True Detective: Night Country, finale: macho crime drama gets a neat, feminist stab in the back
Looking back, didn’t you just know that those women in the fish factory in episode one were going to have a larger role to play in True Detective: Night Country (Sky Atlantic/HBO).
Actually I didn’t either. This may well have been writer and director Issa López’s point: that in both the fictional town of Ennis, Alaska, as well as in the True Detective franchise to date, women have been too long overlooked.
Well, not now. For the climax of the story we knew we were heading to the Night Country, deep into the ice caves that everyone had been told always to avoid. But the opening 20 minutes – an orgy of jump-scares, collapsing floors and things going bump in the ice – were still as scary as hell.
It turned out that the Tsalal research base and the Night Country – or ice cave network – were literally connected. On the search for Raymond Clark, cops Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Navarro (Keli Reis) fell down into the caves and stumbled onto a secret research bunker. This in turn had a hidden exit up a tunnel that led to a hatch and into the Tsalal Station, where it all started.
And there, eventually, they found Clark (Owen McDonnell), who promptly battered Navarro with a fire extinguisher and locked Danvers in a freezer. In a series in which Clark has made many, many big mistakes, this was the biggest – when Danvarro escaped/came round, they soon caught Clark and rained down a mighty vengeance upon him.
It threatened to go full Wheeler (a past case where Navarro and Danvers killed a domestic abuser and then pretended he’d committed suicide) but they needed Clark to talk, so instead they gaffer-taped an iPhone to his head and made him listen to Annie K’s dying screams on loop.
They were soon cut off in an unyielding Alaskan snowstorm, leaving plenty of time to discuss their own demons (“It’s crazy the s--t that we survive”) before heading back to give Clark the third degree. Annie K, he revealed, had come to the station and started destroying the scientists’ precious permafrost samples after she learned of their collusion with the nefarious Silver Sky mining company. The scientists had been on the verge of a world-shattering breakthrough. So when Annie laid waste to their life’s work, they laid waste to her.
That explained her death… but not theirs. Under questioning Clark started spouting some “Time is a flat circle” gobbledygook, echoing Rust Cohle from the first series, but Danvers had no time for time being flat, circular or otherwise. She left Clark with Navarro, who left Clark to escape, and head out into the cold: their only witness had now frozen himself to death.
And then, as a stranded Danvers and Navarro looked likely to freeze to death themselves, Danvers twigged. Clark had said he’d been “holding down the hatch” at Tsalal when he’d hidden from what he thought was the ghost of Annie K (“She’s awake!”). But if he’d been holding down the escape hatch, who was trying to get in? They examined the hatch with UV and found handprints, one of which had two short fingers. Like the fish woman in that opening scene.
She and her friends – the overlooked women of Ennis, the tea drinkers and cardigan wearers and Native Alaskan community who have filled all of the supporting artist roles in this series – had found out that the Tsalal scientists had killed Annie K and had used their jobs as cleaners up at the station to take revenge. They had gone there, cut the power and rounded up the men. Then they took them way out on the ice, made them strip and left them to fend for themselves.
When the women told Danvers and Navarro their stories, the response was that the case was officially closed anyway – in a neat, final twist, if Silver Sky wanted to believe that the Tsalal eight had been killed by the cold and the weather, well, best let them think that. Revenge has never been served colder than this.