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The “To be sure” paragraph in a review, the bit where the critic briefly tempers their overall praise or criticism with the reverse, usually comes pretty deep into things. Not this time, friends.
To be sure, the sixth and final episode of True Detective: Night Country has its high points. The highest is undoubtedly Liz Danvers’s ferocious tirade at Evangeline Navarro when the younger woman claims to have seen and heard Liz’s dead son Holden. “You don’t come here and tell me ‘he said,’ or I will shoot your sick fucking mouth right off your face,” she screams, the threat so blunt it almost sounds silly. “Leave my kid out of it, or I will rip you apart. I am not merciful. You understand? I got no mercy left.” Jodie Foster tears into the words like they’re between her and oxygen.
It’s not just tremendous acting, it’s tremendous writing. Creator/writer/director Issa López gives Liz a wholly and appropriately furious and disgusted reaction to the fucking bunkum Evangeline is spewing. Dead kids returning to tell their mommies everything’s okay? Ghoulish. A ghoulish thing to claim! People who do so, who take advantage of the grieving whether for profit or ideology or psychological gratification, deserve to be screamed into silence.
Then the show itself goes and does exactly that.
Man, it’s hard to know where to begin with this misbegotten thing. The easiest spot would be the resolution of the murders at the heart of the season, both of which were committed in the most ridiculous way possible.
Annie K. turns out to have been murdered by the Tsalal scientists en masse. It was spur-of-the-moment revenge for her trashing of their precious research, after she discovered they were falsifying pollution data while encouraging the mine to get even worse. The higher the pollutants, the softer the permafrost, the easier to extract ancient DNA samples and create an apparently successful wonder drug. (The spirals, the Tuttles — all red herrings. We’ll come back to that.)
This is dumb, for two reasons at least. First, it makes Annie seem like a tantrum-throwing child, trashing literally the only halfway decent thing that could possibly come from the whole mess made by the mine and the scientists. It’s a condescending view of protesters and organizers, who’d more likely take the paper trail, make copies, and get the place shut down. Annie being beside herself with rage I can understand; Annie being stupid and short-sighted sends a weird message.
The second reason it’s dumb also applies to the subsequent murder, that of the Tsalal scientists themselves. It’s dumb because it requires us to believe that like a dozen mild-mannered scientists from all around the world never once breathed a word of this, never once got overwhelmed by a guilty conscience, never once blabbed to anyone. It defies credulity.
Ditto their murders, committed by a small army of vigilante women from the town led by their lab’s cleaning lady Beatrice (L’xeis Diane Benson), whom we previously encountered violently defending a domestic violence victim back in episode one. (So the seeds were at least planted in that respect.) Again, these aren’t hardened killers, they work at factories and hair salons and grocery stores and fisheries and shit. Some of them are teenagers. They sure can keep a secret! It’s a little Wicker Man, which, again, is a weird message to send even if the victims really deserved it this time.
Also, ghosts are real. Ghosts are real! People see and hear the dead. In one shot we see one even when the characters don’t, so you can’t write any of this off as a matter of semantics. The vengeful spirit of Annie K. killed all the scientists, including Clark, the sole survivor of the vigilante attack, with her ice powers. She also planted her own tongue at the crime scene to kickstart the investigation. These are things that happened.
Which makes the constant references to the pointedly agnostic first season that much more bizarre. Arranging a plesiosaur skeleton and an orange peel in spirals does nothing more for the show then get a cheap LeonardoDiCaprioPointing.jpg response out of the audience. By the time they have Clark actually say the phrase that pays, “Time is a flat circle,” the groans from viewers nationwide could probably threaten the structural integrity of that ice cave.
I’m not objecting to the presence of the supernatural per se. That’s stupid. It’s like people who say they don’t find The Exorcist scary because they’re not Catholic. Do you not like 2001 because we didn’t have talking murder computers that year after all? Act like a goddamn grownup and suspend your disbelief already.
I’m objecting to the Hallmark Channel sentimentality through which Evangeline is able to offer Liz closure, this vision of her angelic son who tells her exactly what she needs to hear. If that’s what you or Evangeline or Liz or Issa López believe in, that’s fine. If that’s what you expect to pass off for good human drama — a cheat code that appears to resolve all the issues of this fascinatingly damaged but vivacious person, including her relationship with her stepdaughter and Evangeline, whose whereabouts are officially unknown — then no, it’s not fine. At the very least, it could be so much more.
The same can be said of this season of the show. Many of the constituent parts, particularly the acting by Foster, Finn Bennett, John Hawkes, and Kali Reis despite the lack of shading the writing afforded her, worked well. Most others — the godawful music supervision (the spooky cover of “Twist and Shout” again? at that moment? why? what does that communicate?), the gratuitous and self-destructive references to Season 1, the completely un-scary horror elements, the preposterous resolution of the cases — did not. Say what you will about its predecessors, but Night Country is the first season of True Detective that felt like it could have been just some other show.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
