True Detective Season 4: Night Country (Ice Capades!)

I was enticed by the setting (guilty as charged), but I'm going to wait until this season is over to see if you all like it enough for us to bother watching. Nothing worse than suggesting a show to a friend or SO and having it suck, since it erodes cred better spent recommending stuff you *know* is good.

haven't watched yet but the twitter discourse is infuriating and it's negatively polarizing me to want to watch it more than i otherwise would have. it's opaque and ponderous, you say? the tv show true detective?

Lol there are lots of things worse than erosion of cred smh

I’m enjoying the b movie regardless.

I've also found a lot of the online discourse to be soiled by toxic misogyny. I mean this season ain't perfect, but it's very telling that the show was turned over to a female showrunner and features two female leads and I'm coming across so many over the top pans of it saying it's "the worst show ever", that Foster and Reis are both "terrible actors", that López "ruined the franchise". All real quotes I've read multiple times.

Why are y’all reading this shit? I never look at “””the discourse””” tbh

I was about to say, following that garbage sounds pointless.

how can you not enjoy watching Jodie Foster ripping on everyone she engages with, friend family or foe

I mean, I don't actively seek it out, but I usually run across it when I'm trying to see if there are any easter eggs I've missed.

ok i never do that either. i guess i don't care about the little stuff, i just want to watch a show and be entertained. which i am.

i think the only time recently i have gone looking for what other people are saying was after watching 1) The Queer Ultimatum reality show and 2) Rap Sh!t, which totally rules and no one else I know has watched it.

xps I did see one "True Detective's latest episode scores a new low on Rotten Tomatoes" writeup in my feeds, hopefully the algorithm heard me rolling my eyes

rap sh!t is great, hopefully some other network picks it up for a third season

yeah it's my own fault for still being on twitter, which will feed me the odd dumb criticism of this season despite the fact that i've never interacted with any (one said something along the lines of, "take a shot whenever oscar winner jodie foster says one of the worst lines of dialogue you've ever heard in your life")

Yeah, I mean, you don't have to like the show! It's fine! But the criticism I've seen is so noxious and over-the-top, and it's always Foster, Reis and López that are specifically targeted as the "problems" with it.

Just bc someone brings a platter of poo to the potluck doesn’t mean you or I or anyone has to eat it.

Lol there are lots of things worse than erosion of cred smh

To be clear, I was talking about erosion of *my* cred, at home! Back when we were all here, it was very rare that we would all four of us watch a show or movie together, but I suggested we see "Knives Out" as a family, and everyone loved it. A couple of months later, during covid, when we had no choice but to spend a lot of time together, my kids requested something like "Knives Out,' so I suggested the 1974 Sidney Lumet "Murder On the Orient Express," which I'd never seen but had always meant to see. And everyone *hated* it, so much that they rejected any other suggestions from me for months.

In this case, I've never seen any "True Detective." We're close to being between shows, so I suggested to my wife that we start with the current season, which I'd heard (at the time) was good. She wasn't particularly interested, so I didn't want to push it unless I *knew* it was good, and not, well, a hit or miss b-movie vibe, which I don't think she would enjoy. If I recommended S4 and it sucked, or she thought it sucked, then that erodes my cred for when I suggest something else later.

I do sorta have the reflex now once I've watched a show or a movie (especially if I strongly liked or hated it) to go online and see what people are saying about it... ILX, Twitter, Reddit, etc

I'm pretty sure this could be categorized as a bad habit I need to break

Does Jodie Foster really have haters? Instablock if I run into that idiocy.

The soap in this last episode got me, in a good way. All prior soap sins this season forgiven. re: online discussion, I was seeing complaints that the story hasn't been pushed forward these past two episodes and genuinely what show are people watching because it ain't what I just watched. I thought pacing this episode was fantastic, very ready for the nice ribbon that ties this all together in the final two.

We’re all in the Night Country, now

Just a quick reminder the next episode is tomorrow:

https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/true-detective-night-country-episode-5-debut-early-max-tv-news-roundup-1235898376/

Let’s go

Well.

Great episode!

Indeed! Feels like both a ‘real’ explanation and something more are still in play too.

