While the stick-labyrinth Carcosa in True Detective’s first season carries a hint of perverse womb, one that harbors death rather than life, the ice caves in Night Country might as well be a frozen birth canal. They’re the true essence of Night Country, that unknowable realm that swallows men whole. It’s here that the Tsalaal scientists exact their enviro-sexual crimes; it’s here that the cradle of life lies waiting in the guise of frozen microorganisms.
Night Country: A Dark, Feminine Mirror
Warning: The following contains spoilers for Seasons 1 and 4 of True Detective
You’ve inherited season four of a once-beloved yet slightly moldering television series. Yanked from the original writer and showrunner, it never regained the acclaim of its hallowed first season. Execs hired you to turn that around. Season one has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 91%; critics say that the actors’ performances “reel the viewer in, while the style, vision and direction make it hard to turn away.” The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Beast, and The Atlantic all rank it as one of the best shows in recent memory. It garnered five Emmy nominations. It’s been exhaustively memed. Every Lynchian-bent nerd can recite its catchphrase: Time is a flat circle.
Enter Issa López with True Detective: Night Country.

López told Vanity Fair that she pitched the fourth season of True Detective—and was subsequently hired to write and direct it—as “a dark mirror” of the first season. “Where True Detective is male and it’s sweaty, Night Country is cold and it’s dark and it’s female,” she says. While this departure has some Redditors invoking the “woke mind virus,” which they don’t realize is an endorsement, López snagged a staggering nineteen Emmy nominations.
Despite the disapproval, Night Country’s strengthlies in its turn. While police chief Danvers (Jodi Foster) is often masculine-coded, the season itself reweaves familiar masculine of the noir into a feminine tapestry, subverting both tropes and traditional hermeneutics. Gaia’s not found in the languid, fertile South. We find her instead in the snow-covered sterility of the tundra.
The Tundra As Mother Earth
López spirited the “hot, sweaty” climate of season one to the freezing cold of the Arctic. Ironically, it’s the Southern landscape—hot, sweaty, and feline-sleepy—which is often reified as feminine, while life on the Arctic tundra often includes a snow-and-grit, last frontier masculinity. López turns that trope on its head. Silver Sky Mining Corporation—“improbably,” as Laird Barron says, an expansion of the Tuttle empire from season one—becomes an almost heavy-handed metaphor for the act of rape. Using a probe arm, Tsalaal scientists drill into the tundra to extract and exploit its (her?) secrets; it’s this probe arm that Annie K (Nivi Pederson) shatters before her death.
While the stick-labyrinth Carcosa in True Detective’s first season carries a hint of perverse womb, one that harbors death rather than life, the ice caves in Night Country might as well be a frozen birth canal. They’re the true essence of Night Country, that unknowable realm that swallows men whole. It’s here that the Tsalaal scientists exact their enviro-sexual crimes; it’s here that the cradle of life lies waiting in the guise of frozen microorganisms.
Writer-director López also departs from True Detective’s first season when she paints the Night Country tundra as a fundamentally supernatural universe. Many critics panned this decision; season one only seldom shows the otherworldly (notably the black star of Carcosa and a vision of a spiraling flock of birds). Instead, Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Martin “Marty” Hart (Woody Harrelson) tramp off in search of answers, and it’s answers they find: a criminal to catch, a conspiracy to unravel.
In Ennis, Alaska, on the other hand, most people accept that the dead walk. She’s awake, something whispers—to Danvers, to Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), to Raymond Clark (Own McDonnell). The Navarro sisters see visions of their dead mother; pseudo-Log Lady Rose Agineau is led to the corpsicle by her deceased partner, Travis Cohle, Rust’s father in the flesh—in the end, he actually does die of leukemia. Ennis is a world of ghosts and spirits, a world in which the dead visit Evangeline Navarro. Rust Cohle groped desperately for intuitive leaps. In Ennis, they’re as common as snowflakes.

