz Danvers is a cool and competent foil, as we’d expect; meanwhile, Kali Reis’ Evangeline Navarro seethes with volcanic wrath. Both cops harbor secrets. Their collegial enmity and bitterness easily rival the dysfunctional Season 1 duo of Rustin Cohle and Martin Hart.

If you squint, Liz Danvers presents as a version of Clarice Starling, hero of The Silence of the Lambs. Night Country posits a Clarice who never escaped her small-town provenance, never exorcised the demons of the barn, never shipped off to finishing school at Quantico. No, this character inherits the post of local sheriff and is duly subsumed by the squalor and pettiness of the role. Consequently, Danvers is less refined, less constrained than Starling. Indeed, beneath her dogged, by-the-book persona, she’s wildly undisciplined, a boozy philanderer willing to abet a murder or two if the cause is righteous. Devastated by personal tragedy, terminally cynical, and trapped in the purgatorial amber of small-town Alaska, she’s the deep roller Dr. Lecter warned her alter ego about.

Evangeline Navarro is the nucleus of Season 4: the living, reacting causeway traversing worlds and cultures. She is a damaged crusader who won’t abandon an old murder investigation and a seer with one foot in the realms beyond, plagued by whispering spirits. Most important, she bears witness to the numinous. In a moment of overboiling frustration, she fishes an orange from her parka pocket and hurls it across the ice. The orange mysteriously rolls back to her from the opposite direction, and we are reminded of an earlier scene featuring a close-up of a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), abandoned half-read at Tsalal Station. This conjures to mind a passage of the novel wherein Judge Holden, the big bad, enthralls a band of scalp hunters with his fireside meditation on the natures of God, man, and warfare. He flings a coin into the desert night, only for the object to unerringly arc back into his hand. The recurring orange and coin suggest the mutability of physics, of reality at large. Time is circular, distance illusory, free will a charade. All matter, all space, condenses to an origin point if your field of view is broad enough. Or maybe it’s a parlor trick and we’re rubes. Chicanery and magic bear a close resemblance in the dark. The same could be argued of events in Ennis, the perspectives of its residents.

I appreciate Easter eggs as much as the next guy, but Season 4 verges on overstuffed in the areas of fan service, hidden cookies, and callbacks. Danvers’ child, Holden, as in Judge Holden. “Time is a flat circle.” Harking back to Season 1, and against all logic, the Tuttle empire has dramatically expanded in scope. Rustin Cohle’s dad, Travis, is a revenant; his dad’s lover, Rose Aguineau, a druid. Obsession with vision, as demonstrated by the appearance of a one-eyed polar bear (an echo of Rust’s tiny mirror). The recurring spiral, which acts as a warning of thin ice, insignia of a blood cult, or more esoterically, a representation of the orbital pattern of a frozen dwarf planet named Sedna. The Thing represented in various character names (Blair and Clark), the cover of a DVD, and the gruesome “corpsicle,” which resembles the alien creature from Carpenter’s aforementioned 1982 film caught midtransformation.

It’s a thin line between love and hate, as the song goes.

Conversely, director/writer López gets that less is more in terms of philosophizing. She deftly winnows the fat from Season 1’s exchanges between Hart and Cohle and their various antagonists. Instead of warmed-over Thomas Ligotti or Nietzsche-adjacent monologues, López hits us with rarer, pithier quotes, then steps away to let them do their work. A chief example of this occurs when Rose, Ennis’ local hermit, says to her collaborator, after deep-sixing a corpse, “I guess you’re thinking the worst part is done. It’s not. What comes after, forever, that’s the worst fucking part.” On another occasion, someone remarks that Navarro’s belief in God must be a comfort as it suggests we’re not alone in the abyss of creation. She responds, “No, we’re alone. God too.” Thus ends the interaction. This is in keeping with the austere nature of the backdrop, and the prosaic bleakness of life on the Alaskan frontier.

Irrational explanations aren’t explicit or coherent this season as they would be in a wholly fantastical drama. Rather, mystical elements align with the overall direction of the series. Things that go bump in the night are coyly open to interpretation until the last moment; even then, López provides a fig leaf of rationality for those who shy from the occult. So it goes with the denouement of Night Country. The riddle’s answer is ambiguous; several strings are left dangling. However, this time the cleanest, most obvious solution happens to be the ineffable one: Trooper Navarro is an avatar/vessel of the Inuit goddess Sedna, awakened to exact vengeance upon the men who violated nature and poisoned her faithful. Sedna is angry, and she works in not-so-mysterious ways.

The “Yellow King” storyline that kicked off True Detective in 2014 was set in the South, the geographical and narrative antipodes of Night Country—an oppositional scenario that at once delineates artistic incongruencies (hot vs. cold, light vs. dark) while reifying what the seasons share in common, namely a quest for truth carried out across physical and emotional wastelands.

Season 1 teased supernatural horror fans before ultimately revealing that the otherworldly elements were merely trappings. Brilliant as the initial arc was, it pulled some punches during the latter stages, seeming to lack the courage of its convictions; an existential nightmare undercut with the unmasking of a Scooby-Doo villain and a dose of unearned optimism. By contrast, Night Country grows stronger, weirder, with each episode. The twisting narrative and stellar acting performances build to a crescendo, fulfilling an initial audacious promise that there is more beneath heaven than dreamt of in our philosophy. Not only is the world stranger than we imagine, we passengers on this odyssey will simply have to live with that revelation. I count myself among those who doubted that López would really go there despite the eeriness of the first couple of episodes.

Wrong.

Usually, there’s an all-too-human monster at the end of a terrible dream. But sometimes there’s an angel or a devil. What comes after has always been waiting; it will be, forever. Season 4’s dreamlike aftermath leaves us as haunted as the denizens of Ennis.