There’s More Than One Way to Explain the New True Detective ’s Ending

True Detective: Night Country wrapped tonight, with a supersized sixth episode that saw detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) finally descend into the much-discussed ice caves, nab the mad scientist Clark, get stuck in the freezing-cold Tsalal Station during a storm, find out the truth about the death of activist Annie K., and figure out—sort of!—who turned the group of scientists into the famous “corpsicle.” Meanwhile, the young deputy Peter Prior (Finn Bennett) goes on his own mission, to bury the father (John Hawkes) he shot in Episode 5.

This is a lot to stuff into 75 minutes, and in classic True Detective fashion, the finale left more than one open question. Writer, director, and showrunner Issa López agreed to sit for an exit interview and entertain some queries about Annie’s tongue, “Danvarro,” and that one line about a “flat circle.” This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Rebecca Onion: A lot of people who consume genre fiction set in the Arctic or the Antarctic suspected that the microorganism the scientists were digging for, under the permafrost, might be making everyone in Ennis go a little bit mad. We found out in this final episode that this was not the case! The microorganism was making the scientists power mad, instead.

Issa López: Yes, it’s the obsession with a microorganism that gets them absolutely mad. This corrupts the ambition of finding something for good, that will change human life, and that will achieve beautiful things, and it makes it into an absolute ego-obsessive trip for fame and glory. To find that answer is not about science or helping humanity anymore. It’s about becoming the ones bringing this to the world.

This explains a little bit why they’re so insular or secretive at the beginning. Maybe that’s just because they’re all collectively spinning out on this idea.

Becoming paranoid. Yes, absolutely right. I did toy with the idea that it was something they find in the ice that’s driving them mad. They dig into this place that they shouldn’t be making holes in, an ancient cave that is obviously a special place, and they keep it a secret. There are all kinds of no-noes in this scenario. But there is already a really good TV series about microorganisms under the ice, which is called Fortitude. I would never make Fortitude. It’s a completely different story. But if people are curious, they should absolutely watch Fortitude, because that goes down that route.

At the end here, how much room is left for the functioning of the supernatural within the story? One of the questions that, I think, remains open, is: Who cut out Annie K’s tongue? How did the tongue end up on the floor of the station? And who is the “she” who is awakening? Are we supposed to know the answer to those questions at the end, or are those supposed to remain open questions?

They’re open questions. However, there are answers. And it’s too late for me to try to put the cork on that first one, because John Hawkes has been going around the world telling everybody that his character, Hank Prior, cut the tongue! I’m more of the school of, Don’t give every answer, because as happens in true crime, you have many answers, but you don’t know exactly how everything went down. But for the character work, John and I talked about it. At the beginning I had my doubts that the character of Hank could have done that. And John very clearly was like, Oh, he did. Hank’s not evil, but he has a job to do at that point. And he’s a hunter. He takes Annie’s body and kicks the dead body, breaking the ribs and all of that, that Navarro describes in the first episode. And then he cuts the tongue, because that drives the message home. So, that was Hank, and now I’m forced to tell it to everybody, because John did. It’s fine. It’s fine!

That said, how the tongue appears six years later in the station, that’s a different question.
The entire series, every single question within the series, there is a rational explanation. There is a Danvers explanation, and then there’s a Navarro explanation. And if you go the Danvers route, who found Annie’s body? It was not Navarro. Navarro was the first on the scene from the police force, but the community, the women, find the body. They cannot take the body. They cannot protect this woman that has been so abused so horribly, and it’s one of them. The one thing they can do is take her tongue, and keep it in a gesture of kindness for their comrade. And Danvers says in Episode 2, “The tongue had some unusual damage, could be from freezing.” So, in this scenario, the women preserve the tongue, and when they take the station, they leave it there as a sign that the time of changing the story that we tell has come.

And then when Navarro, in Episode 6, asks Bee (L’xeis Diane Benson), “What happened to the tongue? Did you put it there?” Bee turns to her and says, “That’s not part of her story.” But look carefully at her performance. You can read it both ways. It’s interesting.