There’s a reason for this departure, and a good one. In season one, when her daughter draws lewd pictures, Maggie Hart (Michelle Monaghan) tells her husband that girls always know these things before boys. “Because they have to,” she says. Women live in an uncertain universe, a place where the sum of the unknown outweighs easy answers; they learn early how to navigate it. No surprise, then, that the feminine landscape of Night Country remains comfortable with the unknowable.
Women learn early to move through a world without landmarks, and the supernatural goes hand-in-hand with the tundra’s darkness. In season one, even the climactic scenes take place in daylight; we only see the sun in the first and last episodes of Night Country. Season four remains shrouded in womb-like black. The land remains hidden. Women—usually Inuit women—know how to navigate it. But the whites, particularly Danvers, remain woefully unprepared for the task.
Danvers Becomes the Hart Surrogate
For her role as Liz Danvers, Jodi Foster won an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie. It’s not hard to see why. Despite the tragic lost maternity at her character’s core, police chief Liz Danvers serves as the masculine anchor of the series. She has short hair and browbeats her subordinates, particularly beleaguered Peter Prior (Finn Beckett). Like Hart from season one, she has a messy relationship with her (step)daughter, which blows up after her inability to recognize the girl’s nascent sexuality. She’s banged a good portion of Ennis (“Is there anyone you haven’t slept with?” an exhausted Navarro snipes); those assignations, like Hart’s, include a fair measure of adultery.

Moreover, Danvers rejects traditional Inuit culture, usually portrayed in Night Country as female- and community-centered. She opposes villagers’ protests of Silver Sky Mining. She forces stepdaughter Leah Danvers (Isabella Star LaBlanc) to wash off her Sharpied chin tattoos, a traditional mark of Inuit womanhood. She calls Kayla’s relative a “laundromat grandmother.” This blindness to minority culture becomes a “dark mirror” to Hart’s toxic masculinity in season one.
Moreover, Danver’s racism finds itself inextricably linked to her dismissal of the intuitive and traditional ways of knowing. Danvers wants answers; she pooh-poohs Navarro for any mention of the supernatural or spiritual. “Don’t you say his name!” she nearly shouts when the trooper tries to relate an apparition of her deceased son, Holden, going so far as to threaten violence. “I am not merciful,” she says. “I have no mercy left.”
Still, Danvers Remains Inextricably Tied to the Feminine
Danvers might serve as the Hart surrogate for the show, but she shoulders the tragedy of Rust Cohle. While Cohle’s endless grief stems from the loss of his two-year-old daughter to a hit-and-run, Danvers’ pain comes from the loss of her young son. But unlike Cohle, Danvers’ lost maternity manifests in more than pummeling grief. She sees visions of the car accident which killed Holden, of Holden himself; his stuffed polar bear becomes a heartbreaking, recurrent metaphor of loss.
Also unlike Cohle, Danvers’ lost maternity manifests in action. She spirits a child away to make mac and cheese while Navarro questions a witness. She accurately reads the decomposition of the sandwich at Tsalaal Station because Holden forgot old lunches in the back of her car. Parenthood has left Cohle so far in the dust that he rationalizes his daughter’s loss: she’ll never know pain. Despite her child’s loss, Danvers remains an active agent of motherhood. She might often fail with Leah, but she’s painfully, horribly trying her best.
Moreover, while Danvers rejects non-Western hermeneutics, she always hews to the importance of questions rather than answers. “Wrong question,” she tells Prior over and over, as she frets, “We’re not asking the right questions.” True Detective’s first season emphasizes finding answers: Who killed Marie Fontenot? Who lurks behind the animal mask? Where are the missing children? In Night Country the darkness only becomes familiar when you ask the right questions—not when you find the right answer. This comfort in uncertainty remains the domain of the feminine.
Navarro is Rust Cohle … but it’s also complicated.

