HBO’s True Detective
Night Country Pt. 2
Directed & Written by Issa López

* For a recap & review of the Season 4 premiere, click here.
* For a recap & review of Pt. 3, click here.
The dead, frozen researchers are found naked in the snow. They’ve got burned corneas and ruptured ear drums. Their faces are contorted in terror. They’ve also got spirals on their foreheads. One of the men “scratched his own eyes out.” Danvers declares this case will be a “shit bowl.” She has to really keep things straight at the crime scene because the male officers start to act like a bunch of amateurs, which Cpt. Prior calls fooling around, of course. A mess.
Out of nowhere, one of the researchers seems to wake up, alive, and begins to scream.

Chief Danvers goes to see Adam Bryce (Donnie Keshawarz). She wants him to explain what Tsalal does. He says the bunch were “madmen.” Apparently they were trying to “sequence the DNA of an extinct microorganism” that might’ve been able to “stop cellular decay.” It could’ve helped cure cancer and all sorts of other diseases.
At the same time, Navarro goes to see Rose. They talk about Travis’s final days when he was ill, before he walked out into the arctic weather. [Another connection between this season and Season 1: Travis was Rust Cohle’s father.] Rose says sometimes the dead come because “they miss you,” some of them come “because they need to tell you something that you need to hear,” and others “just want to take you with them.” It’s all about learning the difference. Navarro talks of her sister seeing people, including their dead mother. She’s scared for Julia. Rose advises Navarro not to mix up spirituality and mental health in this case. But Navarro knows the mental health struggle all too well. Rose mentions the spiral on the researcher’s head. Navarro recognises it. Rose says it’s “older than Ennis” and “older than the ice, probably.”
At the cop shop, Captain Ted Connelly (Christopher Eccleston) wants to notify the families of the researchers and take things over, sending the bodies off to Anchorage, but Chief Danvers doesn’t want to hand the case over to anybody else. Liz brings up the official regulations regarding transportation of frozen bodies, meaning they shouldn’t be moved or else the forensics will be “useless in court.” That gives her at least 48 hours. But she has to keep the bodies somewhere. She goes to the rink, where Leah’s playing hockey. She finds Kate McKitterick (Dervla Kirwan) in the stands, though it’s clear they don’t have a good relationship. The two chat about the “giant block of flesh” and a need to thaw the bodies. Danvers asks to use the rink and Kate agrees, only because of a love for Ennis supposedly.

Gruesome Christmas having a bunch of frozen bodies carted through the streets.
The frozen mass is like a terrifying sculpture. Not something Kate wants to stick around for, so she leaves the cops to it. Pete notices that the men bit their own hands; another piece to the existing carnage. He and Liz pick out the identity of all the men now with a clearer view of them. They see “5 heads and 9 feet.” The others are buried. Liz and Pete also discuss the fact it looks like the researchers were in the process of running from something. We further find out that Kate and Liz hate each other because the Chief “might‘ve dated her husband” (and possibly before his divorce).
Pete’s able to get into one of the researcher’s phones. They’ve also prints from the scene that don’t match anybody. Liz discusses drops in pressure can cause eardrums to rupture, and hypothermia can cause all sorts of issues, possibly explaining the madness that looks to have occurred. But why did they just run out into the cold? What made them panic? Was it a polar bear? Or, something else? It’d have to be awful terrifying to go into the arctic weather without shoes. On top of that, what of the folded clothes? Was there a killer who murdered these men, then folded their clothes? All sorts of questions arise, but it’s all theory right now. Pete finds footage on the researcher’s phone showing the moment from Part 1 when Clark started shaking before announcing: “She‘s awake.”

More spiral action: Clark had one tattooed on his chest.
On the road, Navarro nearly has an accident when she picks up a cross and seems to remember a traumatic memory, likely of her mother. She tosses the cross out her window, then she goes to see a man named Chuck Mosley who might have more information than he let on originally when she talked to him. She says that Chuck was okay with what happened to Annie and that’s why he wasn’t honest with her. Speaking of dishonesty, Hank is using younger pictures of himself to a woman he’s been talking to, and this is how he ends up discovering the Annie Kowtok file box is missing.
Liz and her daughter have a difficult time. She finds Leah learning from Kayla’s grandmother about their culture, getting some marker on her face to get a feel for the traditional tattooing. This pisses Liz off. But, as we’ve already seen, Liz has a bit of a white complex going on because she doesn’t really get along with non-white folks, even though there’s many of them in Ennis. Perhaps there’s more to it underneath the Chief’s hard exterior. Across town, Julia and Evangeline are working out their own issues. Jules tells her older sister: “You‘ve got to let me live like a normal person.” It’s only that Evangeline worries that little sis will turn out like their mother. Trauma inflicted by parents isn’t easy to wash off and forget.
At night, Leah sneaks out to be with her girl Sheri while Liz puts up Christmas decorations at home by herself. Liz comes across a polar bear toy, which brings back memories of a little boy, Holden. More of the tragic past comes out and haunts Liz again. She sits on the couch and finds a paper with a spiral drawn on it, so she calls Pete for an update on any further info about Clark. Simultaneously, Pete gets slapped in the face by his father for stealing the Kowtok file. Cpt. Prior says: “Blood is blood, Peter. Remember that.” He tells his son that Danvers doesn’t own him.

At home, Cpt. Connelly receives a visit from Liz for a fucking. Afterwards he starts to question her about the case and why she’s taking it on. He thinks she’s only doing it out of spite. Liz begins to wonder why Ted is pushing to get the case out of her hair. She thinks maybe he has reasons for trying to control everything. Then Ted openly doubts her abilities, which Liz doesn’t take kindly. Neither does Liz take kindly to any threats from Ted about what he might do if she doesn’t kick the case to Anchorage. Danvers gets out of there and receives a message from Pete about Clark’s records. They see the tattoo on Clark’s chest and Danvers tracks down where it was done. She speaks to the tattoo artist, who remembers Clark being weird. The artist sends over a couple pictures: one of Clark with the tattoo, and one of a model for reference. It turns out that the tattoo was originally on Annie’s back. The tongue found at the research station was also confirmed to belong to Annie.
This brings Navarro and Danvers back together. It doesn’t feel great for Navarro, who believes Annie only matters now due to a “bunch of white men.” Danvers doesn’t want to drag up any of her and Navarro’s shared past, whatever it is that’s divided them so deeply. For now they try to work together, as much as possible anyway.

At the rink, Pete’s given a fright when Leah sneaks up on him. He’s busy watching the “corpsicle.” Leah notices that Pete has a bruised face. He mentions it was his father: “He was raised by an animal to be an animal.” Leah thinks that’s just an excuse since Pete’s a good man. She hears Pete’s phone playing “Get Down Tonight” and reminisces about her father and Liz dancing to it together; she even says she thinks Liz even smoked pot, too. Pete talks about his father, as well. Both he and Leah have their own similar yet different family shit going on.
Navarro starts piecing a few things together on her own. She goes looking for a secret trailer that belonged to Clark. At home, Danvers is going through files and sees some creepy scribblings all over them. She then gets a call to go find Navarro at the secret trailer. Inside the trailer are animal bones and all kinds of strangeness. There are scribblings like in the files, all over the walls. There’s also Annie’s phone and a shrine devoted to her, too. Uber creepfest. And then back at the ice rink, the thaw’s been well underway, which brings a discovery: there are only six bodies, and Clark is not among them, he’s still out there, somewhere.