True Detective Season 4 Episode 4 Recap – Can Navarro see ghosts?

Christmas episodes of television are usually a cause for some celebration; a bit of light-hearted festivity, and maybe a gag or two. Predictably, this is not the case in True Detective. Episode 4 of Season 4 reaches the last day of the first full week of night, which happens to be Christmas Eve, and all that’s waiting under Danvers’ and Navarro’s trees are more deaths, one-eyed polar bears, ghouls, and murder suspects.

Also, here I was assuming that the Night Country subtitle was just a reference to the weather, but according to a half-blind and half-frozen drug addict criminal recluse, it might also be a real place. And we might all be in it. Yikes.

Episode 4 quickly makes a point that nobody is having a good Christmas. Danvers is being kept up at night by the screams of Annie K. Navarro’s sister, Julia, is stripping off and roaming the frigid streets. Danvers finds her and takes her to the station, where Navarro is thankful in the weary way of someone who is unwillingly having to share a burden that should be theirs. And Pete is spending his Christmas Eve not with his family, but babysitting a bunch of frozen corpses.

Even Hank, who nobody should feel sorry for, is let down by his fake mail-order Russian bride, who was supposed to arrive in Ennis by plane and never turned up. He’s trying to stay upbeat about it, but when Pete asks him if he ever sent her any money, he’s suspiciously quiet. Instead, he changes the subject and invites himself to Pete and Kayla’s place.

Who is Otis Heiss?

Pete isn’t going home since Danvers tasks him with putting out an APB on a man named Otis Heiss, a German who disappeared in the late 90s after checking into a hospital with suspiciously similar injuries to Anders Lund.

Danvers and Navarro learn from Liz’s old Ennis High geology teacher fling that Otis mapped a series of collapsed ice caves up in the mountains. Given that Otis and possibly Annie K and Ray Clark might have been to the same cave system, and Otis and Anders Lund suffered the same injuries, it stands to reason that those caves are connected to whatever happened at Tsalal Station.

Danvers – alone on Christmas Eve since Leah has departed after her latest act of rebellion, tagging the word “murderers” on the wall of the Silver Sky offices – also makes another important connection. In Annie’s ice cave video, the lights cut out, the same as they did at Tsalal Station. And who handled the equipment at the station? Friendly old Oliver Tagaq. So, since Danvers is too drunk to drive, she sends Pete and Navarro to look for him, but he’s long gone, having disappeared with some haste after their earlier visit. However, he did leave behind a Christmas gift – a rock carved with the same spiral from Season 1 and earlier in this season.

What happens to Julia?

Nobody is having a worse Christmas in Episode 4 than Navarro. After Danvers picked Julia up from the street, Navarro convinced her to check into the Lighthouse, Ennis’s voluntary mental health facility, but she doesn’t stay there. Instead, she wanders out to a barge frozen into the ice, strips off, neatly folds her clothes – like the researchers; can’t be a coincidence – and then walks off onto the tundra, to her death.

When Navarro is informed by the Coast Guard – who are working incredibly quickly to say it’s Christmas – that Julia is dead, she goes postal at the Lighthouse staff and then picks a fight with the abusive husband and his buddies she quarreled with in Episode 1. She gets badly beaten up, and Qaavik, endlessly understanding, tends to her wounds and holds her while she sobs at having lost the only person in her life that thus far she had managed to remain tethered to.

Does Navarro see ghosts?

Let’s speculate a little. Now, thus far, nothing has happened that can’t have a rational, real-world explanation, but it’s quickly getting to the point that things in Ennis are so uniformly weird across the entire cast that supernaturalism would make more sense. One of these things is what seems like Navarro’s innate ability to see ghosts.

Now, look, I know what you’re thinking – it’s mental illness. This is certainly the implication, and it’s probably what True Detective will ultimately settle on. Here’s a broken woman giving her trauma ghoulish form. But it’s happening frequently enough at this stage that it’s worth raising. Navarro was the only person to see Anders Lund sit up in bed and croak a devilish warning. When she tells Danvers about Julia, we see in a flashback that when Wheeler was gunned down, she saw the ghost of his victim moments before (she denies it, but the flashback shows she’s lying.) It happens later in this episode, too. What’s the deal?

How does True Detective Season 4 Episode 4 end?

“Part 4” ends with Danvers and Navarro following a lead out to an old oil dredge in the ice, where Ray Clark was spotted by a fisherman. When they get there, Navarro is immediately led off by ghostly apparitions of her blue-haired dead sister, while Danvers follows Annie’s pink parka to Otis Heiss.

Now, Otis is hopped up on drugs and half-frozen, so he offers little in the way of actionable intelligence. He does, however, claim that Clark was there, but that he left to hide in the “Night Country.” He follows up with, “We’re all in the Night Country now,” which does make one wonder why he’d bother to hide there, but it’s a line intended to have an ominous effect, and it certainly works on that level.

Also ominous: Navarro sees the ghost of her sister again, and by the time Danvers catches up to her, she’s almost catatonic, sitting in front of a Christmas tree and staring into the lights. Merry Christmas.

What did you think of True Detective Season 4 Episode 4? Let us know in the comments.

RELATED:

• True Detective Season 4 Episode 5 Recap