If Liz Danvers is Marty Hart, Evangeline Navarro plays his beleaguered partner, Rust Cohle. Both are isolated, a stark contrast to their partners’ messy home life. Both Navarro and Cohle share a history of PTSD, Cohle’s from his time as an undercover agent and Navarro from her stint in Iraq. Both see visions; however, while Cohle’s are chalked up to—or at least explicable by—his history of addiction, Navarro’s are clearly supernatural. Both obsessively pursue justice.
But while Cohle reels Hart back by telling Hart that, “we owe a debt,” Navarro tells Danvers that Annie K “is yours now.” Cohle sees their search in terms of economics; Navarro insists on personal belonging. It’s a turn from the marketplace to the personal, the masculine to the feminine. Value lies in the intrinsic.
Both Cohle and Navarro become the intuitive foil to their partner’s blundering masculinity. However, Cohle accesses his intuition through intense study—those books Hart always denigrates. Navarro’s knowing, on the other hand, is innate and female. In fact, she cannot fully become herself until she discovers her true name. If Rust, as Maggie says, “always knew who he was,” Navarro has to find herself.
This sense of identity is inextricably tied to her Inuit community; the name itself demonstrates and delineates her place in that world. After she receives a vision of her mother, the collective of Inuit women tell her that it means, “the return of the sun after the long dark.” Armed with the vision of her mother and its explanation of the matriarchal elders, Navarro walks out onto the ice. She becomes, as Laird Barron says, “an avatar/vessel of the Inuit goddess Sedna, awakened to exact vengeance upon the men who violated nature and poisoned her faithful.”
The Importance of the Collective
This self-deification posits a return to the collective. In season one, the Tuttle empire uses collective apparatus, including the state, schools, and religion, as a means to rape and murder private citizens. In Night Country, on the other hand, the Silver Sky Mining Company and the Tsalaal scientists sin not against the private, but the collective. The mining company rapes and pillages the earth; its pollution causes stillbirths in the community and destroys the village’s water quality.
When the Tsalaal scientists kill Annie K, she is not a private citizen, but a soldier murdered on behalf of the whole; she’s killed for defending the comunity. Annie is more than herself. She becomes a female Christ, murdered for righteousness’ sake, risen from the dead. She becomes an avatar of Inuit rage. In her, the men from Tsalaal create their own destruction.
True Detective’s first season never gives up the idea that there’s one true big baddie—the Yellow King, Erroll Childress, Tuttle himself. Evil, or at least the culprit, has a centrality and a locus; we can ferret it out, name it. Night Country, on the other hand, offers a “story” rather than suspect. The “crime” is committed by the matriarchal collective. Or, since the women only force the Tsalaal scientists onto the ice, the earth itself exacts revenge.
This emphasis on the collective continues through the nature of conflict. True Detective’s first season includes a stellar shoot-out sequence of one continuous cut; it’s an armed robbery in the projects. In Night Country, that tense shootout situation is dragged into the domestic sphere, to the literal kitchen. Peter Prior is forced to choose between his father and Danvers. The overhead shot of Hank Prior (John Hawkes) dead on the ground, Peter Prior on the floor, Liz Danvers, and Evangeline Navarro is a literal domestic dispute.
Night Country sees that through to the end. Season one ends with Hart and Cole standing alone against the dark; Rust is wrecked with grief once more for the loss of his daughter. The dead remain unreachable. Night Country, for all its darkness, ends with Danvers and Leah at home in the light. Navarro has died, but she’s also present. The dead can come back. They return. No longer do men grieve alone in the dark; instead, the female collective persists.
In the end, time is still a flat circle. Of course it is: Gaia, after all, is the mother of Chronos. But while Cohle posits the flat circle as a symptom of stagnation, it’s something altogether different in season four. Annie K and Navarro step outside of time and become themselves. This offers freedom rather than despair. We fall, we rise. The feminine collective holds us all.

The dead do walk in Ennis. If you think that’s a bad thing, you may want to wonder which side you’re on.
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