True Detective: Night Country Delivers Long Alaskan Nights and a Chilling Central Mystery

The debut season of True Detective was a cultural lightning rod bolstered by disquieting direction, nihilistic soliloquies, and deep-seated nastiness that made it feel like battery acid was being poured onto your brain. While on the surface, it fit in nicely with the rest of HBO’s prestige portfolio, its weird horror influences and distinctive prose made it an anomaly that’s only proven more singular with time. Unfortunately, its sequels didn’t receive the same degree of praise. The second season of this anthology met backlash due to its significant departures from what came before, and although the third was better liked, its lack of buzz made it seem like the show’s moment in the limelight had passed.

After a five-year break, we finally have a follow-up, True Detective: Night Country. It’s the first time the series creator Nic Pizzolatto isn’t handling the script, with Issa López (Tigers Are Not Afraid) acting as the showrunner, director, and lead writer. In many ways, this distance from the original crew benefits this new installment. While there are parallels and direct callouts to its predecessor, the different voices involved allow this entry to come across as a well-considered response to the initial season instead of another lesser imitator. Through its cast of compelling and flawed characters, supernatural undertones, and chilling setting, it convincingly conveys the frigid dread of endless arctic nights and the ghosts that haunt this tundra.

We follow Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), detectives in Ennis, Alaska who find themselves sucked into an intertwined pair of unsolved deaths. The first is a cold case where a local indigenous woman, Annie K, was murdered after protesting against the local mine, while in the second, a group of scientists from a nearby research station were found frozen in the ice amidst perplexing circumstances. As the duo start digging, they’re forced to face elements of their own pasts as they unearth hidden truths about their community.

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The story begins at the start of the Polar Night, as this Alaskan town is submerged in a continuous darkness that makes room for López to flex her expertise as a horror filmmaker. Although True Detective is no stranger to riffing on our fears, Night Country leans even further into the anxiety-inducing aspects of its setting, emphasizing both the deadliness of the cold and the potential dangers that lurk in the dark. Even as it builds on the aesthetic identities of other arctic horror stories like The Thing (a DVD copy of the film appears in an early scene), it finds its own vibe by doubling down on supernatural elements.

As a character expresses in the premiere, “I think the world is getting old, and Ennis is where the fabric of all things is coming apart at the seams.” This is a place with so much history that the boundaries between life and death are muddled, and López captures this at a high level, with ominous establishing shots that emphasize how these people are surrounded by a hostile tundra that’s been largely unchanged for eons, and in more intimate sequences where characters witness unsettling or outright horrifying sights that seem to have no natural explanation.

The emphasis on scares ties in nicely with the overarching mystery as Danvers and Navarro get to the bottom of their cases. Each piece of evidence invites additional questions as these episodes play with the tensions between the explainable and the paranormal. It leads to the type of spiraling intrigue that defines the best detective stories, pulling us deeper into this spellbinding yarn as we hope to understand the meaning of enigmatic symbols or provocative clues. And beyond just being engrossing, it also connects to the backstories of our central partners and this place’s broader past.

Much of this latest season’s appeal extends from our leading characters, a deeply flawed pair who grapple with traumatic family histories. Of the two, Navarro frequently feels like the heart of this story. Driven by a borderline obsession to solve a case that parallels her past, Kali Reis deftly captures the character’s drive, anger, and occasional tenderness, particularly regarding her troubled sister Julia (Aka Niviâna). Her multifaceted performance communicates how Navarro is torn between contrasting elements, a woman of Iñupiat descent whose sympathy for her fellow locals is at odds with her role as a police officer.

Jodie Foster’s Danvers contrasts and overlaps with her partner in interesting ways, a conservative cop whose antagonism and fraying relationship with her step-daughter ties into unresolved grief. Like her co-star, Foster gives an excellent performance, conveying self-destructive tendencies and a combativeness that pushes others away. The extended cast, a similarly complicated and captivating bunch, demonstrate the lingering scars of this region that are etched in permafrost, and their personal journeys prove as engaging as the broader whodunit.

As alluded to, this latest run comes across as a clear response to the first. While the most obvious connections are faint plot ties and playfully presented easter eggs, the more pressing points of comparison are its thematic rebuttals. If the original is about a particular brand of tortured white masculinity, as Rust and Marty brood over their place in the world, this latest stretch follows women, many of whom are indigenous Alaskans. As López described, “Where True Detective is male and it’s sweaty, Night Country is cold and it’s dark and it’s female.” Specifically, this is a story where characters like Navarro are responding to the type of sensationalized violence against women that’s at the center of most true crime.

Additionally, as we delve deeper into the overarching mystery, it becomes clear that this tale is preoccupied with questions of colonialism and environmentalism. Navarro struggles with feelings of estrangement regarding her heritage and has to reconcile her role in the ongoing violence that the local police propagate. As she and Danvers collect clues, it becomes clear there’s something wrong with the local mine, and growing unrest helmed by people of indigenous descent leads to clashes with the cops, who are allied with corporate interests. These detectives’ cases and family problems naturally overlap with these topics, as their sleuthing uncovers hidden truths that broach this subject matter without ever feeling didactic.

If there’s one notable shortcoming, the climax doesn’t feel as sharp as the rest of its run. With only six episodes to the previous season’s eight, it feels as though the show ran out of time, resulting in a somewhat lukewarm finale that lacked the icy bite found elsewhere. It’s always difficult to provide satisfying answers to what’s in a mystery box, and although the concepts explored in these closing moments have substance, their presentation feels somewhat anticlimactic. Additionally, I’m not entirely sure what I’m supposed to take from one character’s final decision, which seemed to somewhat undermine their journey.

Still, even if its ending left me a little cold, True Detective: Night Country feels like a fulfillment of what this anthology series was always supposed to be. It taps into its predecessor’s gripping and otherworldly qualities while also carving out its own space and ideas. It focuses not only on the textural details of its Alaskan setting, with direction that emphasizes the deadly chill of impossibly long nights, but also delves into the underlying hurt of the people who live there. The result is an engrossing mystery story that makes me hope we haven’t seen the last of this oddball police procedural.

True Detective: Night Country premieres Sunday, January 14th on HBO and streaming on Max.

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves videogames, film, and creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.

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