Now, the Navarro story is different. The tongue is cut, it’s left there, and it vanishes. Where does it go? We don’t know. But when the women come and it’s time for the men to pay, something, someone leaves that tongue there, because it’s the time for that story to come to the light and be told. Your decision.

Now, your second question was who is asleep and who wakes up, and all of that?

Yes, that!

This time, there’s no John here who has spilled the beans, so I’m going to be able to be as vague as I love to be. Clark is convinced the “she” is Annie, that the spirit of Annie has always been in that cave forever, before the ice was ice. And will be there forever because time is a flat circle. That’s Clark’s story. And what’s waiting for the men out there, in Clark’s mind, is probably Annie. The same way that, when the engineer, Otis Heiss (Klaus Tange), and his buddies found the cave, they woke that spirit of Annie and it came for them, because that place should not be messed with. This is the Clark explanation, right?

The women tell us, they went into her home, into her place, and woke her up and killed her daughter and she ate their souls from the inside out—I really like that one.

And Danvers would say, “No, no, no. There’s a cave in there which has some fossils in an interesting shape, because fish can swim in that way and get frozen, and it does have a secret feel to it, but it’s just a cave. This is where the men dug, and then they were taken by the women because they killed Annie. And they were sent into the dark without their clothes, and they died there with a flash moment of freezing, and they had all the signs of delirium because of hypothermia and of all the self-harming that can come with that.” So, everything has a rational explanation. Your decision.

You brought up Clark’s “time is a flat circle” line. What went into the decision to have him say that line, which is so famous, from Season 1?

I felt a very important need to establish that it’s the same universe as Season 1, that while this happens in Ennis, Alaska, in 2023, in 2014 those murders were happening in Louisiana. And if I’m talking about Alaska, which is the place where Rust Cohle’s (Matthew McConaughey’s) father died, it would be very weird not to talk about it. So, every single time the connections happen organically in the story, I put them there, but it had to come from the story.

Similarly, if I have a symbol in my story that signifies the proximity of that place where everything went down, which also connects possibly with a supernatural level where God’s asleep, and there’s a symbol for the same thing in the first season, it would be very weird to use two different symbols. It should be the same one, right? So, the spiral.

Now, I have a mad scientist, literally a mad scientist, in Episode 6, explaining why he’s convinced that Annie’s a spirit, which is a bigger force than a single woman, and has inhabited that cave forever, for all the ages. And that is not because it’s eternal, it’s because time means nothing for scientists. Time is a construct. Time is a flat circle, and that is a concept that comes from quantum physics. So, while he’s trying to explain this, it’s obviously the line that comes organically.

All of this also is making me think more about Clark and Annie’s relationship, and it puts a new spin on it. It’s interesting that he was thinking of her as some eternal feminine.

I think that he was absolutely enthralled. The fact that he sees the spiral on her back that he knows is a spiral down there in the cave, and he’s losing his mind, as you said, in the obsession of this search. And then he sees this woman who has the same symbol and his mind is going places, and he actually falls in love with her at a human level. But I think that his madness is already boiling underneath, and then everything explodes and he ends up murdering her with his own hands. And I think that the story he tells himself is that he was stopping her suffering because she was going to die anyway, right? But we don’t know that. I think that there was a chance that she could have survived, had he tried.

That’s what will destroy his mind. The cognitive dissonance between I loved her and she was the most important thing and I killed her for this. And the only thing that keeps him from exploding is deciding that she’s eternal, that she’s indestructible and will come back.

As a sort of self-soothing mechanism?

Yes. Which might be not completely a lie!

Speaking of people who are fucked for life, is Peter Prior going to be fucked for life?

