Thoughts on Night Country
The first season of True Detective was the kind of true-to-life nihilism and cult-y weirdness I quite like. Then Rust said he had to do all the drugs and we had a built-in excuse for what weirdness he would see (the murmuration of black birds into a spiral, the vision of Carcosa). It could all be in his head. Or maybe…
Then there was the plagiarism and I’m surprised Thomas Ligotti doesn’t have a credit like Harlan Ellison does with Terminator being so like his Outer Limits episode, Soldier. The Ligotti connection is still in the new season, but in direct reference, an Easter egg.
And that’s mostly what connections the two seasons share, Easter eggs. Remember Rust? What if you met his dad…kinda? Remember the spiral? Did you know Tsalal is the name of a Ligotti short story? Tuttle family? OOOoooOoo!
But it’s better than that. Night Country was exciting and intriguing and I’m clearly still thinking about it. I’ve seen opinions for and against its quality, from a lot of voices I trust and find I agree with. There is no consensus. Some loved it, some were disappointed, and I think others took it in and have moved on.
I can bloviate on Night Country, I could essay about single moments, single shots! There was a lot to take in, and that is exciting in a six-episode series of mostly just one-hour episodes.
I will tell you what I loved from the jump: this was a ghost story. Whether the ghosts were there or not, everyone in Ennis, Alaska is haunted. How these people deal with their personal traumas involves dread and visions. Are those things really there and does it matter?
For them—for the characters—they are. And that gets us into philosophy that I personally believe: that people who believe in things, people who have honest faith, what they place their faith in is real for them. The Ancient Greeks believed in the Olympians. The Inupiaq of Northern Alaska believe in their spirituality just as fiercely today.
But like the first season, Night Country builds in an excuse for visions. Firstly, it’s winter in an extreme northern latitude where the sun won’t come up for days at a time, and not cross the sky for a month. There’s dangerous weather, geological events that can cause infrasound to freak you out for no reason, and a mine, polluting the ground water and causing health problems throughout the community.
What I am disappointed in with True Detective is that it teases cosmic horror. It suggests that the cults and things that personally haunt us are threatening to break into reality. But, then pulls it back in the last few episodes with convenient handwavium. Unless…
What was all the shit about primitive DNA in the permafrost that could “save the world?”
Is that the old god who will rain down madness upon the Earth?
Night Country reminds me of the podcast the White Vault. Then the titular Night Country reminded me of Silent Hill. Not the same, homage, or rip-off, but, similar themes, and nothing to be upset with. There is an element to the last episode that betrays our nihilist Danvers character up to this point, but almost dying seems like something that might affect you deeply.
It is in that transition that I have to wonder if the cosmic horror is still there, and not even from a certain light, but really there.
Navarro slipped through time.
That happened. It wasn’t a trick of light. It connected the end to the beginning. Navarro is a god. She can walk between the worlds, and her first step was an accident when she “awakened,” standing in the empty and powered down Tsalal station. We’re told only moments before that time is a flat circle, happening over and over again. We finally see what our remaining Tsalal engineer saw, after a standing seizure caught on camera, when he said, “She’s awake!”
He saw Navarro and she saw him. She was the awakened god those few days ago for him, but now she’s caught up with being that god.
The time slip, to me, is the most overtly supernatural thing that has happened in a show that keeps pretending to be supernatural. Which makes me start writing my own head canon that even connects back to Rust’s hallucinogen-ruined brain.
He said in the first season some of his visions felt different, as if he was looking on how the universe worked. The spiral in True Detective is a creepy symbol that connects the crimes. In Night Country, they’re a warning for dangers of deadfalls into ice caverns. Does this retconning of symbology make the first season’s visions become real warnings for Rust to heed?
I know Pizzolatto doesn’t like the new direction and Easter eggs, but I think I do, I think a lot of viewers do, too.
I don’t know, and frankly don’t care, what season 5 does. It will be different. However, I’m glad Issa López will be back for True Detective and new original programming.
Maybe the Tuttles and ancient entities will still loom on the fringes. Maybe that’s where they belong, for those of us who choose to look into the shadows a little longer.
Jodie Foster and Kali Reis turned in amazing performances. The native representation felt relevant and honest. I wish they’d come out and give us human triumph over unnatural horror, but honestly, human evil often feels very unnatural.