:(

The mid-episode reveal, when we learn that certain characters have contradictory goals than other characters, it felt like the meal had finally arrived. Hooray! Looking forward to the finale and saying a prayer they stick the landing, which I think (after tonight) is likely

omg what a crazy good everything-bagel episode

however
that slowed down Eagle Eye Cherry cover over the end credits HAS GOT TO GO.

mr veg was v amused by how loud i shouted at him to turn it off

Lol. All this negative attention being given to non-bad parts of the show when the internet should really be getting furious about the musical selection, for real

Wooooooooweeeeee
Amazing ep, shame about the final song tho.
I turned it off immediately

Fantastic episode, and one that hopefully puts to rest those “this show isn’t going building to anything” whiners.

My wife actually did have something complimentary to say about that ending song - “hey, it’s better than the original”.

my prediction: ice caves finale episode is going to be hella scary

Well how about better musical news, namely that John Hawkes aka Hank wrote the song he did earlier in the episode:

Q. John, when I re-watched the episode, and you’re singing that song, I was frantically googling to figure out what it was — and couldn’t find it. I emailed HBO to ask whether it was original to the show, and the publicist wrote back, “John Hawkes wrote it!”

Bennett: It’s a John Hawkes original!

Q. I know it’s not the first time you’ve contributed a song to a project that you’re in, but how did that come about here?

Hawkes: Again, when Issa broached it early on, Hank playing music, for the reason stated, I wasn’t comfortable. And then I thought, “Well, it’ll just be a guy sitting in his living room playing an instrumental,” which I wrote and played for her over the phone, and sent her a version or two. And she said, “That’s great.” So I thought, yeah, it’s not going to be performative. It’s just a guy sitting around playing the guitar, and it will end up, as the script described, scoring some work between Danvers and Navarro and the mine riot.

It became a wonderfully good-natured argument between Issa and I, because I played a show while I was there with my friend Nikki Lorenzo, a talented musician. Issa came, and then it became, “Well, now you should write words, and you should sing to it!” I dug in so hard. I mean, I love Issa! We never had any argument at all, ever. It was always spirited discussion, with laughter afterwards. But I thought suddenly it was just too performative. What words would I even begin to write? I came up with the words pretty last minute, actually.

i loved that scene & his song!
kinda low-level Lanegan vibes imo
and it gave a nice extra dimension to his character in a way, you get a bit of soulfulness against awkward/antagonist/etc

Yeah, a deft addition for sure. Elsewhere in the interview he goes into working with Lopez to make the character not simply a cartoon shithead.

Great scene. And that character is a real walking question mark, isn’t he?

VG otm
Added dimension and also a very good song.

my immediate response was "i'll buy a John Hawkes album" without realizing he wrote the song.

I'm all caught up and can't wait for the finale. I've taken to calling it 'TD4: Angry Sex in the Snow'.

This show - in all its iterations (*and* Pizzolato's novel) - has pretty profound daddy issues, right? I need to have a proper audit, but it feels like a theme that runs throughout.

jeez time really is a flat circle I guess

I died a little inside when that line appeared

I died a little when twist and shout played during navaro and danvers hugging

yeah same PLEASE DON’T

the interview structure of the very end was a bit rmde … i’d rather an open-ended ending than tieing all the bows

but i liked a lot of this finale! it was intense & suprised me in a few ways

Yeah I’m more than fine with it. It gives a ‘real’ answer for those who want it and enough left hanging to make it more interesting than how season one ended. And boy a lot of this episode was properly unsettling.

Interview with Lopez. Worth a read.

https://variety.com/2024/tv/news/true-detective-season-4-ending-who-killed-annie-scientists-1235908415/amp/

Still figuring out my feelings.

Mine aren't as positive as I'd like them to be

The “this is what happened to the dead men out on the ice” reveal is actually great! It’s just other aspects of the finale, and the fact that this needed to be an 8-10 episode season.

This got steadily less good by the episode, as the creepy and supernatural/
high end cop drama started to tip toward the latter.

I liked seeing hearing Tanya Tagaq in this

I was on board from the beginning with the deaths having a direct non-supernatural answer, but supernatural stuff is just happening in the periphery.

I'm not sure what their source was, but I heard that Issa López had approached HBO with a pitch, and they turned around and told her they'd do it if it was adapted into being a season of True Detective. Has anyone else heard something like that? If so, I'd be curious how the original pitch differed.