True Detective: The dead of Night Country scream louder than the living

This week’s episode of True Detective: Nightland opens with a clever bit of sound editing, where the trademark white noise of the HBO logo transitions seamlessly into the white noise machine of Police Chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster), standing next to her bed, unable to relax her. She continues to obsess over the video she and Navarro (Kali Reis) found of Anne Kowtok’s final moments, searching for more clues. It’s Christmas Eve and Anne’s cries for help are almost accompanied by a chorus.

“Part 4” of Night country is the season’s spookiest hour, focusing on the ghosts on the show’s periphery even as the leads continue to deny them. The emotional core of the episode lies with Navarro’s sister Julia (aka Niviâna), who finds Danvers without a coat in the snow and shivering through some episode. Navarro admits Julia to an extended care facility, but it is already too late: she sees dead people everywhere. And so she walks onto the ice and joins them.

Night countryThe series’ protagonists have been hurtling toward the brick wall of their own denial, and Julia’s death is the collision. The injustices and tragedies that haunt and intersect with Ennis boil over, and neither Navarro nor Danvers can ignore them much longer.

That doesn’t mean they don’t try: Navarro, grieving, starts a fight and gets her ass kicked. Danvers, who is slowly revealed to be a woman torn down and shoddily rebuilt like a work of freakish kintsugi, becomes so hostile and toxic that she can’t persuade her fuck buddy Captain Connelly (Christopher Eccleston) for a drunken rendezvous without him in to hit each other. , and ends up spending the holiday wasted and alone. Without the growing chorus of death, this would be a quiet, sad episode.

The thin membrane between the living and the dead in Ennis is one of them Night country‘s richest thematic veins, and showrunner Issa López never misses an opportunity to remind us of that. Sometimes it happens casually side by side, with everyday conversations being had in front of a gruesome ‘little body’. Other times it’s in the way the planet’s history is so deeply etched into its surface that we can’t remove them, like the ancient whale bones frozen in the background of the ice cave where Anne Kowtok died. And finally, it’s in the angry tones of dead women screaming in Navarro’s ear.

We’re over Night country‘s centerpiece, and the various ghostly events of “Part 4” form a haunting mosaic of the show’s many concerns about our past, and how we work hard to ignore it. The eerie secrets locked in the ice, Navarro’s distance from her indigenous culture, the toxic male entitlement that threatens—if not extinguishes—women’s opportunities. History can suffocate us if we don’t pay attention to it. We may forget the dead, but the dead may not forget us.

Danvers has her own burden to contend with: a monstrous one-eyed polar bear that causes her to crash into a snowbank – a bear that Night country suggests is not real. It’s another terrifying shape: the shape of Holden’s favorite stuffed animal, Danvers’ prodigal son. It’s one of the few things of him she keeps with her, one of the few signs that she’s never stopped grieving, never bothered to move on.

“The dead are gone,” she insists to Navarro. “Damn gone.”

Navarro says if Danvers believed that, she wouldn’t keep that teddy bear. And perhaps, the viewer may conclude, she would not throw herself into this task, seeking justice for Anne Kowtok, fighting her way through the spirals hidden in Ennis, staring at horrors that others turn away from. The ghosts surrounding Ennis will not be ignored. She no longer tunes out the white noise.