To be a True Detective fan is to grapple with uncomfortable contradictions. The first season is both a masterpiece of cosmic horror noir and a piece of art that feels like it was created not just by, but for men. It was a gritty treatise against toxic masculinity that still dehumanized women and ultimately reified the very thing it attempted to deconstruct.
Despite its critical acclaim and influence on prestige drama in the years that followed, True Detective also generated a deeply toxic fanbase. These fans were men who missed the point but who saw themselves as a vital part of the show’s metatextuality, the real “true detectives” all along. Ever since, that first season has primarily been remembered, not for its incredible acting, its brilliant aesthetic touches, that legendary six-minute tracking shot, nor even the now-ubiquitous line, “Time is a flat circle,” but for the misogyny. Its two subsequent seasons have mostly been forgotten altogether.
All of these uneasy truths loom large over season four, True Detective: Night Country, 10 years after its progenitor. Every succeeding season of this anthology series has occupied a lose-lose position simply by not being season one. But season four, by virtue of being centered around two women — a local chief of police (Jodie Foster) and a state trooper (Kali Reis) trying to solve a mysterious set of murders in the unforgiving Alaskan north — has simultaneously raised the stakes for the series and revived all of True Detective’s messy paradoxes.
Night Country’s new showrunner and writer/director Issa López needed to accomplish two risky, ambitious goals: The season had to justify itself as a creative follow-up to a work that’s very difficult to follow up, and rectify the notorious sexism of season one in a way that would hopefully allow the series to forge a new path. Its sixth episode, which aired Sunday on HBO, had to reconcile both goals in a satisfying finale.
To many among True Detective’s original fanbase, outrage at the second goal has precluded an objective view of how well it’s succeeding at the first. By the same token, many longtime fans are so eager to see the second project succeed that they’re quick to dismiss all critiques of season four’s creative aims as pure misogyny.
These seem like unbridgeable positions. But there’s unfortunately a third view: that Night Country’s creative flaws ultimately torpedo its efforts at feminist reclamation, shifting the season finale away from a compelling cosmic mystery and toward a hamfisted Me Too revenge plot that leaves a comic number of plot points unresolved and arguably weakens the whole series.
(Note: Spoilers for Sunday’s season four finale abound.)
Season Four’s clunky writing and direction never got what made True Detective work
To be fair to López, this isn’t the first season of True Detective to miss the mark by a mile. Season two, a hasty, shoddy 2015 follow-up from series creator and season one writer Nic Pizzolatto, featured all the worst parts of season one on speed — the tortured masculinity, the presentation of women as little more than sexy window-dressing, and a poor imitation of all of Matthew McConaughey’s famous existential monologues as Rust Cohle shoehorned into vapid machismo nonsense from Colin Farrell’s dysfunctional detective. Perhaps to shift himself and HBO away from misplaced allegations of plagiarism, Pizzolatto cut out most of season one’s mesmerizing Weird fiction elements: murky occult figures, arcane Lovecraftian rituals, and worship of the “Yellow King.”
If season two had too little of the supernatural, 2019’s third season was a true return to form, with Pizzolatto returning to the deep South and to a cold case tinged with occult horror, floating on a sense of nonlinear time, and backed by a soul-filled T Bone Burnett soundtrack. But by then, the world was a much different place, and True Detective had to compete with a field of its own descendants — shows as disparate as 2017’s Mindhunter and 2018’s The Terror, each successful at cordoning off a sliver of True Detective’s genius for themselves.
Still, anchored by Mahershala Ali’s pitch-perfect turn as an aging detective who spends decades trying to solve a cold case, season three really clarified the True Detective formula: A labyrinthine mystery driven by deep characterization, replete with hints of a dark otherworldly version of reality, filmed with an attention to aesthetics, and written with a certain literary flourish. Perhaps most of all, True Detective has to have a philosophy — a commitment to engaging with those eldritch horrors, if only to nod to them and be on your way.
On paper, Night Country ticks a lot of those boxes. Inspired by the recently solved Dyatlov Pass incident (an avalanche did it), the season follows a quest to solve the gruesome deaths of a team of scientists. The group was found naked, frozen, and apparently terrified to death in the tundra near the small town of Ennis, Alaska. Populated mainly by Iñupiat residents whose water has turned black due to pollution from an evil mining plant, Ennis has plunged into its annual winter stretch of sunless polar night, and tensions are high as the local police begin their investigation. Sheriff Danvers (Foster) and Trooper Navarro (Reis) work to solve the murders while navigating their own rocky history. The brutal, still-unsolved murder of an Iñupiaq activist has unexpected connections to the current crime; the women quickly realize they have to bury their differences and work together to solve all the murders at once.
<