‘True Detective’ Finale: What Was This Season Really About?

Michele K. Short/HBO

This article contains spoilers for True Detective: Night Country, including tonight's season finale.

The backlash around True Detective: Night Country was predictable. Crime bros of all types cling to Season 1 of True Detective the way Swifties do to Speak Now: it was purer, more fun, sui generis. They aren’t fully wrong either. Season 1 had a spooky cult and a big, disfigured, incestuous serial killer. The last 20 minutes of the season finale were the last 20 minutes of Silence of the Lambs for young men of the DraftKings, craft bourbon and War on Drugs set. I’m not immune to those charms.

And sure: Night Country's ‘corpsicle’ was a not particularly creative riff on Carpenter’s The Thing. The dialogue could feel stilted. Not incorrect. But there were no hackles raised over the first season’s Schopenhauer-meets-Sour-Diesel monologues about time’s geometry, which have aged like milk (Woody Harrelson’s bayou working-man bullshit remains superior). The same fans who heard profundity there were also likely the people that wanted to take Season 2 seriously and blanched at Season 3’s unsentimental takes on aging and error. It’s little surprise that a True Detective season about how the sacred feminine and supernatural blur and that takes place in a deeply unsexy small town filled with indigenous arctic culture and people in puff jackets might frustrate them.

I found a contemporary urgency and echo in Night Country, though. A month ago, just as the season premiere rolled out, another arctic vortex rushed down the middle of the country, a product of an increasingly unstable polar cap. In the south, aluminum glamour trucks and their drivers skittered across a fungus of highway ice. In Kansas City, Taylor Swift swag-surfed in a toasty suite as the beer cans of the freezing proletariat around her exploded. In the Dakotas? The wind chill numbers sounded fictional.

In that sense, Night Country’s arrival could not have been timed better. Filmed in Iceland, and set in a fictional Alaskan town, Night Country embraced the arctic cold as a kind of spiritual zone, wrapping its very well insulated arms around everything that the setting had to offer. People could see the dead, the night never ended, and the indigenous Iñupiaq culture grappled with the local mine as a toxic, economically potent reality, and a research station’s core samples of ice became religious relics for the climate-change era.

In previous iterations of True Detective, the world around each pair of boozy, haunted cops pulsed with heat: the sweltering caul of Louisiana in the first season and the scratchier heat of the Ozarks’s cottonwood, pine, and pollen in the third. I admire how Night Country maximized all features of the cold weather crime canon. In many stories, the cold becomes a metaphor for something else entirely: middle-aged guilt in Insomnia (2002); the naiveté of Americans overseas in TransSiberian (2008); the facades we drape over barbarism in A Simple Plan (1998); the bloody entropy of the Vietnam War coming home in Season 2 of Fargo (2015). These stories range from interesting to excellent, but ultimately portray the cold as more of a motif.

The subgenre to which Night Country belongs might be called cold as overlord. Think of The Thing, John Carpenter’s 1982 masterpiece, or the contemporary grindhouse gem The Grey (2011). Two outstanding graphic novels fit the bill too: Greg Rucka’s crime thriller Whiteout and Steve Niles’s vampire story 30 Days of Night. In Whiteout a female US Marshal is sent to Antarctica as punishment and has to solve a murder spree among an assemblage of dudes. 30 Days of Night has a pack of vampires descend to feed on a remote arctic community that doesn’t see sunlight for months at a time. This season’s showrunner Issa López was a fan. Fingerprints from both smudged Night Country’s visual profile.

In warm-weather crime stories, time stretches its legs. There’s room for shaggy stories by the beach with dark rum, coconut puree and a little umbrella smoothing out the body count. In cold everything concentrates and accelerates. Night Country summed up Ennis’s reality in flashes: the microwave stationed bedside in a mine worker’s cell-sized room; 20 dollars for a pack of cookies at the local store; windows that crank open from the bottom to minimize heat loss; glimpses of Iñupiaq rituals of birth, tattooing, singing.

Alongside the physical details, Night Country had an icy magic realism, a spirit world layered on top of the material one, accessible only to the locals. Only when you see ghosts can you become a local. The quantitative and deeply male worlds of the mine and the lab are found lacking. In the season premiere, in an arctic research station mysteriously emptied of all men, the “Twist and Shout” scene from Ferris Bueller plays on a DVD loop in the lounge—could there be a better scene to telegraph carefree male vibes?

All the cold in the world and woolen layers couldn’t hide the show’s burning core, the eyes of its two stars, particularly Kali Reis as Iñupiaq state trooper Navarro. With her boxing-honed frame, Reis cleared doorways like a wraith, broke up barfights, and generally carved through every scene. Her eyes narrowed with skepticism when dealing with the drunks and do-nothings around her and opened wide when sympathizing with her ill sister and revisiting the ghosts of both her time in the military and the cold case that haunts her.

Playing a law enforcement officer—an Alaskan police chief with a reputation and a fuck-you attitude to match— for the first time since the Silence of the Lambs, Jodie Foster’s molten intelligence carried the procedural moments. Clarice Starling was an eager prodigy from the hills; Danvers is a crusty vet who rages at her own family. But then and now, any shot of Foster’s face scrutinizing case files is like Serena firing groundstrokes or Georgia O’Keefe wielding watercolors at sunset. There’s nothing in American entertainment like it.

