You know, I’ve owned the first season of True Detective since it was released and I’ve still never watched the whole thing. I know it’s the best season out there, and it was basically at the very beginning of the reintroduction of the “golden age of television,” but I just haven’t mustered the desire to finish it yet. And for whatever reason, two bad seasons later I decided to tune in for Night Country.
The internet informed me that this is the first season that has a subtitle, so that’s kind of neat. You also have the great Jodie Foster as the show’s lead, so they were already kind of setting themselves up for success. She has an equally impressive counterpart in Kali Reis, so I definitely need to watch her starring turn in Catch the Fair One. Either way, the premise of this season just really tugged at me. There must be something about desolate winter towns that really speak to me. I can never help but think of Fargo, though this is in some fictional town in Alaska that definitely has a connection to the afterlife.
That fact, nodded to early in the first episode, did give me pause, but the gruesomeness and utter mystery behind the death of a bunch of scientists was too intriguing to abandon. Alaska had just entered their first days of night when the frozen bodies of the Tsalal scientists were found out on the ice. Chief Liz Danvers wants to keep the case instead of giving it over to Anchorage, but the Captain warns she only has until the bodies thaw to do so. That means she’s working her underling, officer Pete Prior to the bone, and at the risk of losing his own, young family to his job. Prior’s father, Hank, is a real piece of work and he doesn’t make their limited time any easier.
She does also manage to get help from her former partner, now trooper, Evangeline Navarro, involved. These two share a tumultuous past that involved a messy and ultimately unsolved case involving Annie Kowtok. She was a local who was consistently protesting the mines that were polluting their town, and then one day she shows up dead with over thirty stab wounds to show for it. Navarro knows something more nefarious was involved than just her extremely abusive boyfriend, but Danvers and the others forced it to be shut down. These two begrudgingly are rebuilding bridges with each other over the course of the season, and while most of their interactions were fraught with frustrations, it’s clear that they make a good team.
Again, the flair of the supernatural elements laced throughout the season might be a turnoff for some, but the whole season was so tensely mysterious that it’s easy to put into the background. The last two episodes of the season have some serious action that I think would be hard for any town to ignore, but with the beauty of television you don’t always have to stick around to see the outcome. That’s perhaps the only place where I think this series falters, but the storylines are all so relevant and taut that I was sucked in from the first minutes. I hope this is a permanent return to form for this anthology series, and who knows, maybe I’ll finally get around to watching the first season here soon.