By Peg Aloi
When the identities of the guilty are finally revealed in this new season of a superb True Detective, it is terrifying and glorious.
Kali Reis and Jodie Foster in True Detective: Night Country. Photo: HBO
This compelling new season of True Detective was originally conceived as a stand-alone drama series, not a follow-up to the HBO hit. Nevertheless, creator Issa López has beautifully crafted a new paradigm for the series that also pays homage to the themes and imagery of Nic Pizzolatto’s original creation. Often hailed by critics as one of the finest television series of the past decade, True Detective premiered ten years ago this month. Starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as Louisiana detectives revisiting their investigation of a still-unsolved occult murder spree, Pizzolatto set a high bar for a character-driven anti-hero narrative that also satisfied storytelling tropes of true crime, occultism, and corrupt police behavior.
Two more seasons followed, with similar narrative structures featuring two detectives of opposing styles and personalities working together on horrific crimes. But new locations (a suburb of Los Angeles and the Ozarks, respectively), casts, and characters were featured. Until now, all three pairs of detectives have been men. Night Country not only chooses a distinctive and little-seen setting (a small remote town in Alaska), but pairs two female detectives of disparate backgrounds and temperaments. The focus on women does not end there: the unsolved murder of Annie K., a local indigenous midwife and activist, hovers over the town like an angry ghost.
As the pilot opens, the season of winter darkness, just before winter solstice, has just begun up north. State trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis of Catch the Fair One) is summoned to investigate the sudden disappearance of eight scientists from the Tsalal research facility. After a human tongue is found, Navarro suspects a link to Annie K,. whose tongue was also removed in a brutal attack. Navarro, with ancestral ties to the local community, is personally troubled by the unsolved case and wants to pursue it alongside the missing persons investigation. Before her death, Annie K. took part in environmental protests against the Silver Sky mining company, Ennis’ main industry. Demonstrators insisted that toxins were poisoning the town’s drinking water, affecting many indigenous households.
The chief of police in Ennis, Alaska, Elizabeth Danvers (Jodie Foster, who shines in this juicy role) is called to the scene. Despite their obvious dislike for one another, stemming from a mysterious event from their past, Navarro asks to work on the case with Danvers to explore possible connections to the unsolved murder. Liz Danvers is prickly, arrogant, and moves through the crime scene with efficiency and authority. She generally likes her job, but resents being posted to such a remote location. She berates her senior detective Hank (John Hawkes of Winter’s Bone and Martha, Marcy May, Marlene) for his incompetence. She defers to her superior, regional chief of police Ted Connelly (Christopher Eccleston, a world-class British actor who’s made a career playing rough Americans). He grudgingly allows her to keep the crime in her jurisdiction, with an unspoken caveat that it might be given over to his own team if Liz steps out of line, hinting at the complex history of their relationship.
Along with this unfolding major crime investigation, Liz’s teenage stepdaughter Leah (brilliant newcomer Isabella Star LaBlanc) is getting in trouble at school. We don’t learn much about Leah’s deceased father, but we know he was indigenous and that Leah’s efforts to immerse herself in her native heritage are a source of tension. Liz is a loving parent but her job takes priority — a common trope in the gritty detective genre. Brilliant crime-solving skills inevitably exact a high personal cost that often includes loneliness. Things are kicked up a notch after the scientists are found near their secretive facility: they are naked and frozen solid in the snow, their faces contorted in fear. Danvers relies on Hank’s son Peter (Finn Bennett), a smart junior cop, to do lots of the research legwork. He has to be on call at all hours, something his young wife Kayla, attending night school and caring for their infant son, doesn’t appreciate. Danvers sees the smart and thorough Peter as a protégé but, given her dysfunctional relationships with men (her past affairs with the small town’s roster of married men is an ongoing joke), their connection generates jealousy and enmity.
Navarro (called Angie by her friends) is similarly standoffish and tough.It seems to come with the territory of serving as a small town cop in a mining town. But her tenderness comes through in her devotion to the town’s indigenous women, who work tirelessly as midwives when they’re not employed as cleaners. Angie keeps her boyfriend Eddie (Joel Montgrand, one of many fine First Nations actors in the cast) on the down-low; he is a hardworking, kindhearted local who might be Angie’s salvation if she’d let him love her. Navarro also maintains an intriguing friendship with Rose Aguineau (the inimitable Fiona Shaw, all bow down!), a fascinating character whose life is a wild combination of living off the land and enjoying sophisticated pleasures. A sort of village wise woman and badass grandma figure, Rose offers terse but loving guidance to any who seek her counsel.
In this rural, frozen setting, as bleak as a dystopian moonscape, life is lived on a knife’s edge. Small town gossip and grudges prevail. Nearly everyone has a gleam of desperation in their eye; masterful casting has rounded up actors who imbue even minor characters with depth and complexity. The performances here are uniformly terrific. Just when you think there’s not quite enough for the excellent Hawkes to do, he and Foster unexpectedly butt heads — suddenly, it’s on, baby!
Fans of the series will note the ongoing references to the original. Danvers keeps telling Navarro and Peter (whom she considers intellectual peers) to “ask the right questions” just as Rust Cohle (McConaughey) did when being interviewed by officers about the killer who got away. Marty (Harrelson) treats women badly and uses them sexually, similarly to how Danvers treats men. A spiral symbol (similar to the one discovered on the first murder victim in Season 1) keeps showing up as a wall carving or a tattoo. There’s even a sly nod to Marty’s early boast of having a “big ass dick” via the multiple close-ups of the tiny, shriveled, and frozen penises of the naked scientists. Patriarchy is on display and rightly skewered. Food becomes a fascinating focal point, a vehicle for conflict, comfort, and nurturing.
What’s missing here is the consistently brilliant dialogue that crackled between Rust and Marty who, like Danvers and Navarro, are acrimonious cops partnered against their will. This new version doesn’t supply the original’s thrilling story arc: watching how poor life choices and lingering trauma push a collaboration between two brilliant but flawed detectives to an ugly confrontation. Then again, these are women, and women don’t have the spare time for petty ego tripping: they have killers to find. And, when those killers are eventually revealed, it is terrifying and glorious.
Peg Aloi is a former film critic for the Boston Phoenix and member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Critics Choice Awards, and the Alliance for Women Film Journalists. She taught film studies in Boston for over a decade. She writes on film, TV, and culture for web publications like Time, Vice, Polygon, Bustle, Mic, Orlando Weekly, and Bloody Disgusting. Her blog “The Witching Hour” can be found on substack.