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SPOILER ALERT! This story contains plot points from the season 4 finale of True Detective: Night Country.
The HBO crime anthology concluded its fourth season on Sunday with detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) solving the murder of the eight men from the Tsalal Arctic Research Station who disappeared without a trace.
Here, creator and showrunner Issa López, who came to the anthology after writing and directing the award-winning Mexican film. Tigers are not afraid (They return) — talks about how he first revealed the story about the men at the research station, who represented the moral center of the drama, and what it was like working with Foster and Reis.
DEADLINE So, did Navarro become a ghost in the finale after walking on ice?
ISSA LOPEZ I’m not saying she’s alive and I’m certainly not saying she’s dead. I’ve carefully crafted this as an ink block test for you to discover yourself as an audience member. I love that Navarro states very early in the series that he has the urge to just walk away and leave everything behind. On the other hand, the entire series is an exploration of the fact that she feels a calling to the afterlife. At the climax of the ending, and instead of fighting it and going into pain and fear, she gives in to it. And in doing so she receives a part of herself. This is how that call that she feared so much is solved. The Aboriginal people of Australia go and walk, meet each other and then come back, which I think is what Kali adopted (for the character). However, there is a possibility that she is also with the women who came before her to visit them. You can read it both ways and it’s up to you to interpret which one satisfies your heart.
DEADLINE For several episodes, I thought you were telling a supernatural murder mystery, that something otherworldly killed these men. I guess that was the goal, to baffle us?
LOPEZ Again, it’s both. A horrible event happened in the real world. Annie K. was murdered. There is no valid reason to kill a woman anywhere. But on top of that, she is killed for horrible reasons. That eventually has consequences for these men. Women take justice upon themselves because justice does not come from outside, as we know happens in the real world. They put the men in the arctic. It is very easy to think and assume that they die from exposure and when they die from exposure, they go into a state of panic and become delirious, as explained in the series. So it’s perfectly real. That’s a rational explanation. But there is another explanation for these men walking onto the ice. Their clothes are there so they can go back to them and try to survive. They never come back for the clothes. Did they find something out there that woke them up when they were digging in places they weren’t supposed to? When they were taking the lives of women, where were they digging? That’s another view of it. And once again, it’s your mission to decide which version you choose.
DEADLINE How did you come up with the story?
LOPEZ I was briefly married to a scientist and I love science. I was an archaeologist and studied anthropology. That’s the beauty of television. You really have room to explore your obsessions. And instead of seeing it as a challenge, I saw it as an opportunity to just launch and explore so many avenues, so many ways to explain a single event.
DEADLINE You ended up giving us a history lesson about the indigenous people of Alaska that most people didn’t even know existed. Was that a goal?
LOPEZ True Detective is about locations. The place is a character as much as the characters themselves. So the first season takes place in Louisiana, the second season in Los Angeles, and the third season in Arkansas. Each of those locations was incredibly distinctive and brought different elements to the table. Then I thought of Alaska, which is completely different from those three and where the nights last forever. It would have been absolutely wrong to talk about these communities without embracing and delving into the fact that 70% of the population of these northwest Alaska towns are Iñupiaq. I wasn’t familiar with them. So I learned everything I could on my own. And then I recruited the tribe’s council of elders to go over each script with us and keep it real. We brought in the people of Alaska, the Iñupiaq people, as characters in the show, just to remind us that we weren’t using that as an interesting background. It became the story we were telling.
DEADLINE So at what point during filming did you wonder why the heck I chose a cold location?
LOPEZ Oh, every night. I’m mexican. What am I doing here? Nobody told me I had to do that. Being Mexican, I think maybe there was a little expectation that I would do it along the border, or in the Arizona desert, or that it would be tropical. No, I had to choose the hardest place in the world!
DEADLINE What was it like working with Jodie and Kali? So much anger in every episode with those women! Did they require a lot of direction?
LOPEZ I think the interesting thing about working with women is that it is very easy to access (motivation). I mean, we’re very happy to be on those sets. But we’ve all dealt with shit in our lives. It’s easy to access and fun to use to create something positive. So it’s not a show about angry women, but it’s also a show about angry women. It is also about loneliness, loss, sadness, wanting to be with someone and share the things we carry and not being able to until we overcome ourselves. But it’s also about the anger we feel and carry. Kali and Jodie couldn’t be more different and those two couldn’t be more different than me. But you do find that there is a communion of experiences and the technique they use among themselves is different. With Jodie, everything comes from the mind. And if you are clear about the reasons why the character accesses an emotion, she will get there. Kali and I come more from the world of emotions. So I would use verbal analysis with Jodie while she would go to Kali and say, ‘this is how you feel.’ Then she would release them and they achieved the same tone beautifully. It was wonderful to see.
DEADLINE I have to ask about Peter Prior (Finn Bennett). He felt like the moral center of this story. I felt so bad for him.
LOPEZ Do not be sad. I mean, yeah, he’s absolutely the moral compass. He is the uncorrupted one at the beginning of the story. But the truth is that it is a police story. And I don’t think there is an easy way to be a cop in this world, if there ever was. And delivering justice, if that is the role of the police, cannot be black and white. We have seen it time and time again. He is a budding cop and is trying to become a full-fledged one. And he does it by asking the right questions and training himself as a detective. He is not a full policeman until he receives the baptism of blood and it is his own blood. Now, from a Freudian perspective, from a Greek tragedy perspective, there is an ancient human tradition that to become an adult you have to kill your parents. It is a very primary image, but it is behind many modern conflicts. In this case I took it a little literally. He has to break through the pain, corruption and dark emotions that Hank (John Hawkes) asks him to connect with. He is not that person. Peter makes a decision before they shoot each other and Hank realizes that his life is over and everything will go downhill from there. Everything he did will be exposed. He knows that he lost his son. He then raises the gun. And if you look closely at the picture, Hank doesn’t have his finger on the trigger. He wasn’t going to shoot Danvers, but he makes the gesture knowing that he will fall.
DEADLINE Did you feel like you had enough episodes to tell your story? Did you want more?
LOPEZ No no. It was quite the opposite. HBO kept saying, ‘please do eight, please.’ Well. Seven.’ And I was like, no, six. That was me. I feel like overstaying your welcome is a mistake. You have to quit while you’re winning. Each story uses the space it needs. Six was the goal and six was where we ended up.