So what’s Real detective, Real? Before this year, it felt like a collection of aesthetic trappings. Two police officers played by prominent actors. A crime that spans multiple timelines. Sort of a weird fiction/supernatural horror bent. Thematically, the anthology’s concerns shifted from season to season, with its strongest threads being its heavy musings on masculinity. But in his final, stunning hour, True Detective: Nightland tries to bow down and answer once and for all, what Real detective what it’s really about – by going back to where it all started.
This isn’t about knowledge, or Easter eggs. Sure, Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) talked about being in Alaska for a while Real detective‘debut season. And yes, he may have spent some time there Night country‘s Ennis, who watches the stars without a TV, the city’s permeable relationship with the border between this world and the next occupying his subconscious, his Uzumaki-like fondness for spirals that unsettle his mind just so. There are plenty of connections for those looking for them.
While Night country is happy to haunt viewers with the same cosmic horror trappings as the original series, the true full circle moment, the thing it posits that Real detective what it’s all about is how the characters respond to that cosmic horror: with hope. Rust Cohle’s last line in the first season of Real detective is a simple explanation of the bleeding heart that is at the heart of Real detectivealmost hilarious after eight episodes of nihilistic pablum.
“The light wins,” he tells his partner Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) as they gaze at the stars in the night sky.
(Ed. remark: The rest of this post contains spoilers for everything True Detective: Nightland.)
In the end, light wins Night country at. The Long Night ends and the sun finally rises, as Navarro (Kali Reis) and Danvers (Jodi Foster) follow the spiral of mystery from the Tsalal station to its gruesome center. The riddle posed by the corps of investigators finds its answer in the solution of the other case that has haunted Navarro and Danvers: the murder of Anne Kowtok. In an Agatha Christie style, Annie was eventually murdered by all the men working at the Tsalal station, after uncovering a conspiracy between the researchers and the mining company Silver Star to increase the amount of pollutants released into the environment for the benefit of their research.
From there, everything flows into a propulsive denouement that neatly ties everything together Night country‘s themes together into an astonishingly coherent whole. Danvers ultimately concludes that she’s been asking the wrong questions: not just who wants Annie dead, but also who knew who those people would be. The answer lay hidden in plain sight: the indigenous women of Ennis, always present, always ignored, always watching. In the cleaning crews and in factories, a community formed in the shadow of men’s ignorance, deciding to remind the world that they are more than just passive victims in Ennis’s story.
Throughout the six-episode series, Night country has reflected on memory: of individuals, yes, but also of places, cultures and the land beneath his characters’ feet, bones circling the ice. Cut the story with a knife, and those who remember will fall on one side, and those who forget will fall on the other: the women who remember the history of a violent man at the premiere, those who to be at peace with the dead, those who flee from their past.
Photo: Michele K. Kort/HBO
Navarro, Danvers and poor Petey Prior all have to grapple with the consequences of running from their pasts and the history of Ennis around them, but it is Navarro who is at the heart of Night country‘s concerns. After we met her from her Indigenous roots, Navarro ran for years, leaving her Indigenous name behind and fearing that her family’s spirituality would lead her to madness like her sister. Her career in law enforcement served as a vector for the anger she harbored instead of memories, of connection – anger toward men who hurt women, who had no control over their passions and no respect for anything outside themselves. Regardless of its history, Navarro is incomplete.
In Navarro’s story, Issa López and her collaborators plant the quietly optimistic core of Real detective season 1 in the permafrost of Ennis, Alaska, and watch as it surpasses the odds and grows despite the horror. Night only comes when Navarro takes her own name – Evangeline Siqiññaatchiaq Navarro, which means “the return of the sun after the long darkness” – and accepts who she is, and what it means to be part of this place . She decides to become someone else. No longer an agent, but part of something bigger, something she hopes to discover in the ice.
Night country ends with the most overt tribute to its predecessor yet, as Captain Danvers conducts a recorded interrogation about the events of the series sometime in the future. It’s another aesthetic garnish, another way for the show to look back to acknowledge where it came from. This time, however, things are different. Where the interrogation scenes from the original series were foreboding moments of fear, there is hope here. The woman in front of the camera knows that the light is gaining ground, and knows how to ensure it stays that way. It means not running, but getting close to the pain. To stare dead into the abyss and keep walking until you see the stars.