‘True Detective’ Season 4, Episode 6 Recap: Stories Are Stories

Season 4, Episode 6: Part 6

One of the difficult parts of a ghost story like “True Detective: Night Country” is the banal and inevitable task of having to explain events that were once mockingly inexplicable. It is more disturbing, for example, to imagine a supernatural force turning terrified scientists into an Arctic “corpse” than to know that they were commanded by a vigilante group of indigenous women who took the law into their own hands.

This is the risk creator Issa López has taken all season, as the show’s procedural elements have been interspersed with dark symbols, hidden traumas, and ghostly hallucinations. To solve the practical mysteries facing Danvers and Navarro, she would have to return to Earth.

However, the achievement of this flawed but compelling ending is that Lopez manages to have his cake and eat it too. The important questions about Annie K.’s death and the scientists have concrete answers, but she is unwilling to reveal the spiritual and psychological discomfort that is unique to this place.

From the beginning, the strongest element of “Night Country” has been its evocation of Ennis, Alaska, as humanity’s northernmost outpost, a frontier town headed toward oblivion. There have been several moments, including some in the finale, where a character is one step away from disappearing into nothingness, like Werner Herzog. upset penguin in “Encounters at the End of the World.”

The big reveals begin before the opening credits here, as Danvers and Navarro burst into the ice cave system in the middle of a storm that seems formidable even by Ennis’ standards. However, López is still not willing to let go of the sinisterness that has been such an important piece of the intrigue: as they advance through the caves, Navarro retreats through a narrow crevice, certain that he “hears” Annie. taking it where they need. go. That’s more than a detective’s instincts at work; that’s a sixth sense. And López validates the moment when the two discover the secret laboratory where Annie was murdered.

The connection between Annie’s case and the dead scientists had been something Danvers and Navarro had worked hard to connect, from the romantic relationship between Annie and Raymond Clark to the shady financial deal between the mine and the laboratory, which needed help improving their pollution figures. . When they find the underground facility and capture Raymond, their suspicions are confirmed, although the details are a bit surprising.

It turns out that the lab’s multi-year effort to extract DNA from a microorganism in the ice benefited from heavy pollution from the mine, which softened the permafrost. Annie found out about the project through Raymond’s notes and tried to destroy the research, leading Lund and the other scientists to stab her repeatedly.

In an ironic twist, Danvers and Navarro are far from the first people to find out what happened to Annie, despite having investigated the case so obsessively. Last week we discovered that Hank had moved Annie’s body at Kate’s behest, prompted by the promise that she would use her political connections to secure the police chief job for him. But later in this episode, Danvers uses Raymond’s testimony about “holding the hatch” while his fellow scientists were attacked to deduce that there must be evidence of someone trying to break in from above. That leads her to an indigenous custodian who discovered the hidden lab, discovered what the scientists had done, and took the law into her own hands.

As presented, the flashback to the vigilante assault on the scientists seems a bit over the top, an action too extreme for ordinary women to take. But López has done well to lay the groundwork to make it semi-plausible, given the conspiratorial intimacy between the mine and authorities and the hostility directed toward the natives who have been paying the highest price for the profits. They can’t trust that justice will be served on Annie’s behalf, and even Navarro and Danvers, two women of the law, have to admit it. After all, one of their own helped cover up the murder.

In the end, as Navarro says, “stories are stories,” especially in Ennis, where the most important business seems to happen outside of the books. If Kate and Connelly have the gall to ignore the scientists’ fate as a “climate event,” then Danvers believes she has the same authority to use the official story to exonerate the women responsible for that abstract work of art that melted in the center of the ice. The same lie that had been used to cover up a conspiracy would be used to grant mercy to indigenous people who had suffered the loss of one of their own, not to mention the stillbirths the mine had cost their community.

But there is still the question of living with it all. Peter spends the episode cleaning up a crime scene. When Rose helps him slide her father’s corpse into the sea, she has the mercy of turning him around while she knocks the air out of his lungs to keep him from floating. But otherwise, she is no consolation, saying that the worst is not over, but rather “what comes next: forever.” She will have that stain on her conscience. Danvers will not forget his son. Navarro may or may not follow his sister’s path into darkness.

The end of “Night Country” is ultimately about Ennis, a town that, in Danvers’ words, “was here long before the mine, long before APF, long before Alaska was called Alaska.” In a semi-vulgar callback to the first season, Raymond complains that “time is a flat circle” in reference to Annie, who he claims has been hiding in the caves before she was born and will continue to hide. after everyone dies. Even after tying up all the loose ends, Lopez clings to the idea of ​​Ennis as a place where ghosts commune with the living, whether through feverish hallucinations or a lingering guilt that blooms in the darkness like a mushroom.

“Nobody really leaves,” Danvers says. That is a comfort and a curse.

flat circles

• A couple of notable nods to previous work here: The hatch leading to the secret lab feels like the tip of a hat from “Lost,” the ultimate TV puzzle box, and Navarro slowly regains consciousness as Raymond drags her across the floor. and remember Shelley Duvall trying to drag Jack Nicholson into the kitchen storage room in “The Shining.”

• The great mystery of the rolling orange is solved! Navarro’s mother loved oranges and she peeled them with a knife. The shape of that shell? A spiral, of course.

• Raymond genuinely loves an indigenous woman while actively plotting against her and her community, making this season of “True Detective” an ideal pairing with “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

• Rose’s deflated response when Peter knocked on her door: “It’s going to be one of those nights, isn’t it?” – makes you wonder if she has a side business dumping dead bodies into the sea. She’s very good at it.

• Dirge-like covers of pop songs have become a staple of trailers, movies and shows looking for an edge, but let the sad rendition of “Twist and Shout” here be the end of it.