In Danvers’ words, “It’s crazy the shit we survive.” I think he’s not. I definitely very much profoundly think he’s not. I think he is a virgin spirit, throughout the entire series up until that point. He does have a moral compass. He’s truly trying to do the right thing. He is so confused about the fact that the person who he looks up to committed a murder, and he doesn’t know what to do with that. He wishes he didn’t know, but he found out, because he’s good at what he was trained to be good at. And then he’s confronted with a moment where there’s no possible action except pulling that trigger on his father. And he commits the original sin: Killing your brother or your father, especially your parents, is the original sin. However, he’s destroying an evil origin.

Hank is everything that is pulling him to the dark, to not be himself and to not grow up and to not live his own life. And I’m absolutely not promoting the idea that you have to go around shooting your father, for fuck’s sake, but I will say that in relationship to this particular series.

I’m not saying that he’s not going to carry it his entire life. Doesn’t seem like the type of place where you go to therapy, Ennis, but it feels like this will also allow him to explode out of himself and grow in different ways. Carrying that pain, carrying that doubt forever. But he’s going to make it. He’s going to be fine.

You kind of see it in the fact that his wife finally kisses him.

I know. And then he’s in bed with his baby at the very end.

Speaking of people who have redemption arcs, what about Liz Danvers? She starts out in the first couple of episodes pretty darn unlikable, and it seems like at the end she’s softened through the events of what’s happened, and is almost reborn when she goes down into the ice and then comes back up.

Yes, because she has to die. She really dies. This is a woman who has effectively frozen her past, her pain, her loss, her life in a knot of bitterness and irony. And let’s be clear, as Connelly (Christopher Eccleston) says, she was not nice to start with. She was a difficult woman forever. And I worked on it with Jodie. Jodie was very clear: “Let’s not make a woman that was perfectly fine and then went through tragedy and became shitty.” No, no, no. She was a tough fucking bitch from the very beginning, because she grows up in this incredibly male-dominated, push-and-shove culture.

And then she goes through a horrible tragedy, and she becomes shittier. And her emotions are completely frozen, and she’s terrified of being quiet with herself. She has to play white noise when she’s alone, because otherwise she’s going to start to feel and think. Throughout the series, she’s pushed and forced into facing the things she carries, into facing the loss, into facing the fear she feels for her stepdaughter. She cannot love her, because she’s terrified of loss. And she cannot allow anybody too close, because when they get too close, she has to push them back. As Navarro says in Episode 2, “You’re going to break Prior’s heart, because when you get too close, you have to break our heart. You kick us back.”

In the end she’s faced with the ghost of her dead child. And I’m not saying a literal ghost, but she has to face the fact that he’s dead and gone, and face the pain of losing him. And she speaks about it finally. She falls through the ice and dies—I think her pulse basically stops. Navarro has to bring her out of the ice and back to life and force her to breathe. And then she can talk about Holden, and then she can cry, and then she can move on finally.

And it’s not that after that she is going to be Mother Teresa, because she won’t, but she’s going to be better. I think she’s going to be kinder to herself and kinder to others. And we see her in the car with Leah, and they’re laughing. And Leah has her tattoo lines on her chin. So, this is a different woman we see.

You may be aware that there is a contingent of people, including at least one writer for Slate.com, who want Danvers and Navarro to get together?

Oh, I know. I read it somewhere, that made me laugh so hard and I sent it to Jodie and Kali, where they called the couple “Danvarro,” which—I love it. I love it!

You see at the end there’s an opening for that, where they’re together looking out to sea from Danvers’ deck—but maybe not.

Well, listen. HBO paid me to write six episodes, and I didn’t write seven. They wanted me to write seven. And I was like, No, it’s six, it’s six, it’s six. What I’m saying is, everything that happens after this series is yours. It’s yours! Navarro is a character that is established in the story is bisexual. Danvers is pretty fucking damn straight. But that said, she’s 60, life’s short!

The truth of the matter is, it is a love story. It’s a profound, profound love story. And I wrote it as nonromantic, because I think that there are definitely loves that are deeper than romantic love. And I’m a firm believer in this, and I believe these women love each other to a level and to a depth that goes beyond romance for me. But Episode 7 is yours, guys. It’s not mine. Go for it.