In utter disbelief, I yelled at my TV more than once during the True Detective: Night Country season finale. Not only did the plot rip off Wind River in a pretty major way, but it also ended with some of the cringiest, most cloying nonsense I have ever seen on a major show. I’m shocked that HBO would air this.
True Detective: Night Country Episode 6 Review
The following are a few things I found utterly absurd about this True Detective episode:
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They’re so fast to investigate the caves in a storm, no less that they leave Peter to clean up not only Otis’ corpse but also his father, who just died. He has to clean this up and then visit Rose, who seems just fine with helping the poor young man cover up these deaths.
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After breaking through the ice, Danvers and Navarro find the tunnels that nobody except the teacher guy had ever heard of. They fall through to a lower section where—shocker of all shockers!—they run into Raymond Clark, the lone survivor of the scientists. Then they go down to the science room, which we soon find out is directly below Tsalal station. Did I miss that they were so close? It looks like they walked about fifty feet and are directly beneath the base.
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They follow Clark up to the station and eventually catch him. At this point, no one has ever talked to Clark about what happened to Annie or the other scientists, so they sit him down and start asking questions. Oh wait, never mind, they tape the loop of Annie screaming to his ears, and he has to sit there hearing the woman he loved screaming and probably dying over and over. While they are having another tedious conversation, Danvers and Navarro tie him up to a chair and torture him. For all they know, he might have been innocent of the crime.
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Then they decide it’s time to ask the right questions, and they go back to doing that, even though it looks like they’re just going to kill him, but then they decide he would be helpful in the mine and Tsalal thing. It’s crazy how crazy the cops are around here!
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Then Clark explains how Annie discovered what they were doing, which was pushing the mine to pollute as much as possible to make the permafrost softer so they could get to the miracle organism they were trying to find. Despite Raymond’s best efforts, she was caught and stabbed to death, though she didn’t participate. We get a less believable version of Wind River here.
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You’ve got to be kidding me; Raymond Clark says time is a flat circle the whole time.
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As they’re stuck at Tsalal during the ice storm, Navarro walks off into the ice (which is what Ennis does), but Navarro falls through into icy water, somehow rescues her and warms her up with a fire. They realized it was the cleaning ladies who killed the scientists, and since I guess the blizzard is no longer an issue, they go to where I guess all the women who killed the scientists hang out. As opposed to previous seasons, where investigations often last for years or decades, this one’s over in two weeks!
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They cover up the whole thing, which involves all these Badass Boss Ladies showing up at Tsalal and turning off the power (and Raymond randomly says, “she’s awake!” without reason) and rounding up the scientists at gunpoint, forcing them out into the ice, stripping them and running into the night. In the end, they froze to death. They blame a merciful spirit for letting the men survive. I guess the vet was wrong, and the dudes did die from freezing to death because they were forced out there at gunpoint by the women.
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As you may remember, the mine wanted everything covered up. Well, it looks like everyone wants it covered up.
At the end, they talk to Danvers about what happened and where Navarro and Hank disappeared, which is a little nod to earlier seasons. There’s just nothing satisfying about the resolution. None of the supernatural stuff worked. The scientists murdered Annie, which is what most people thought. In the end, it all seemed like a massive, unearned head-fake where the cleaning ladies tried to have their supernatural cake and eat it, too, even though many people guessed the cleaning ladies killed the scientists.
They end up being the worst police on this show, torturing the guy they’re looking for the moment they find him—and leaving Peter with his dead father to deal with.
Despite Peter working such a big case, Kayla is relentlessly petty, so I don’t like any of them. Danvers’ stepdaughter Leah is just as bad, making life hard for Danvers with no remorse in the face of—again—another major murder investigation.
Christmas is the time when people try to treat one another nicer. Aside from being awful to each other, Danvers and Navarro have a pretty boring backstory. Peter seems like a nice guy. Rose is okay, too, but she’s mostly just a character with no real point of existence.
I don’t know how anyone walks away from this finale thinking it worked. None of the fan theories came true. Neither of the murder mysteries of the scientists nor Annie got much solved. My guess was Wind River after the first True Detective episode, and I know plenty of others did, too.