Summary
True Detective feels close to its roots, delivering the first part of a layered, chilly mystery with style and confidence.
The first season of HBO’s True Detective was so great that it earned enough goodwill for two subsequent seasons, neither of which were especially well-received. Now, after a five-year hiatus, we’ve arrived at Season 4, which boasts a new subtitle – Night Country – and a new writer, director, and showrunner in the form of Issa López. But, if Episode 1, “Part 1”, is anything to go by, the show has returned closer to its roots than ever.
Things have changed, of course. This season isn’t set in rural America, but in the fictional town of Ennis, Alaska, a mining outpost so remote that on a night in December, the sun sets and doesn’t bother to come back up again for months. The two protagonists are women instead of men. There’s an upbeat, slightly ironic theme tune (Billie Eilish’s “Bury a Friend.”) But everything else is very reminiscent of that striking debut season, from the brutal murders to the deeply scarred and embittered characters to the looming feeling of complete social collapse.
Tsalal Station
The hook this time is that there hasn’t technically been a murder in the beginning. The eight male staffers of Tsalal Station, a secretive research base looking into the small matter of life’s origins, have all disappeared without a trace – well, except for an errant tongue on the kitchen floor. We don’t know they’re dead until the end of the episode confirms it, although we strongly suspect it all the while. But the lack of a body is initially the point. Nobody knows what happened, from the audience to police chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and her combative state trooper colleague, Evangeline Navarro (boxer Kali Reis).
Liz’s initial investigation of the station neatly handles some important character development. She has a good idea of how quickly mayonnaise and processed meat deteriorate from her experience packing lunchboxes – a mother, then. She takes no backchat whatsoever from her idiot second-in-command, Hank Prior (John Hawkes), who gets roasted for having a mail-order wife, and inspires more loyalty from his neglected son Pete than he does. She knows what she’s doing since she’s immediately able to identify the severed tongue as belonging to a Native Inupiat, recognizing tracks in the flesh as the legacy of orally mending fishing nets.
Who does the tongue belong to?
The tongue, we later learn, belongs to Annie K, a local activist whose dead body was found tongueless a few years ago. It’s an unsolved case that haunts Navarro, who has a complicated working relationship with Liz, and she puts her on the mission of connecting the two events.
“Part 1” doesn’t welcome us into Ennis warmly – this is Alaska; nothing is warm – but opens the door on a community that seems to have been carrying on at quite a clip since long before we got there. We get a brief snippet of Pete and his wife, Kayla, who have a son but a relationship that is strained by Pete’s loyalty to Liz. We learn that Liz has a stepdaughter, Leah, who has made a sex tape with her sixteen-year-old girlfriend, and that both Liz and Leah seem to have been involved in a car accident in the past that might have claimed the life of Leah’s father. Everyone knows everyone, and everyone knows everything.
How did Annie K die?
This is why at one point Annie says that Ennis itself killed Annie K. We’re supposed to understand that the place is a character of its own. When she began protesting the mining companies, which brought jobs and money to the community at the expense of its environment and secrets, she was met with resistance from the entire town. Someone stabbed and beat her to death, and then after she was dead, in a frenzy of hatred. But the hate wasn’t just for her but for what she represented; it wasn’t coming from one individual but an entrenched set of values and desires.
At this early stage, it’s unclear on whose side of any of this the characters we’ve met are supposed to be. Likewise, we don’t know the connection between the murder of Annie K and the disappearance of the researchers, though we know there is one, both because of the tongue and because Liz matches Annie’s pink parka to one of the missing men. But there’s a flimsier, almost supernatural connection in two words, “She’s awake”, which are spoken aloud by a researcher in the cold open and heard separately by both Liz and Evangeline throughout the episode.
This hazy mystery, dotted with flashes of half-memories and leading snippets of dialogue, feels very True Detective. There’s so much to unpack in the case itself and the pasts of the women investigating it that the sheer volume of unanswered questions can feel overwhelming – but it’s difficult to imagine not tuning into next week’s episode to find out more.
How does True Detective Season 4 Episode 1 end?
The premiere ends by revealing the dead researchers – some of them, anyway – buried in the ice, their faces frozen solid in final screams, their tongues still attached. But even this news is delivered in a typically inscrutable way.
A local woman named Rose found them, and in dreamy flashes throughout the episode, we saw her being led in the right direction by a shoeless man named Travis. When Rose explains how Travis helped, Evangeline gently reminds her that Travis is dead. “I know,” says Rose, offering no more explanation than that.
What did you think of True Detective Season 4 Episode 1? Let us know in the comments.
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