Night Country’ Episode 6 Review — A Truly Embarrassing Season Finale

The season finale of True Detective: Night Country had me yelling at my TV more than once in utter disbelief. Not only did the plot ripoff Wind River in a pretty major way, it wrapped things up with some of the cringiest, most cloying nonsense I’ve seen on a major TV show. I’m shocked that HBO—the studio behind Succession, Game of Thrones, True Detective and White Lotus, just to name a few—would air this.

Let me just rattle off a few of the things I found so utterly absurd about this episode:

• Danvers and Navarro are in such a hurry to investigate the caves—in a storm, no less—that they leave Peter to clean up not only the corpse of the junky, Otis, but his own father who he just killed. He has to clean this up and then visit Rose, who is apparently just perfectly happy to help the poor young man cover up these deaths.
• … (content continues)

In the end, we get a little nod to earlier seasons with them interviewing Danvers about what happened and where Navarro and Hank disappeared to. It’s all just wildly unsatisfying as far as resolution goes. None of the supernatural stuff paid off. The scientists murdered Annie, which was the first theory almost everyone had. People had guessed that the cleaning ladies were responsible for the scientists’ deaths but the way it went down just came across as a massive, unearned head-fake that tried to have its supernatural cake and eat it, too. Danvers and Navarro end up being some of the worst police on this show, turning directly to torture the moment they find the guy they’ve been searching for —not to mention leaving poor Peter to deal with his dead father.

Of all these characters, I like virtually none of them. Peter’s wife Kayla is deeply unlikable from the get-go, relentlessly petty despite him working such a big case. Danvers’ step-daughter Leah is just as bad, constantly making life hard for Danvers with no sense of remorse despite—again—a major murder investigation going down. And Christmas being a time when some folk try to treat one another just that much nicer. Danvers and Navarro are routinely awful to one another and their backstory isn’t even that interesting. Peter seems like a nice enough guy. I suppose Rose is alright, too, but is mostly a character with very little reason for even existing. I’m not sure how anybody walks away from this finale thinking it worked. None of the more interesting fan theories came true. As far as the murder mysteries of the scientists and Annie go, neither was much of a mystery at all. I know that myself and plenty of others made the Wind River guess after the very first episode.

Here’s my video review:

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