True Detective
Night Country Pt. 6
Directed & Written by Issa López

* For a recap & review of the penultimate episode, click here.
December 31st, the fourteenth day of night in Ennis.
Danvers and Navarro cautiously enter the ice caves. There’s an eerie presence immediately. Outside, the storm has begun to rage. Danvers and Navarro head into the caves looking for anything they can find. Navarro hears a ghostly whisper and heads through a space in the ice wall. It’s a tough squeeze but Navarro leads the way and Danvers follows. They come to a place where there was a cave in. Navarro’s convinced there’s something beyond it. “Can‘t you hear it?” she asks. She believes Annie’s calling out. Suddenly the floor gives way and Navarro falls down below, though she luckily doesn’t break any bones. Moments later, Danvers comes tumbling down when the floor collapses further. This leaves them trapped.
And out of nowhere, Clark appears but ducks back into the cave tunnels.

Navarro and Danvers discover a lab setup. They search the place for Clark but can’t find him. They notice something above them: a spiral, which is actually a fossil frozen in the ice. [Remember when Rose said the spiral was maybe even older than the ice?]. Danvers and Navarro keep looking around through the lab, which only makes them suspect Clark’s murderous impulses more than before. They discover a ladder going up to a hatch so they take a closer look and open the hatch, which leads into Tsalal. Almost like deja vu when Danvers and Navarro come up to hear the same Beatles song that played in Part 1 after the researchers disappeared.
Meanwhile, Peter’s cleaning up his father’s blood and Otis’s, too.
Danvers and Navarro carefully search for Clark throughout Tsalal’s research station. Navarro follows a set of footprints while Danvers goes to shut off the music. Danvers winds up being locked into a freezer by Clark, as he runs off. He gets the jump on Navarro with a fire extinguisher, knocking her out. Danvers gets herself a piece of metal and eventually smashes the freezer’s glass door. She rushes to save Navarro but Navarro’s been beating the shit out of Clark, so she has to stop it so they can question him. A great scene that you can tell was directed by a woman; a man would’ve had even another female character save the one in peril, but a woman allowed a female character to save herself without anybody needing to save her.
Peter’s surprised while cleaning when Leah shows up. He missed a tooth embedded in the wall. He’s able to get out of there without Leah noticing the human debris left behind. He also goes to Kayla and explains he did something bad, that he needs to fix it, but afterwards he’ll come back to her and Darwin. Kayla loves him despite everything that’s happened with them. She kisses him, tells him to be safe, then slaps him and calls him an asshole.

Back at Tsalal, Danvers and Navarro wake Clark up for their little interrogation. Navarro questions whether Clark really loved Annie. He says yes, then Navarro plays the video of Annie screaming. She duct tapes headphones to his head, forcing him to listen on loop to the sounds of Annie screaming for her life. The women go for a coffee while they leave Clark to be tortured. Navarro mentions how her mother “loved oranges.” This explains the earlier episode when Julia saw a vision of her mother after an orange rolled out beneath her bed. Navarro and Danvers talk about Peter being “fucked for life.” Liz says: “It‘s crazy, the shit that we survive.” The women return to release Clark from his torture, then they question him about Annie. He says Annie found out about Tsalal digging in the ice to get the DNA “of a microorganism contained in the permafrost.” He claims they were actually able to sequence the DNA, too. Problem: the mine’s pollution was helping to thaw the permafrost, meaning the DNA extraction was easier. Clark says they were “pushing the mine to produce more pollutants.” A haunting microcosm of how some scientific progress has come at the cost of the Earth itself and human lives. When Annie found out the truth, she wrecked the researchers’ work. Lund found Annie and attacked her. She tried to fight off the rest of the researchers, but they overpowered and murdered her, except for Clark, who’d tried to save Annie. That’s NOT actually true since, in the end, Clark still suffocated Annie to death. Except Clark says they weren’t the ones who cut out Annie’s tongue. He tells the women that a cop was sent to deal with the body.
Then Danvers steps out of the room, leaving Navarro with her gun and Clark. She thinks about that day with Wheeler. Navarro decides not to kill Clark. Then Danvers says she was about to shoot Wheeler herself when Navarro shot first. The truth of that day is revealed. It requires Danvers to go make herself a drink.
While oranges make another appearance with a delightful spiral of orange peel, Liz notices something on the floor. What is it, exactly? Liz goes back to her drink, as Navarro confirms the lines are down, so they’re stuck at Tsalal for the moment. Perfect timing since Chief Danvers isn’t exactly following procedure here, nor is Trooper Navarro. The women get back to interrogating Clark, who explains that he knew Annie would come back for them. That day, he had his strange moment convulsing, then he launched into action. He ran to the hatch and got inside, locking it. He heard the screams inside the research station. Someone, or something, came to the hatch and tried to get inside, too. But Clark remained for ages until he was able to leave. He doesn’t know exactly what happened, though. He barely came out of the caves. Clark also talks about Annie almost as if she’s a timeless, ageless entity rather than a person. He says: “Time is a flat circle, and we are all stuck in it.” Another Season 1 connection, no matter how nebulous.

