True Detective Season 4 Ending Explained – Who killed Annie K and why?

Episode 6 of True Detective Season 4 was an incredibly dense hour of television, full of all kinds of reveals and explanations, but its beauty and power as an ending is in what it didn’t answer; what it left to the imaginations of the viewers who have endured a cold, stark stint in Ennis, Alaska for the past six weeks. I’m sure many people will be a little unsatisfied with it, but in a show so rich with hidden meanings and connections that has so interestingly tiptoed the line between real and imagined, corporeal and supernatural, Season 4 and Season 1, it stands to reason there would be a few things best left up for debate.

The finale begins right where Episode 5 ended, with Danvers and Navarro descending into the ice caves where Annie K was supposedly killed, while Prior is left to clean up the evidence of his father’s death. They quickly find Raymond Clark and interrogate him in Tsalal Station, which yields the majority of the key answers we were looking for while also positing a few more questions.

Why was Annie K killed, and who killed her?

Most crucially, Clark reveals why Annie K was killed. She discovered the truth of the relationship between Tsalal Station and Silver Sky.

We already knew that Tsalal was falsifying the pollution reports. Clark confirms this was the case and reveals that the researchers were pushing Silver Sky to pollute Ennis even more since the contaminants softened the ice they were studying, allowing them to retrieve microorganism samples more quickly and effectively. The researchers had been working on this problem for years, and they were confident that their discoveries would be a net good for humanity. Ennis was deemed an acceptable sacrifice.

Annie K found out about this, and when she did she destroyed the work – all the samples and the research. When the researchers discovered this, they attacked and killed her.

How does Raymond Clark die?

The finale deploys a trick that Night Country has used a few times, having a character explain something while a flashback reveals they’re being dishonest. In this case, Clark claims not to have participated in Annie K’s death, but we see that he was the one who killed her. He didn’t stab her with the other researchers, but when he discovered she was still alive, he strangled her to death.

Clark has been keeping this a secret for a long time and even keeps it secret from Danvers and Navarro in what he knows to be his final moments, suggesting how much the guilt has consumed him. At some point during the night, Clark wanders out onto the ice and freezes to death. It’s a suicide, though there are some question marks around it, not least of which how and why he ended up dying in the same manner as the researchers, why his face was frozen with such shock at the end, and whether Navarro was complicit in allowing him to leave the station.

Who killed the researchers?

Thanks to the mysterious physical evidence, including the handprint on the hatch leading from the station to the ice caves, Danvers and Navarro eventually realize they have been asking the wrong question – it isn’t who killed Annie K that matters, but who knew about it. And that turns out to be Bee and the other Native women from the crab company.

While cleaning, the women had discovered the hatch leading to the caves, and by following the trail had discovered evidence that the researchers had killed Annie K. When they were sure, they broke into the station and ushered the researchers outside at gunpoint. They led them out onto the ice, forced them to strip, daubed their heads with the spiral, and left them on the ice to freeze to death.

The scene in which Bee explains all this as a hypothetical story is simply brilliant, but it also leads Danvers and Navarro to understand why the women did what they did. They couldn’t report what they had learned to the police since the police were already in bed with Silver Sky, which we know because Hank was employed to move Annie K’s body to disrupt the investigation (and was subsequently charged with killing Otis Heiss, though we know how that turned out.) The women wanted justice and the only way they could get it was by taking it into their own hands.

This resonates with Danvers and Navarro since they did the same thing in the William Wheeler case (a flashback confirms it was Navarro who shot him, but Danvers says in the present day that she was about to herself.) With Silver Sky’s attempted cover-up having already explained the death of the researchers, Danvers and Navarro keep quiet about what they have learned and let the women get away with it.

What Happened To Annie K’s Tongue?

One of the big mysteries that Night Country leaves unaddressed is what happened to Annie K’s tongue. While we can’t be sure, we can at least make a very educated guess about who removed it in the first place, but how it got into the station six years later is another matter entirely.

Clark reveals that the researchers didn’t remove Annie’s tongue, and suggests that perhaps the cop who moved her (which we know to be Hank) did it to send a loose-lips-sink-ships-style message from Silver Sky. This stands to reason, and in a GQ interview with John Hawkes, who plays Hank, he confirms this.

What happened to the tongue after that, though, remains a mystery. Hank didn’t return it to the station as he would have been exposing his corruption to do so, and the crab company women didn’t know anything about it either. This is one of the few outright allusions to supernaturalism that the finale indulges in after carefully providing rational explanations for most of its mysteries.

The Aftermath

Sometime after all this, Danvers visits Navarro’s home and finds it mostly empty, though it does contain a phone with a video of Raymond Clark confessing what Silver Sky was doing at the station’s request. It is very strongly implied that Danvers leaked this video, resulting in the mine being shut down.

Danvers also cooks up a cover story for Hank’s death, and we see that Prior is still working with the police, not remotely a suspect. It’s a little odd that Danvers’ superiors don’t suspect her more given she was the last person to be in contact with Otis Heiss, but it is what it is. As she implies, not all mysteries get solved.

How does True Detective Season 4 end? Is Navarro dead?

Speaking of which, the final mystery of Night Country is the fate of Navarro.

The epilogue reveals that, at the very least, she’s no longer in Ennis. This is a payoff to an earlier conversation in which she had revealed to Danvers her desire to just up and leave Ennis like Matt Damon at the end of Good Will Hunting. However, there’s enough ambiguity in Danvers’ description of this and in the shots we see to suggest that maybe Navarro killed herself.

This is a bit of a reach, but one of the final shots is of Danvers and Navarro hanging out together, but it’s framed in such a way as to imply that Navarro remains in contact with her via spectral means. Earlier in the episode Navarro had revealed to Danvers that her dead son Holden had been communicating with her from the other side, and on death’s door from hypothermia, Danvers finally bought into the idea. Being newly receptive to the spirituality of Ennis, this might be a suggestion that Navarro still benignly appears to her.

Or, you know, they could just hook up at the holidays or whatever.

What did you think of True Detective Season 4, Episode 6 and the ending? Let us know in the comments.