"True Detective" season four review: a return to chthonic origins
A blood-chilling continuation of the detective series with Jodie Foster as a policewoman.
The cult series "True Detective" is known to most thanks to the first season, released ten years ago. In it, actors Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson reincarnated as partners with strange relationships, work and friendship, and series creator Nick Pizzolatto showed what a sweaty male investigation is. The next two seasons didn't stick in fans' minds as well, but the anthology sequel called Night Country has a good chance of becoming iconic in its own way - even without Pizzolatto's involvement.
The town of Ennis, Alaska, falls asleep for months - and "we do not know what beasts dream the night that lasts so long that even God slumbers." At the Tsalal research station, something unexplainable happens: eight scientists first go about their business, then disappear, and suddenly seven of them find themselves stripped naked and encased in ice. For a town in which the worst crime is to drive drunk, the tragedy becomes a cause for all-consuming panic. Local police chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and young patrolwoman Evangeline Navarro, with whom it will not immediately work out, take on the case. She is played by Cali Reyes, once a boxing champion.
For years, True Detective has been something of an encyclopedia of alpha males whose ideologies are shattered by everyday life. Season four explores the habitat of those women who are rarely taken as wives and can't imagine being mothers. They are surrounded by men ordering Russian brides online and unwilling to share the responsibility. The opening credits of season four declare from the doorstep that it's women's time, and instead of Leonard Cohen, it's Billy Eilish. The viewer is used to the hot endless heat, and Lopez is plunged into a cold agelessness. Both Liz and Evangeline have secrets from the past: they haunt in the form of memories from their experiences and shadows in parking lots. Navarro can't get over the unsolved murder of local activist Annie (Nivi Pedersen), and Liz's stepdaughter goes rogue in her fight for indigenous rights: both mentioned weaknesses turn out to be clues. The heroines don't act feminine at all: their stiffness, cynicism and closed-mindedness are hardly different from the characters of previous detectives, nor is their desire to solve everything on their own, and sometimes with brute force. Lopez said of the season, "It's cold, dark and feminine," but did not imply that gender affects the characters' behavior.
While the issue of gender has only now come up in True Detective, the chthonic roots have always been there. It's unclear whether the dead Annie herself appears as a ghost and scatters clues or whether her mysterious death acts as a red rag on the detectives. Ice blocks with a secret inside are inspired by John Carpenter's thriller The Thing, and the murder is reminiscent of the story of the Dyatlov group - Liz also finds someone's icy tongue, and the scientists' injuries are inexplicably brutal. Before their deaths, the lab workers wrote "We're all dead" on a chalkboard, and the animals were acting overly active. Suddenly, a frightening spiral symbol appears - the same one that was drawn on the victim's back in the first season. "Night Country" only flirts with mysticism, making it seem more like a distraction from what's going on. Still, Liz states: sometimes questions are forever unanswered, and some are beyond the power of the human mind, even a police officer. It is unclear whether the sudden tongue mark on the floor is a chemical reaction or a ghostly message. Some viewers have claimed that Navarro herself has become a conduit to the otherworld - a blurry figure often appears behind her, she hears voices, and periodically it is as if she is under someone else's influence. Some have suggested that Evangeline is the goddess Sedna, the Inuit embodiment of life and death, and that her indigenous name, whispered by the voices, means "light returning after prolonged darkness.
We gradually learn that the woes of the town of Ennis come from a corporation connected to a company from previous seasons, and... nothing more. The thing is, Nightland was originally intended to be a standalone series, but HBO liked the idea of Lopez filming a "dark mirror" of True Detective's first season. Despite all the references that appear in the sequel - whether it's a distinctive spiral, a Rust Cohle quote, or a character related to his father - they're just flirtations, not direct parallels. The knots scattered between season four and season one go nowhere, remaining mere fanservice. This was pointed out by Nick Pizzolatto himself, who in his X (formerly Twitter) profile first called the connection to the first season "very silly" and wrote about the new episodes that he "had nothing to do with them" - though then quickly deleted it, but the Internet remembers everything. Perhaps the creator of the original "True Detective" was hurt by the ratings of "Nightland": it is higher than the second and third seasons, where Pizzolatto still served as showrunner. Despite the creator's dissatisfaction, the fourth season still honors the series' balance between human wickedness and mystical justifications. In the end, the main downside of the sequel was the creators' blatant flirtation with McConaughey and Harrelson's real-life detectives, which doesn't really lead to anything and is left hanging in the middle of the plot.
"Night Country" was not as daring as it seemed from afar: the season does not open a new detective formula and certainly does not remake the old one, moving on the beaten path - in Lopez immediately visible fan of "True Detective". Despite the women in the main positions, it doesn't change much: people try to justify their own cruelty by otherworldly forces, detectives get stale and icy because of unhealed injuries, and in the end everyone gets saved. Season four is still just as infected with pessimism, but with a good ending, though it gets harder and harder to fight evil. As Rust Cohle said, "Once there was only darkness. Now the light is winning."
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