Somehow Clark gets out and he winds up frozen, looking like his researcher friends.
Danvers blames Navarro. Now there’s no witness left, either. Danvers is starting to get stir crazy. She feels they’re going to freeze to death, too. Navarro goes to try starting up the generator and starts to feel a ghostly presence. Similarly, Danvers sees the hubcap of a car’s wheel go rolling down the hallway. Navarro hears a ghostly voice speak and turns to see Clark, convulsing, before he said: “She‘s awake.”
A fire helps Navarro and Danvers stay warm for now. Navarro says there’s “something out there” calling to her. She says there are comforting things about believing there’s more than right now and the living. It’s not what Danvers want to hear. Then Navarro refers to the dream she had about Holden. “He‘s out there,” she says, but it makes Danvers angry. Liz doesn’t want to hear about her child.

In the night, Navarro wanders into the snow. She finds herself back in that desert-like landscape where the overturned vehicle sits. She walks further, as Danvers comes looking and calling out to her. A ghostly voice speaks: “Come, Evangeline.” A hand with similar tattoos to Evangeline reaches out and touches her own. The voice tells her what her actual Indigenous name is, too; it means “the return of the sun after the long darkness.” Danvers likewise starts to hear a voice. She hears Holden screaming, then sees her body beneath the ice, trying to escape. She starts to beat on the ice and falls in, sinking down into the dark water below. She fights to the top but goes unconscious. Thankfully she’s pulled onto the ice again and brought to safety by Navarro.
A cold, weakened Liz comes to next to the fire again. She remembers the crash that killed her husband and her boy. She recalls happier times, too. It’s all mixed together in her memories. Danvers remembers finger painting with Holden and blowing out birthday candles. Then she’s back in the land of the living with Navarro. She asks Navarro what Holden said to her in the dream. Navarro tells Liz that Holden says “he sees you.”
An incredible reversal: Peter must chip away at the ice to dump his father’s body, to erase his father’s life forever, juxtaposed with a shot of Hank, many years ago, cracking through the ice to save a young Peter. Rose takes the air out of Hank’s lungs so the corpse won’t float when they send him into the water beneath the ice. Peter must finish the job and “close the door” by putting his father’s body into the water himself without Rose’s help. Rose tells Peter that what comes after all this, forever, is “the worst fuckin‘ part.” Now, he has to learn to live with what he’s done, even if it was the right thing to do.

January 1st, the fifteenth day of night in Ennis. The storm has passed.
Danvers and Navarro talk more, then they suddenly rush to the hatch. Danvers pours a bunch of solution on the hatch and they use a UV light to take a closer look. There’s a large, distinct handprint on top of the hatch. This leads them back to a woman we’ve already seen from the local crab processing plant, Blair Hartman. Navarro and Danvers go looking for Blair and Beatrice. When they talk to the women, Bee says they were already pretty aware that the researchers were the ones who killed Annie. When Bee was cleaning at Tsalal, she stumbled onto the hatch and everything else. They obviously didn’t report it to police because it would “change nothing.” Bee says: “We told ourselves a different story with a different ending.” What really happened at Tsalal was that the Indigenous women of Ennis came for the researchers to avenge Annie in their own way. The women led the men outside and locked them into a truck before taking them onto the ice. They forced the men to strip and left them out on the ice. “If she wanted them, she would take them,” says Bee. And so it went: “I guess she ate their fuckin‘ dreams from the inside out and spit their frozen bones.”
At least, that’d be the truth, if it weren’t “just a story.” The women stand united.

Danvers and Navarro aren’t prepared to challenge the official narrative of the Tsalal case. Danvers tells Bea and the women that the forensics determined the deaths were caused by an avalanche. Case closed. Navarro and Danvers aren’t about to shake things up, not after they told their own story about Wheeler; they understand that not every story needs to be told to those in power, or to the public, some stories are better off left to silence. Also, what about the tongue? Navarro questions Bea about it, but the older woman says she doesn’t know anything about it.
In the aftermath, Liz has to officially be interrogated about Cpt. Prior’s disappearance. She gives her story of events. We also see that Navarro’s moved on with her life, or, at least she’s moving onto another stage of life. Danvers finds a stuffed polar bear left behind on an empty bed, as Qavvik discovers he’s been left a SpongeBob electric toothbrush left for him. Navarro is out on the ice, walking out into the distance. Danvers also found a video of Clark’s confession about the pollution in Ennis. She manages to leak it online without being caught. She also starts to rekindle a relationship with Leah. And there’s some hope that Danvers has changed, as we see one last shot of her on the deck with Navarro, who’s likely only a ghost; whether an actual ghost, or just a ghost of a memory to Danvers, who knows.
A beautiful season of True Detective.
I would love more in this universe of True Detective created by Issa López.