True Detective: Night Country, episode 5, review: some answers, some murder, a lot of ice
The whole of True Detective: Night Country (Sky Atlantic/HBO)has been leading its protagonists out to those mysterious ice caves (aka the Night Country itself) but first, this penultimate episode had some plot housekeeping to take care of.
Is there a connection between the big, bad mining company and the Tsalal research station, from where all of the scientists disappeared? Why yes, there most certainly is. Pete Prior (Finn Bennett), Ennis Police’s assiduous research bloodhound, had finally joined the dots to prove that Silver Sky funded Tsalal in return for Tsalal keeping quiet about Silver Sky polluting the local waters and making the locals ill.
Item two on the loose ends agenda was more Big Mine corruption. Policeman Hank Prior (John Hawkes) has always seemed a little shifty and, in this episode, we found out why – he too is in the pocket of Silver Sky head honcho Kate McKittrick (Ballykissangel’s Dervla Kirwan).
In fact Hank is up to his neck in it: it was he who hacked his own son’s computer, stole all of Pete’s typically thorough research into the Wheeler case, and went and told McKittrick and police chief Connelly (Christopher Eccleston) how Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Navarro (Kali Reis) had shot the domestic abuser, then framed it as suicide. It meant that when Danvers stormed in to Silver Sky HQ to confront McKittrick with the Tsalal smoking gun, she was told to shut down the whole investigation. Blame Hank for the Kompromat.
In fact blame Hank for almost everything – it was also he who, on Silver Sky’s say-so, had moved Annie K’s body. Tsalal, Annie and Silver Sky are all, we now know, intrinsically linked.
McKittrick had also seen footage of Danvers and Navarro trying to enter the Night Country (aka the ice caves on Silver Sky land, where Annie K was killed). But only freaky former engineer Otto Heiss knew how to get in there, and so McKittrick told Hank that he needed to “silence” Heiss.
It all led to the poor old glassy-eyed heroin addict, and so when Danvers took him to her house and Hank followed her there, we were assured a proper ice-cold Mexican (Alaskan?) stand-off. We might have expected Hank to kill Heiss (he did) but what we didn’t expect – and, please, look away now if you haven’t seen the episode – was for Pete to shoot dead his own father, potentially to save the life of Danvers.
For the finale, surely, we are heading for the deep freeze. We know now that was where Annie K was killed but we don’t know by whom or why. We don’t know what’s down there, we don’t know what it’s got to do with Walter Clark (still the only named suspect) and we don’t know either literally or metaphorically how the ice caves connect to the Tsalal research station, or the scientists who died of fright. We certainly don’t know what Fiona Shaw has got to do with any of this, other than that her former partner was Matthew McConaughey’s character’s dad.
Let’s park that, because all roads lead to the cold underground and that, presumably, is where Danvers, Navarro and the rest of us are heading for the series’ conclusion.
Episode five of True Detective: Night Country is on Sky Atlantic on Monday 12 February at 2am and 9pm, and on NOW from Monday; the US broadcast was brought forward to avoid clashing with the Super Bowl