Josh Reviews True Detective: Night Country

True Detective: Night Country is the fourth season of the True Detective show but also a completely stand-alone six-episode story, with a new setting and new characters, as well as a new creative team behind the camera.  Night Country was written and directed by Issa López and stars Jodie Foster and Kali Reis.  The show is set in the snow-swept town of Ennis Alaska, a town where, once a year, the sun sets and doesn’t rise again for weeks.  On the last day of sunlight, a team of scientists vanish from an arctic research station.  The local police chief is Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster), who investigates along with her estranged ex-boyfriend, Detective Hank Prior (John Hawkes) and his son, newbie police officer Peter Prior (Finn Bennett).  Trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), an Alaska Native (Iñupiaq) trooper becomes convinced that this case is connected to one from six years ago: the brutal murder of Annie Kowtok, an Iñupiaq woman who killed after protesting against a local mine (run by a corporation that employs most of the townsfolk).  Danvers and Navarro deeply dislike one another and disagree on most everything, but eventually find themselves forced to work together to unravel these dual mysteries.

I loved True Detective: Night Country!!  This is a spectacular six-episode crime story.  Creator and writer/director Issa López has crafted something very special here.

I’ve been a fan of all three previous seasons of True Detective.  (I’ll even stand up for the much-maligned second season.)  I was thrilled when, after several years away, the show returned with a terrific third season in 2019, starring Mahershala Ali.  Whereas the first three seasons were written by Nic Pizzolatto, this fourth season has been created and run by Ms. López.  Each previous season of this show has been stand-alone, but this fourth season feels even more like a reinvention/reboot of the show.  I am happy they gave this season its own subtitle, Night Country, to emphasize that.  This is a great approach if the show continues, to give each season its own title, rather than saying “season four” or “five”, etc.

This new season hooked me right from the first ten minutes of the first episode, in which we’re immediately presented with a fascinating and compelling new setting (the town of Ennis, Alaska) and a new mystery (the disappearance of all the scientists at the Tsalal Research Station).  Once again we had a great mystery with hints of possible supernatural involvement.  I was in!

The show continued to have me deeply hooked into its story throughout its six-episode run.  I loved the way we gradually got to know many of the characters in Ennis and slowly peel back the layers of the various traumas they’d each suffered, to see how it all connected.  (To quote The Wire, this was a show where “all the pieces matter.”)  A compelling mystery combined with nuanced character arcs is a recipe for a great show.

The series is headlined with two towering performances, by Jodie Foster and Kali Reis.  Jodie Foster is one of the great actors of our time, so it’s not a surprise that she’s amazing.  It’s great fun seeing Ms. Foster on a TV show, and I loved how deeply she was able to sink her teeth into this character over the course of the series’ six hours.  Ms. Foster shows us Danvers’ laser-sharp focus and intelligence, and also how broken she is and the pain she tries to bury deep down.  (The show’s structure, and Ms. Foster’s terrific performance, reminded me of Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown; both shows center on a broken, older female detective whose poor choices and take-no-prisoners bluntness means they are disliked by many/most of the town’s denizens; but both are like a dog on a bone when it comes to a murder investigation.  That’s not a criticism; I love both that show and this one!)  While I have been a fan of Ms. Foster’s work for decades, I’d never before seen anything by Kali Reis.  She’s tremendous; a revelation who is easily able to hold her own on-screen with Jodi Foster.  Ms. Reis has a background as a fighter and apparently only began acting a few years ago.  Wow!  She’s spectacular here; Navarro is raw and wounded but also fiercely intelligent and with a tremendous drive for justice.  It’s an indelible performance that stuck in my mind long after I’d finished watching this show.

A key aspect of Night Country is the show’s exploration of indigenous culture, specifically the Iñupiat, who are a real community in Alaska.  I was pleased by the way the show took the time to explore various Iñupiaq characters, giving us a taste of their culture and history.  This was done skillfully, weaving throughout the fabric of this story without overwhelming it and turning into a lecture or an educational film.  The portrayal of the Iñupiaq characters felt pleasingly nuanced to me, avoiding easy good-guy or bad-guy cliches and presenting us with complicated characters who could be supportive or antagonistic at various times.

Navarro is half-Dominican and half Iñupiaq; the story explores her feeling of being caught between worlds and her journey towards connecting with the Iñupiaq side of her heritage.  (Ms. Reis herself comes from a Cape Verdean and Wampanoag background.)  I found this character-arc to be extremely compelling, and I was moved by the resolution of the question of Navarro’s Iñupiaq name.

Isabella Star LaBlanc plays Leah Danvers, Liz Danvers’ adopted daughter.  Ms. LeBlanc is a member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota tribal nation, and she brings great nuance to Leah’s story.  Like Navarro, Leah feels stuck between two worlds and is on a journey to connect with her heritage and to figure out who she is as a young woman.  This is a beautiful story (weaving throughout the main murder mysteries) and Ms. LeBlanc is terrific in the role.

The whole ensemble is top-notch.  John Hawks (Winter’s Bone, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) is wonderful as Captain Hank Prior, Liz’s jerk of an ex-husband who she has to work with every day in Ennis’ small police force.  Finn Bennett does strong work as Peter Prior, the eager-beaver young police officer who’s caught between his two parents, Liz and Hank.  Christopher Eccleston (Doctor Who, The Leftovers) is wonderful playing Liz’s boss Captain Ted Connelly, with whom she has a complicated romantic history.  Nobody plays “hangdog” quite like Mr. Eccleston.  Fiona Shaw (who played Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter films and who stole the show as Maarva on Andor) is wonderful as the idiosyncratic Rose Aguineau.  I was quite taken by Joel Montgrad’s work as Navarro’s put-upon boyfriend Qavvik.  I loved him and was rooting for his happiness!

True Detective’s mystery stories have often touched on the supernatural — that’s been baked into this show since the first season.  But usually, in past seasons, the show has veered away from that by the time we reached the end and got some explanations for the various mysteries.  I was intrigued that Night Country, right from the beginning, seemed to be leaning more strongly than ever into the supernatural.  I was very happy that, while we did get scientific explanations by the end for much of what we’d seen, the show also presents the supernatural and the spiritual as matter-of-fact realities that aren’t all explained away by the last episode.  Events such as Rose’s seeing her dead husband, or Navarro’s visions, do seem to have “really” happened to these characters.  That was a fascinating development for a True Detective season to take and it helped give this season its own identity, distinct from what had come before.

It’s always a challenge to create a compelling mystery story that sustains properly through a TV miniseries like this, one that can keep the audience guessing without getting bogged down in too much confusion.  Overall, I thought creator and show-runner Issa López did a solid job with this.  My one quibble was that, after such a fascinating and interesting opening at the Research Station, I was surprised that aspect of the story seemed to drop out of the show for a while in the middle.  I was surprised that Danvers and Navarro weren’t spending more time poking around the station to investigate what had happened, and that we hardly heard a peep from any of the missing (presumed dead) scientists’ families.  (Usually that’s a major plot point in a mystery like this — the missing/dead’s families pushing on the investigator(s) for answers to what happened to their loved ones.)  But I enjoyed the show’s narrative twists and turns, and I was glad that we returned to the Tsalal Research Station by the end, in a big way.

I loved True Detective: Night Country!  I wanted more!!  I would love to watch more stories set in this setting, with these characters.  Bravo to Issa López for all that she and her team have accomplished.  This season stands tall with the best that True Detective has had to offer.  If we’re going to keep getting new seasons this good, I hope this anthology series continues for a long, long time.  (Time is a flat circle.)

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