True Detective always wanted a happy ending

So what is it? True detective, Really? Before this year, it felt like a collection of aesthetic additions. Two police officers played by prominent actors. A crime that spans multiple timelines. Kind of a weird fiction/supernatural horror film. Thematically, the anthology’s concerns varied from season to season, with its strongest focuses being heavy reflections on masculinity. But in his final, breathtaking hour, True Detective: Night Country tries to pull himself together and answer once and for all: What True detective is really about going back to where it all began.

This isn’t about lore or Easter eggs. Sure, Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) talked about being in Alaska a while ago True detectiveis the debut season. And yes, he may have spent some time there NightlandEnnis looks up at the stars without a television, the city’s permeable relationship to the border between this world and the next absorbing his subconscious, it Uzumaki-like penchant for spirals just throws his mind off balance. There are many connections available for those who seek them.

While Nightland is happy to haunt viewers with the same cosmic horror trappings as the original series, with the real full-circle moment, with what it posits True detective That’s what the way his characters respond to this cosmic horror is all about: with hope. Rust Cohle’s last line in the first season of True detective is a simple statement about the bleeding heart at its core True detectivealmost hilarious after eight episodes of nihilistic pablum.

“The light wins,” he tells his partner Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) as they stare at the stars in the night sky.

[Ed. note: The rest of this post contains spoilers for all of True Detective: Night Country.]

Finally the light wins Nightland to. The Long Night comes to an end and the sun finally rises as Navarro (Kali Reis) and Danvers (Jodi Foster) follow the spiral of the mystery surrounding Tsalal Station to its terrible center. The mystery posed by the Explorer Corps finds its answer in the solution to the other case that haunts Navarro and Danvers, the murder of Anne Kowtok. In an Agatha Christie-style twist, Annie was eventually murdered by all the men working at Tsalal Station after discovering a conspiracy between the researchers and the Silver Star mining company to increase pollutants released into the environment, to promote their research.

From there, everything pours out in a propulsive resolution that neatly ties everything together NightlandThe themes come together to form an amazingly coherent whole. Danvers ultimately comes to the conclusion that she was asking the wrong questions: not just who would have wanted Annie dead, but who knew who these people would be. The answer lay hidden: the indigenous women of Ennis, always present, always ignored, always watching. In cleaning crews and factories, in the shadows of men’s ignorance, a community formed that decided to remind the world that they were more than just passive victims in the story of Ennis.

Over the course of the six-episode series Nightland has thought about memory: about individuals, yes, but also about places, cultures and the land beneath his characters’ feet, the bones that spiral through the ice. Cut through history with a knife, and those who remember will fall on one side, and those who forget will be on the other: the women who remember the story of an abusive man in the premiere remember those who are at peace with the dead, those who are fleeing their past.

Navarro, Danvers and poor Petey Prior all have to wrestle with the consequences of escaping their past and the Ennis story around them, but it’s Navarro who takes center stage Nightland‘s concerns. When we meet her, Navarro is separated from her indigenous roots. She ran for years, gave up her indigenous name and feared that her family’s spirituality would drive her mad like her sister. Her law enforcement career served as a vector for the anger she nurtured instead of remembering connections – anger at men who hurt women, who had no control over their passions and no respect for anything outside themselves. Aside from her story, Navarro is incomplete.

In Navarro’s story, Issa López and her collaborators plant the quietly optimistic core of True detective Season 1 in the permafrost of Ennis, Alaska, and watch it grow against all odds and thrive in the face of horror. Night only falls when Navarro takes on her own name – Evangeline Siqiññaatchiaq Navarro, meaning “the return of the sun after the long darkness” – and accepts who she is and what it means to be a part of this place. In doing so, she decides to become someone else. No longer a police officer, but part of something bigger, something she wants to figure out in the ice.

Nightland ends with the most overt homage to its predecessor yet, as Captain Danvers sits in for a recorded interrogation about the events of the series sometime in the future. It’s another aesthetic flourish, another way the series looks back and acknowledges where it comes from. However, this time it is different. Where the original series’ interrogation scenes were ominous moments of terror, here there is hope. The woman in front of the camera knows that the light wins and knows how to make sure it stays that way. It’s about not running and moving towards the pain. Stare into the abyss and keep walking until you see the stars.