Specific scenes in Night Country echoed Starling’s legacy. In a pivotal scene in Silence of the Lambs, Starling disperses a gaggle of sheriff’s deputies before an autopsy in Appalachia using her native accent and home-culture nous. There’s a wonderful inversion in an early episode of Night Country. Foster’s Danvers curses at the young police bros who dick around and take selfies by a frozen corpse. She’s the boss now.

It is interesting that two most prominent characters indebted to Foster’s Clarice Starling, Winter’s Bone’s Ree Dolly and Girl with a Dragon Tattoo’s Lisbeth Salander, both ply their trade in the cold, and in the face of violent, patriarchal subcultures. Like their forerunner, they survive on their resourcefulness and resolve. Reis‘s Navarro is a blunter tool than Starling was, but her weaving together of her honed police skills and lived cultural experience evokes Starling’s supreme intuition. She too belongs to the Starling matriarchal line.

Night Country isn’t a masterpiece. I found the corpsicle’s resolution—the women who worked on the base and in the town took communal revenge on the scientists—a little pat, close to Agatha Christie. That the scientists encouraged the mine to melt the permafrost to better access core samples for potentially world-altering medicine is too complicated by half. In a power ranking, I’d slot this season right next to Season 3, and streets ahead of Season 2. Season 1 is still the most realized—but the idea that it’s somehow a sacred totem that Night Country defaced feels deeply cringe and a little Cheeto-dust-on-the-keyboard incel-y.

The online anger reflects the deeply aspirational energy around the entire True Detective franchise, this hunger on the part of fans to see it considered a peer of The Sopranos or The Wire. Witness the young bro procedural that reached the land of prestige! You imagine the word “elevate” being thrown around the way that VC-backed restaurant groups want to “elevate” Peruvian or Polish cuisine for influencers. The first season was extremely well executed comfort food, all crooked clergy and fun house scares. The third danced with classic detective tropes—the aging cop, the accidental conspiracy. Night Country is memorable, interesting, and, yeah, pretty good.

It’s a burden of genre. Young Adult writers want to be for more than kids. You’ve got to tag the word “literary” on publishing genres like horror or thriller because many readers don’t want to feel lowbrow. Some shows dive into genre and emerge confident and memorable. Justified embraced its Appalachian-Western DNA and unironically committed to the beats. It earned the right to have its operatic season 2 and breathless season 4 be considered top drawer TV.

Night Country’s biggest sin is that its themes and ideas don’t quite match the mystical mode it leans on. The more sober messages of the story land better: we are fucking up the ecosystem beyond repair; cutting one’s self off from the spiritual and the sacred is sad; community responses can overpower individual ones. There’s a global exigence too. The season’s vision of winter echoes because winter itself is more and more a fantasy for the world at large. Setting a story in a world that will have ice and cold as long as those two elements exist on earth now qualifies as a kind of magic realism. Winter in most of the world was a season that once ebbed and flowed. It’s now become a series of blasts. Floods where there should be carpets of snow. Queasy months of heat where there should be a chill. The streak of 700 days in New York without snow was just broken. The Great Lakes ice retreats.

I lived through the 2021 Texas deep freeze, and saw the energy capital of America glitch and halt. And I remember the most surreal part: an empire of ice and snow and cold eradicated in 72 hours by the sixty-degree days that followed. The secrets in the biggest, most important realms of ice promise bad news for all. As the permafrost in Siberia melts, epidemiologists fear ancient pathogens are as ready to run wild on our 9-billion-person world like a bachelorette party bursting out of an AirBnB in Nashville. The center cannot hold.

Maybe the best comp for True Detective: Night Country is the ne plus ultra of cold weather crime: the 21^st century Scandinavian noir boom. For about twenty years, Scandinavian writers ran the show in the world of crime, thriller, and noir publishing. Readers could not get enough of Lutheran silences, brutal crimes, pickled fish and high functioning alcoholism. The screen adaptations hit all four quadrants. There were franchises: Steig Larsson and the Dragon Tattoo trilogy and Henning Mankell’s Wallander books. There were dazzling one offs and wild swings. The cold and darkness could play the partner, the antagonist, or the disinterested, watch-maker god. Each country had their tics. In Sweden the stories tended toward financial crimes and the country’s two-faced relationship with its refugees (welcome but not really welcome). Finland’s books grappled with the heavy-political-breathing of its neighbor Russia. Most pertinent to Night Country, Icelandic stories tended to center identity and mysticism.

Fitting for the—let’s be real here—deeply gendered backlash Night Country has endured, female crime novelists have triumphed in Scandinavia. They’ve offered overlaps with their male peers and provided refreshing counterbalances. Icelandic writer Yrsa Sigurðardóttir and Norwegian writer Karin Fossum have their unbothered, middle-aged female cops and lawyers do the gazing at the buried bodies and withering coasts. Like those authors, Night Country looks at human crime as a reflection of the natural world along with the social one. But it’s a fun house reflection like the one ice offers: warped, melting, the exact human face just an angle or divot off. Or, as Fiona Shaw’s village weirdo in Night Country says: “The world is getting old, and the fabric of all things is coming apart at the seams.”

Originally Appeared on GQ