“Don’t confuse the spirit world with mental health issues.” Rose Aguineau (Fiona Shaw) says these words to Detective Navarro (Kali Reis) early on in the second episode of True Detective: Night Country. It seems like important commentary on True Detective’s first season, in which Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) often walks a tightrope between the spirit and real worlds, though his hallucinations are explained by his mental health issues and use of drugs as an undercover cop.
It’s no coincidence, surely, that in the same conversation Rose waxes poetic about her dead lover, Travis, who we saw as a dancing ghost last week, and who guided Rose to the frozen mass grave where the scientists were found. She tells Navarro about their final encounter. Croissants, sex, not much talking, and then he walked off into the ice to die rather than suffer the long misery of leukemia.
“Then I found him,” Navarro says.
“Yep, one last gift from Travis Cohle,” Rose replies. “I got to meet you.”
The fanservice here is cloyingly thick, served up on a fat platter of exposition. The fan theories, it seems, were all true. Rust—who lived with his father Travis in Alaska!—is indeed, Travis’s son. They don’t say so explicitly, but there’s no way this guy just happens to share Rust’s last name.
I’m both a little surprised and a little disappointed that the Season 1 connections are so abundant and heavy-handed this season. I was expecting some subtle nods to past seasons, which we’ve seen in throughout the anthology series, but there’s very little subtle about this.
In their investigation into what happened, Prior (Finn Bennett) reveals that the science station is funded by an NGO shell company called NC Global Strategies. He tells Danvers (Jodie Foster) that this shell company is owned by Tuttle United, a corporation with its fingers in a bunch of different industries from shipment to cruise lines to video games.
Danvers laughs this off as “really unhelpful” but to anyone who’s been paying attention, she’s clearly wrong. The Tuttle Cult was at the heart of Season 1’s atrocities and I can’t imagine that Tuttle United is just a coincidence here anymore than Travis Cohle.
Then there’s the spiral symbol, which pops up half a dozen times in the episode.
Rose draws an image of it in the snow (more dramatic than on a piece of paper) to show Navarro and tells her it’s older than Ennis, probably older than the ice, all of which is super vague and “really unhelpful.” We learn from the delivery guy that the scientist Raymond Clark (an Irishman) who said “She’s awake” when he was having his seizure (which Danvers and Prior later witness on one of the retrieved cell phones) had the image tattooed on his chest.
More importantly, we see an image of Clark with the dead Native girl Annie, who has the tattoo of the spiral on her back—standing naked in a photograph Clark took of the two of them in front of a mirror. As you can see, this is the exact same image from Season 1, right down to the placement of the spiral:
What this means is yet to be revealed, but it’s a pretty strong indication that the Tuttle Cult has made its way to Alaska somehow. The money funding the station is from the Tuttle empire, and we know the scientists were trying to find the key to eternal life, which seems in keeping with the weird Satanic crap Tuttle was into. How the killings are connected is less clear. Why Annie—who was protesting the mines—has it on her back, or is apparently Clark’s lover, is another mystery. It seems fairly obvious that Clark’s weird behavior is not because he killed Annie, but because he loved her and was grieving her death and that the focus on him as a possible killer is just a red herring.
That theory is complicated somewhat by the trailer that Danvers and Navarro find and investigate. Here we have a very creepy scene straight out of any serial killer nightmare. The trailer is filled with photographs, images of the spiral and a full-sized “person” made out of what appears to be stuffed clothing, and dolls and other arts and crafts projects that are very reminiscent of stuff we saw in Season 1 and 3. On the wall above the “body” is something that looks like an evidence board, like someone has been trying to solve a mystery but is also kind of a nutjob. The music outro from this scene sounds like someone screaming under the ice. Very creepy!
Back at the hockey rink where they brought the bodies to thaw, they discover that only six of the seven scientist’s corpses are present. Clark is missing. “He’s alive,” Navarro says. Another needle drop lands—the rather on-the-nose ‘Seven Devils’ by Florence & The Machine. Lots of lyrics about crowns and devils and being dead and evil and all that jazz. Like I said, very on-the-nose and heavy-handed just like most of this season’s dialogue and exposition and imagery.
