‘Night Country’ Didn’t Need Any of Its ‘True Detective’ Connections

Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for True Detective: Night Country.

The Big Picture

• True Detective: Night Country
  ultimately reveals that true evil lies within people, not supernatural elements.
• Despite heavy connections to Season 1, they hold little significance in
  Night Country
  ‘s plot.
• Night Country
  ‘s premise of exploring the darkness within individuals stands strong on its own, even without connections to the larger franchise.

True Detective: Night Country has finally unveiled the answer to the questions surrounding the deaths of Annie Kowtok (Nivi Pedersen) and the Tsalal Station scientists. In typical True Detective fashion, while most of us were theorizing about the potential introduction of supernatural elements in the series, it turns out the real evil lay in people all along. But while it certainly stuck the landing, it did stumble on a very important and highly hinted-at front: the connections to previous seasons. All season long, the resurgence of important elements of Season 1 — like the spiral symbol, the Tuttle family connections, and even the ghost of Travis Cohle (Erling Eliasson) — were dropped along the way as potential hints about Night Country‘s endgame, but, ultimately, they were not.

‘Night Country’s ‘True Detective’ Easter Eggs Were Really Just That

The structure of True Detective as a series is an anthology — seasons that tell stories that are independent of one another but share the same overarching subject. So far, the three previous seasons have followed that pattern (albeit Season 3 did use the spiral as a symbol, too), but Night Country broke this mold from the start. Not only does it have its own subtitle and introduce supernatural elements into the series, but it also has a lot of connections to Season 1, which is the most successful and unanimously regarded as one of the best seasons on television.

In every one of its six episodes, Night Country drops at least one reference to Season 1, among them the spiral symbol (which in Season 1 belongs to the cult of the Yellow King), the Tuttle conglomerate funding Tsalal and the mine, the connection to Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) through the ghost of his father, the iconic “time is a flat circle” line uttered by Raymond Clark (Owen McDonnell) in the finale, and even the notion of a video that drives people mad (the raping of Marie Fontenot in Season 1, similar to the murder of Annie K in Night Country). While they were teased as having connections to the story of Chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), none of them hold any bigger significance in Night Country‘s plot.

The spiral is arguably the biggest reference and appears in every episode, mentioned by Rose Aguineau (Fiona Shaw) as being “older than Ennis… older than the ice, probably.” In Season 1, it’s a symbol of evil and the Tuttle cult’s goal of reaching the realm of Carcosa, which in their minds justifies the raping and torturing of young women. In Night Country, however, it turns out that it’s a symbol of nature’s power. After we learn what really happened to the Tsalal scientists, it seems more like a symbol of sorority and sisterhood that was corrupted by that group. Annie K having a spiral tattoo is confusing when put into the larger perspective of the series, because it’s immediately connected to the Tuttle cult.

However, Night Country implies that the spiral is a symbol that first originated in the Indigenous community way before colonizers arrived. Clark gets the same tattoo once he sees it on Annie because he’s drawn to the iconography and trying to memorialize her, but he does have his own connections to the Tuttles, however indirect, through Tsalal’s coordination with the mine. The use of the spiral by Clark and the Tuttles, then, seems to be a commentary on colonization and appropriation, via an Indigenous symbol that is twisted for evil ends by white colonizers. But we only know about how the spiral connects to the Tuttle cult because of Season 1; for all intents and purposes, Night Country could have used any other symbol, and it would have worked the same way.

The other references contribute to establishing a larger True Detective universe but were never a central focus in Night Country. The Tuttle conglomerate has now become an omnipresent corporation in the sense that it’s always in the background, but is never tackled directly. If the company recovered in such a major way after Season 1, when they were the central element in a human trafficking ring, is Clark’s video confessing about their pollution of Ennis going to be enough to take them down? The same goes for the “time is a flat circle” line, which may very well be an indication of Clark’s deeper involvement with the Tuttles, but it doesn’t earn further elaboration.

‘True Detective: Night Country’s Premise Was Interesting Enough On Its Own

Night Country has an interesting premise: examining how people fight the evil within themselves in a land where even light can’t reach. For weeks, this remote corner of the world is engulfed in a constant state of darkness, making it difficult to discern at what time of the day things are happening. In this context, a story unfolds about strange murders, the blurred lines between what’s real and what’s not, and how corporate greed drives a town mad, with two detectives alone in their fight to solve a crime that ties in with the very fate of their town. That’s Ennis, where “the world comes apart at the seams,” according to Rose Aguineau.

This is a perfect story for a True Detective season all on its own. Even with the supposed supernatural elements, it remains a story about how evil people can be to each other, and how much it costs good people to face this dark reality in the name of doing the right thing. The series’ biggest problem is that it’s supposed to be an anthology, so each installment has to rely on isolated plots and storytelling devices. It’s why Season 1 was such a success, whereas subsequent installments were mixed bags, failing to recreate the eerie feeling that got everybody hooked. After Season 2 failed, Season 3 started using elements like the spiral to try and convey the idea of being connected to Season 1, but it didn’t really work.

With Night Country, however, the fact that it was so different from previous seasons created speculation that this new installment could potentially tie the whole series together. It’s a huge break from the original True Detective premise, and such great goals warrant ambition. Of course, it’s not its responsibility to cater to speculation, but any greater connections mostly fell under mere details or hints in the background of Danvers’ and Navarro’s narratives. These characters are indeed supposed to have their stories larger than anything else in the series, and the overall plot of Night Country reaches a satisfying ending. But why tease so much interconnectivity, only to drop it afterward? If Night Country‘s goal was to tell its own story from the start, there was no need for such heavy use of elements from previous seasons.

This is a symptom of True Detective‘s larger problem: it was originally conceived by Nic Pizzolatto to be a novel, then turned into a TV show and, for the sake of continuity, transformed into an anthology series. Once Season 2 failed, references to the one successful season were introduced in Season 3, likely with the intent of getting the audience back, and that might explain why Night Country is so heavy with them, too. Watching this latest season, one really does feel that creator Issa López is also a huge True Detective fan, but she’s a much better storyteller when she doesn’t have to be constrained by someone else’s playground.

All six episodes of True Detective: Night Country are now streaming on Max.

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