Into the central mystery True Detective: Nightland seems easy when the credits roll on episode 1. It’s not like the viewers have the answer yet, but it certainly feels like we can see all the pieces of the puzzle in front of us. At least, until episode 2. The second, even better episode of Night country deepens the season’s central mystery with clever world-building and the most disgusting and disturbing ice sculptures on television.
If True Detective: Nightland is about everything so far, it’s about Ennis. Ennis is more than a small Alaskan town where the night lasts for days: it is a place that is simultaneously peaceful and eerie. Rose’s (Fiona Shaw) description of the city to Navarro (Kali Reis) seems almost perfect: a place where the universe is falling apart at the seams. It’s a description that foregrounds the strangeness of this world, but also hints at the softer side of the town: the dead find their way back into Ennis (sometimes because they want you to join them). But Ennis is also the kind of town that feels careful and handmade; the seams wear like a beloved toy and don’t tear like cheap factory stitching.
It’s a beautiful and layered description, but it’s also a description that gives us an idea of what the show does. Things here are certainly supernatural; something is clearly going on. But that doesn’t mean there are zombies roaming Ennis or that a quick séance will clear up this whole mess. The deaths in Ennis are like ice: it’s always there, but sometimes it shifts a little, so you notice it. And neither gives away its secrets easily.
Episode 2 opens with the reveal of the season’s central mystery: a frozen pile of corpses belonging to the Tsalal scientists, an introduction that comes with pitch-black comedy involving a gruesome hand fracture that requires a laugh to break the tension. Real detective has a great history of gruesome crime scenes that are beautiful in their own dark way, but this is without a doubt the masterpiece of the series so far. The frozen body is as grotesque as it is beautiful. It’s deformed and horrible, each body has its own bizarre, self-inflicted wounds, equally inexplicable and begging for a detailed reveal that could show us how this could all have happened. Set in the middle of an ice rink, a triumph of set decoration and design, the whole thing looks as if it could hold an infinite number of secrets and details if you were unlucky enough to look at it for too long.
Photo: Michele K. Kort/HBO
One of the show’s most brilliant and subtle strokes, however, is one that comes outside the new, forever-cursed rink when Danvers (Jodie Foster) interrupts a classroom to ask her former loot what exactly Tsalal does. If these scientists’ deaths merited something as extreme and seemingly otherworldly as their frozen remains would indicate, it seems perfect that their research into something as utopian as the description Danvers gets. A miracle cure, hidden under millions of years of ice. A perfectly solvable puzzle, if only the ice would reveal its mysteries. The explanation makes perfect sense to Danvers; after all, it is also her new burden.
And fittingly, she too turns to science to solve her frozen puzzle. She and Pete (Finn Bennett) show all the classics that scientists have used for the Dyatlov Pass Incident: paradoxical undressing, wild animals, some kind of invisible but natural force like gas or radiation. Not one sticks around.
But the show is too smart not to have Danvers beat. She’s stubborn enough to stick to the case and fight for it, but she’s not too stubborn to admit that she needs Navarro’s help to figure it out. And with mysterious tattoos of spirals older than ice, and a trailer full of creepy dolls, the show finally lets its two main detectives work together.
Technically, True Detective: Nightland‘s second episode consists mainly of setting tables, bringing our detectives together, laying out the facts and their complications, the oddities and their half-hearted explanations. But the show plays all this setup as if Ennis is finally boiling over. It is a city on the edge of both the spiritual and physical worlds, and now it is breaking open little by little, under the weight of poison water and mining protests. And True Detective: Nightland clearly wants to show us the secrets beneath the fragile ice of Ennis.