So far, I remain unimpressed. The setting is cool. The endless dark is surprisingly effective and even two episodes in, I find the atmosphere quite suffocating and oppressive. If only the rest of the production lived up to the setting but there’s something off about all of it, from the opening credits to the cinematography. It feels cheaper than previous seasons. Despite all the obvious connections to Season 1, it just lacks the aesthetic and feel that the first season achieved.
I’m also bothered by how muddled everything is and for no apparent reason. The story so far isn’t that complex, but it’s buried in episodes over-stuffed with too many characters and subplots, many of which feel superfluous. Do we need Navarro’s boy toy or Danvers’ stepdaughter? There’s Navarro’s sister and her mental health problems. Rose and her Travis stories. The miners and the townsfolk. I’m not sure what the point of Hank Prior (John Hawkes) is yet, or why he’s allowed to have official case files at his home that his son has to steal. Prior has his wife Kayla (anna Lambe) and their baby.
Danvers’ boss Ted Corsaro (Christopher Eccleston) shows up this episode for apparently two reasons: First, so that Danvers can disobey him and second so that the two of them can give us yet another ferociously awkward sex scene. I’m sorry, I have no desire to see Eccleston and Foster bang on a dresser. At least Season 1’s sex scenes had a point!
All of these characters and their relationships might be fine if we got to know them over time rather than have each of them jammed into the first two episodes. But even then, we’re talking about a six-episode limited series. There isn’t room for this huge cast in such a short show. It’s distracting and makes an otherwise interesting mystery too busy and distracting.
Worse, it seems like almost everybody hates everybody else. Sure, there’s some small affection between Navarro and her lover, but that’s muddied a bit by the fact that she seems to treat him pretty badly, both during sex and when she shows up at his place unannounced and scares him in the bathtub. Navarro and Danvers hate each other. Corsaro and Danvers are lovers but don’t seem to like each other at all outside of that. Peter Prior is nice, but Danvers is rude to him and to his wife and to his wife’s mom (yeah, wow, too many characters).
It’s tough keeping up with all the names, let alone all the reasons everyone is so angry with everyone else, let alone which actual mystery is being solved at any given moment.
Scattered Thoughts:
- Navarro seems really out of place. She’s supposed to be a local Native American but she doesn’t look or talk like anyone in the area. I’d believe her character more if she was a transplant from the East Coast or LA.
- Eccleston is probably best known for Dr. Who but I first saw him in the really great Robbie Coltrane mystery series Cracker. Check it out sometime. It’s a better mystery show than Night Country so far at least.
- I keep wanting to like Jodie Foster more than I’m actually liking her in this so far. I’m not sure exactly if that’s just that Danvers is such an unlikable character or what, but I was hoping for a very different performance / part. Like I said last week, at least in Season 1 you really liked both Rust and Marty even though they were both deeply flawed. I don’t like Danvers or Navarro at all. The scene with Danvers and the old Native lady was just so . . . off. She’s so unbelievably rude to an old lady. It was almost as bad as the drunk driver scene last week, when Foster was apparently reading off her lines for the first time. She’s a great actor but I don’t know . . .
- I wonder how much of this season will just tie directly to the Tuttle Cult and how much of this is fan-service or red herrings. I don’t like it either way. That was a perfect season of television and anything they do now risks tainting it a la the myriad ways Star Wars has been screwed up by sequels and prequels and fanservice. Please don’t have some weird Rust cameo!
- The frozen dead guy letting out that creepy moan in the beginning was super freaky and I’m not sure what to make of it.
Anyways. That’s my two cents. More like two-thousand cents. I’m just not at all impressed and incredibly disappointed so far. In a better role, Jodie Foster could have been the perfect choice for a new season of True Detective, and the setting is so compelling. Too bad the story is all over the place.
Here’s my video review:
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