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Looking back, 2014 was truly a different time: Obama was in office, skinny jeans still reigned, and “real detective”was established with an unabashed emphasis on masculinity. Three years earlier, Ryan Murphy had revived the anthology series with “American Horror Story,” but it took the approval of HBO, big movie stars and a “serious” genre like crime to give the format real prestige. By pairing Matthew McConaughey with Woody Harrelson on a journey through the swamp, creator Nic Pizzolatto elevated some of that genre’s clichés and left others intact, including a marginal presence of women, crammed into small roles as wives and villains to leaving room for portentous monologues and four-minute tracking shots.
The fourth season of “True Detective,” subtitled “Night Country,” is both a sharp break with the show’s past and an implicit response to its shortcomings. After a disastrous Season 2 and an improved, if low-key, Season 3, Pizzolatto has completely relinquished all showrunner duties, although he retains executive producer credit. Instead, Mexican filmmaker Issa López takes the reins of a disturbing murder mystery set in the far north of Alaska. (Director Barry Jenkins also joins the “True Detective” team through his production company Pastel.) And to share the main role, López presents a novelty for the franchise: multiple female protagonists, in the form of a living legend jodie foster and boxer-turned-actor Kali Reis. But “Night Country” doesn’t just modify the “True Detective” formula in terms of genre. The six-episode season also takes a noticeably different approach to the supernatural, a background motif of past installments that becomes a central theme here.
Foster’s Liz Danvers is the police chief of Ennis, a fictional town that experiences the real-life phenomenon of the polar night, in which the edges of the Earth are plunged into darkness for days around the winter solstice. Just after the last sunset of the year, eight scientists from a secret research station appear to vanish into thin air. To find out what happened to them, Danvers has to reteam with her ex-partner Evangeline Navarro (Reis), who spent years obsessed with the unsolved murder of native midwife Annie Kowtok (Nivi Pedersen). When evidence emerges that the two cases are related, Danvers and Navarro reluctantly pool their resources.
As “Night Country” continues, it begins to provide the details that make Ennis feel like a lived-in place, such as long-standing tensions between the native community and a mining corporation they accuse of dumping pollutants into the water supply. . On an interpersonal level, Danvers is a prickly misanthrope with a penchant for ill-advised affairs, whether with a high school teacher married to the local mine manager or the boss who exiled her to the Arctic in the first place. His only colleagues are a father-son duo: Hank (John Hawkes), a sad man who pines for his mail-order bride, and Prior (Finn Bennett), a young father whose dedication to work causes a breakup with his wife Kayla ( Anna). Lambe), who is studying nursing. Danvers is a widow, though she is still raising her half-Native teenage stepdaughter, Leah (Isabella Star LaBlanc), who becomes involved in the mine protests both to perform and to explore her own heritage. In just a few hours, we get a crash course in Ennis’s dense social network, a claustrophobic environment that contrasts with the open space that surrounds him.
Before the show’s realism hits, however, “Night Country” begins on a fantastically spooky note that resonates throughout the season, a tone sustained in part by a credits sequence set to Billie’s “Bury a Friend.” Eilish. When a delivery driver passes by the station, all that’s left of the scientists is a severed human tongue and the parade scene from “Ferris Bueller” playing on a loop. Not that it takes long to find the all-male crew: They turn up naked, frozen and dead, discovered by local eccentric Rose Agineau (Fiona Shaw), who claims that the ghost of a former lover of hers led her to her bodies. (“It’s a long damn night,” Rose says. “Even the dead get bored.”) But there are signs, such as burned corneas and ruptured eardrums, that the scientists did not die simply from exposure.
The two investigators react to these events like a modern riff on Mulder and Scully. Danvers insists there must be “a real explanation” for the deaths, while Navarro is more open to the paranormal. But there is a racial dimension added to this divide between believers and skeptics. Navarro is part native, the butt of Danvers’ crude jokes about “spirit animals” and other perceived superstitions; his sister, Julia (also known as Niviâna), struggles with hallucinations or visions, depending on one’s perspective. Finally, there’s the gratifying contrast between Foster, a veteran taking on her meatiest role in years, and Reis, whose revelatory intensity belies her recent transition to acting. Both the roles and performances complement each other, giving “True Detective” two true, even co-stars for the first time since Harrelson and McConaughey.
Everywhere Danvers and Navarro look, an ominous black spiral keeps appearing, drawn on a wall or scratched into a rock. The symbol is a callback to the creepy stick figures and sculptures of seasons past, but the question of what can or cannot be explained by pure logic is much more central to “Night Country” than in any “True Detective” before it. While ultimately ambiguous, said ambiguity feels more like an intentional choice than a red herring (or the Yellow King, if you will), one that relates to the season’s highly specific setting, which becomes more than just a stunning backdrop. Hardened police in a blue-collar community, as seen in shows like “Happy Valley” and “Mare of Easttown,” are now as big a trope as elements of the first “True Detective.” By redefining what the show can be, “Night Country” also revitalizes the archetype by placing it in a new context.
‘True Detective: Night Country’ premieres January 14 on HBO and Max at 9:00 pm ET, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Sundays.
