‘True Detective’ boss answers burning questions from finale

Warning: This article contains spoilers for the season 4 finale of True Detective: Night Country“Part 6.”

After six very dark and very cold episodes, the many mysteries involved in True Detective: Night Country have been officially (mostly) resolved.

While some precise threads are left a bit to the imagination for us armchair sleuths, the answers to the season’s biggest questions have been revealed. That is to say, it was the Tsalal scientists who murdered Annie K. when she realized the corrupt shenanigans they were involved in, which the cleanup crew later discovered when they inadvertently found the opening to the cave’s research lab. of ice where Annie was killed.

Then those women, in turn, took matters into their own hands to get justice for Annie, forcing the scientists to point guns at the ice, where they claim they ordered the men to strip naked and then simply left them there, but they didn’t do it. I don’t actually kill them. “Yeah she She wanted them, she would take them. If not, her clothes were there for them,” they said on the ice. This satisfies Danvers, who then tells the company that an avalanche killed the men, without mentioning the women’s involvement. We also learn that after the investigation, Navarro disappeared, but Danvers claims to know nothing about it.

Here, EW picks the brain of showrunner and Season 4 mastermind Issa Lopez on all of these mysteries and our remaining burning questions.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Let’s start with Clark, the last scientist, disappearing into the ice outside of Tsalal. How did he escape? Is it fair to assume that after he filmed the video, at Navarro’s request, she let him go and Ice got her way?

ISSA LÓPEZ: That’s exactly what happened. I mean, he has given you everything that he can give you because what he told you is his absolute truth. That’s all he has. And he is asking to die, for her to let him die. And then she’s going to give him that. A part of her says, fuck you, no, because she doesn’t want to give this killer anything. But another part of her thinks he deserves to die with whatever is out there, number one. And number two, she needs the video and he’s willing to give it to her. So he makes the video for her. He cleans himself up a bit so it doesn’t look like he’s being tortured. He makes the video from a place of honesty, and then she walks onto the ice (later) to find out he’s dead.

Then we find out what happened to Annie, and then we find out what happened to the Tsalal men…or do we? Should we believe the story the women told?

Well, it’s just a story, but I think these women took these men and sent them to the Arctic. What happened to them after that? We will never know. Because maybe they just panicked and went into hypothermia-induced delirium. But maybe they saw something so horrible out there that they gouged their eyes out and then froze. So the decision about that, those events, what happened out there at night, that’s yours. They both work, but I’m not going to tell you.

And what’s up with Annie’s tongue? We are never told exactly who put it there.

Is it perfectly possible that when the body was found by the community, someone remained silent as a gesture of reverence and respect and knowing that there would be an opportunity to return? Maybe that happened and they preserved that tongue because Danvers in episode 2 says that there was some cellular damage and that it was strange. It may be due to freezing or not, we don’t know. Anyway, the language disappears. Or it could be that the tongue is kept in a different place waiting for Annie to return and leave it there as a sign that now is finally when she can tell it. his History through women.

Speaking of going out on the ice, we see that both Navarro and Danvers also make their own trips to the ice to face their demons, but unlike the scientists, they live to tell the tale. And they also find themselves and others out there.

Absolutely. I think one goes because she feels the call of whatever is out there. And this is from Navarro’s perspective, so I’m going to be completely magical because this is his perspective, right? One option, if you’re going to be rational, is that she’s losing her mind a little. And Navarro’s explanation is that there is something out there that she calls us and we go, but what she calls her is that feminine principle that she is waiting in the darkness, in the ice. But for her that principle is not destructive. For her, it is her identity that she embraces, she receives her name and now she is free. So she has to face what she fears most: am I losing my mind? Am I cursed? Is this going to kill me? And instead of running away, running towards it, she is out there.

And with Danvers, he goes out to find Navarro because she had told him, if you want to walk on the ice and die, do it. And she does it. Then Danvers comes out to say, “Hell, no, I didn’t actually mean that.” And what he discovers there, instead of Navarro, is that there are things that call his outside, which are their own things, their own pain. Is that what the scientists assumed, their own fault? I don’t know. What Danvers carries is the death of her son, who is killing her while she is alive. She’s a dead woman, she’s been dead for a while, so she has to die at that moment. She enters the ice and dies there and is brought back by Navarro, who can now do his her own decisions in freedom and being the owner of her own name. So she too has come back to life. She goes through it so she can then talk about what happened and cry and finally break down over the loss of her.

Before the season aired, I read that you viewed the season as a love story between these two women, not in the romantic sense, but in the sense of two people finding each other to find themselves. And after watching this episode I thought that was a perfect way to say it.

It is absolutely true. I think, and I learned this from my work with the Inuit, I asked them, well, how do you deal with the long night and the darkness? And they were like a community, sticking together, because otherwise, if you’re alone, you die. One dies if he is alone, if he is isolated. Then you have to join together. And it’s a love story, these two women. It is not a romantic love story, but it is a deep love story of mutual forgiveness and forgiveness of themselves especially. And a “I see you” process they must go through. They need to see themselves to then see themselves.

The episode ends with Danvers saying that Navarro disappeared, but we get a vision of them together enjoying the sunlight on a porch. Was that real or was it more of an imagination of some kind?

It’s also a free performance for every person who watches the show. I have mine, but that doesn’t mean that any other reading is wrong, because at that point the story is no longer mine. It belongs to the audience. For me, as a viewer, Navarro is alive. She went out and took a walk on the ice, because now she can do it and find a way back. But it’s true that no one ever leaves Ennis… or anywhere else.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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