by If ever there was a series that could afford to take a huge swing at the end, it is True Detective: Night Country. After all, the fourth season of HBO’s True Detective The central mystery of the series concerned a group of scientists who were all killed at the same time, their frozen bodies found together in the tundra. And those same scientists stayed frozen, their huge blocks of ice kept the town’s community cool. They called it “corpsicle!” on him. That’s wild in the best way – absurd, eerie, and spine-chilling.
For six weeks, Night Country it made us wonder what on Earth could have created this terror on a mass scale. That’s why it’s so disappointing that revealing the fate of the scientists felt like the easiest possible solution, without all the creative sense that went into the first five episodes.
What is particularly frustrating is that it felt, in Sunday’s 75-minute final Night Country building on something great. The revelations come thick and fast as detectives Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) and Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) try to get to the bottom of what happened to the scientists as they try to uncover the truth behind a gruesome death. Annie K., native woman. whose murder was never solved. They discovered the truth about Annie – the scientists killed her after she attacked their research. But what the hell happened to the scientists?
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When they noticed a unique hand principle that only had three fingers, it gave them a startling discovery: The explanation for the death of the scientists was much simpler than they thought. When they went to the home of Blair (Kathryn Wilder), the woman with three fingers, they learned the truth – a group of Native women found out that the scientists killed Annie, and they took it upon themselves to avenge her death. They stormed the research center, forced them to dress up, and took them into the frozen desert, where they had to freeze to death. The show treated this revelation like a girl-power revenge story, which would have been a lot more interesting if Night Country who did nothing in the previous five episodes to lay the groundwork for him. But it wasn’t.
Instead, this final twist made the show a victim of its own success. The giant block of ice of dead scientists was an unforgettable invention, one that made us question what happened to them, and, perhaps more importantly, who or what was responsible. But that meant the show created a lot of expectations for itself that would be hard to live up to in six episodes. A cop out might be expected—maybe you can’t please everyone, so why please anyone? While confessing their crimes, the women made vague suggestions that there was a spirit that killed the scientists when they were abandoned in the ice. But even that potentially interesting nugget was delivered with a smirk followed by, “It’s just a story.” Ugh.
Liz’s reaction is the biggest problem. It was understood that Evangeline was willing to forget the truth of the murders, due to her long-standing frustration with the police force, as well as the fact that she is desperate to find the people responsible for killing Annie so that she can bring them to justice. And since the women killed the scientists who murdered Annie, Evangeline considered the death of the scientists as the conclusion of the situation that was tormenting her. She turned into a blind eye, and finally gave up on the police, her arc satisfactorily completed.
But how do we believe that someone like Liz, who we knew to be so dedicated to her work, would let a whole group of murderers in Ennis get away? Sure, we had seen evidence that Liz didn’t follow every letter of the law; she let Evangeline kill Clark and helped her stage a past murder to look like a suicide. But that didn’t feel good enough to convince us that Liz would let a confession slip without hesitation. She was not one to forgive major offenses, but her implicit acceptance of this revelation went against everything we knew about her. Worse, this quick demarcation was a very convenient bow to wrap up what we thought was a very complex mystery.
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If anything, it would have made more sense for Liz to dismiss the findings at first — if the whole group of women were staring down menacingly — and report the truth when she was in a safe zone to do so . She narrowly escaped death the night she found out what happened to the scientists, so it would seem reasonable not to want to arrest a number of people hours later. But in the next scene, we jump ahead to see Liz talking to investigators. Despite their (understandable) curiosities and questions, Liz couldn’t muster more than, “Some questions don’t have answers.” That nod to ambiguity would They had a great ending, yes Night Country continued to lean into his harrowing unknowables. But since we learned that there was nothing mysterious about the deaths, it instead came off as the show trying to have its cake and eat it too.
The end result was a major change in our main character at the last minute. She had a track record of saying some pretty naughty things about Natives throughout the series, and had a rocky relationship (to put it mildly) with her Native stepdaughter. Liz also had a testy relationship with Evangeline – at the start, it was pretty clear that they were desperate for each other. They finally came to an understanding in the end, but it didn’t feel like nearly enough growth to justify Liz doing a complete 180, putting aside her deep prejudices in favor of girl power.
When it is revealed that there was no other aspect of life to the death of the scientists, it runs diametrically against the interests of the show itself. If the supernatural elements were going to drop in the last 15 minutes of the season, why did they continue so much into the previous five and a half episodes? Night Country it was full of things that cannot be explained. It’s a shame, then, that instead of buying into its own universe, the show chose to give up on a huge shrug.
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