There’s nothing quite like the moment in a thriller when a character finally breaks and does something they didn’t know they could do on television. For True Detective: Nightlandthat moment arrives late in episode 5, and it affects virtually every character at the exact same moment.
Night country‘s fifth episode largely follows Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Navarro (Kali Reis) as they continue their investigation. Danvers, who has been investigating the mine’s connection to the whole case, suddenly has a target on her back by harboring the missing scientist, and Hank Prior (John Hawkes) turns out to be the mine’s troubleshooter. On the surface, this all seems to clear up a few questions about Annie’s death, but the show refuses to let the answer be that simple.
While it’s clear that all of this brings the season’s action to a head, we really get a sense of how Pete Prior (Finn Bennett) is evicted from his house and has to move into Danvers’ barn. The season largely shrinks into itself, bringing all the major players into one place and applying pressure until something turns up. And boy, does it pop.
But any show can make its characters explode. What makes the climax of “Part 5” so exciting is how much you can feel the tension: not a single character in the scene wants to be there, or knows what to do next. Hank stands in the kitchen, backed into a corner by Kate McKitterick (Dervla Kirwan) and the mining company, Pete is literally forced to choose which mentor figure will live and which will die, and Danvers would always rather hold the gun than have it. pointed at her.
But every choice we’ve seen in the series so far has pushed these characters to this one place. This is what television is best at. We’ve spent almost five full episodes with these characters, and we know them better than to think this situation would immediately spiral into violence. But we also know that they are all stubborn and determined in their own way. Throughout every second of the entire standoff, it’s completely clear that all they want is a way out – a way to defuse the situation that doesn’t end with blood splattering the walls of Danvers’ house. And yet in the end they all know that’s not possible, and then the shooting starts.
However, any show can end its penultimate episode after the death of a major character. The pleasure of Real detective – actually every season – looks at the reality that plays out in the minutes after the explosive moment arrives. Danvers, Navarro and Pete, standing around a kitchen island trying to figure out how to dispose of a body, provide a tranquil scene packed with residual adrenaline.
Photo: Michele K. Kort/HBO
If TV at its best is about spending time with characters and seeing them change, it doesn’t get much better than seeing Pete volunteer to clean up the blood of the father he just killed. It’s an undeniable shift, and one that Bennett plays perfectly, with all his police discipline and dedication on display in an instant, pushing aside any reckoning with the ways in which his life or his psyche could be forever changed by it. Suddenly it’s all business, and a body is a body.
Night country is, among other things, a show dedicated to exploring the ways in which people live with decisions, and how they reconcile with the past. For some characters, this means literally seeing the past as visions or ghosts. For Danvers it means hating The Beatles and denying your pain, while for both her and Navarro it means lying about William Wheeler but finding other ways to move forward with Annie’s case. All of these pivotal moments happen long before the show starts, so it would be a shame if the show ended without letting us witness one of those impossible decisions. This time it’s Pete’s. The slow unfolding of that scene is a wonderful illustration of Pete’s point of no return. In the context of the show, we can easily imagine all the ways that particular night, and that particular gunshot, will come back to haunt him. But in keeping with the show’s themes, life begins with that decision immediately for Pete: He volunteers to clean up the mess as he makes it.
If you do all this in one episode, you run the risk of losing momentum. But Night country cleverly avoids that pitfall by giving Hank Prior one last detail to add to the Tsalal case before he’s gone for good: he only moved the body. It’s a confession that feels at once small, revealing, crude and desperate – Hawkes delivers the line as if he’s convinced himself he’s done nothing wrong and at the same time begs for forgiveness. It’s a perfect ending for the show’s saddest character, but it’s also great setup for the finale that finally seems ready to reveal what the mystery of this entire season has led to.