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

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.

I’ve heard that a lot

"And what is your pitch?" "It's about interfering studio executives dying in agony naked out on the ice." "Seems on the nose, can you frame it for us?"

i like the idea that it ultimately partly hinges on grief (though this is maybe a tad underdeveloped)

rose says to the kid on the ice “you think the worst part is over don’t you. but the worst part is that it lasts forever”or something like that paraphrasing horribly …
so then the orange, the bear, etc all that seemingly creepy stuff are talismans of loss that the grieving ppl keep randomly seeing, like weird unearthly anchors that keep them in their grief idk just spitballing

and that being really fucking cold & really fucking tired can make you really fucking crazy

My favorite random moment may still be the plait of hair in the washer.

https://www.vox.com/culture/2024/2/18/24075084/true-detective-night-country-season-4-finale-review-what-happened

this review is interesting but since I don't engage with the (apparently super hetero dude) online fanbase of this series it's kind of weird so see that fanbase be the context for criticism.

I liked the final. Liked the resolutions for Danvers and Navarro (including the ambiguous final scene) and the solve for the deaths of the scientists. Had more issues with the overall series - felt like it went too wide with characters and subplots for a 6 episode series with a great setting, intriguing murder mystery and strong lead characters. Maybe this is just a pet peeve of mine - thought the same thing about Murder at the End of the World.

yeah i feel a bit that way too

I was not expecting an essay by highly regarded horror writer Laird Barron about this season, but he wrote one, and it's really good.

oh awesome! love them. great read

Finale was a little slow — just finished watching so I’m digesting my thoughts. At least we got to see 😍Qavvik😍 again, feeding his wolf-dogs.

I liked it, overall. It felt a bit underdeveloped in the writing, and the LOTR ending upon ending tied things up a little too neatly for me. I wonder how the women attacking the station will settle over time, but right now I like it. The scene of the men in the truck, getting out, huddling in the snow, being told to take off their clothes - that scene has been enacted so many times throughout history, the other way around, that it felt partly like the whole thing had been written in an attempt to right that wrong. And I was here for it.

I'm not sure about the supernatural elements. Perhaps simultaneously over-coded and under-written (something that could be levelled at S1)? Not sure.

xp I wanted Navarro to end up with Qavvik!

I'm babbling now but I don't quite get Navarro's isolation at the end. Disappearing without disappearing?

maybe she did disappear! maybe it was her ghost w Danvers at the end

I'm not sure about the supernatural elements. Perhaps simultaneously over-coded and under-written (something that could be levelled at S1)? Not sure.

that's practically the True Detective hallmark now. It felt like a mess in the first season (as though the show actively worked against these elements because someone at the network said to dial it back; I don't know if that's true but that was always the feeling I got). This time around it felt like an attempt to address those dangling issues and give them more space in the overriding narrative, but I have no idea if anything will ever be more fully developed or if even doing that is a good idea. 'time is a flat circle' felt really hamfisted this time.

In season 5 there will be a scene featuring a construction worker accidentally running over a grandfather clock with a steamroller and saying to his foreman, "hey boss, looks like time is a flat circle now, eh?".

Lol

I think it's just really hard to do ghost stories effectively now, since your audience has seen dozens and dozens of them and spookiness depends on subtlety but anything you try and do now is amplified to the level of cannon fire by awareness of ghost tropes and Internet discussion

like how do you masterfully have something flit past behind a character and make the viewer think "did I just see that, or?" when they can just pause, rewind, and watch again until they are satisfied

(I thought the final episode of the season redeemed it a lot)

like how do you masterfully have something flit past behind a character and make the viewer think "did I just see that, or?" when they can just pause, rewind, and watch again until they are satisfied

I read an essay about writing recently in which the author argued that one should not write with one's worst possible reader in mind. And what you're describing falls into that trap. Don't write for people who live to go on Twitter and talk about "plot holes" and "gratuitous sex scenes" and other bullshit. Those people cannot be satisfied, because their only satisfaction comes from picking things apart until they're convinced no one else can enjoy it anymore either. Write for people who are willing to get on board the Fun Train and take the ride. Let the joyless nitpickers and doubters live their joyless, nitpicking lives out of your sight.

Not ghosts but seeing the Exorcist for the first time after growing up with the tropes made it difficult to understand its reputation.

idk dude, i still find it scary af

Prince of Darkness is scarier than the Exorcist to me

!!

prince of darkness still owes me for the 101 minutes it robbed from my life

I think Exorcist III is scarier than the first one, and it's also the only one I ever saw in a theater cold without any expectations

what is happening

Finally watched the finale. I know everybody fixated on the reappearance of "Time is a flat circle," but to me the key to the whole series is Danvers' mantra, "You're asking the wrong questions."

TBH I got really tired of her saying that over and over. when people complain about the lazy writing this time around (which i've seen people do) I'm guessing they're talking about stuff like that.

wtf i liked that

I think I like VG's angle about it being about grief, all the ghosts being projections of.

we usually locate the subconscious inside our bodies, but some cultures evert it and keep it in the world, we look haunted but this show took the other tack, to the grieving the world looks haunted, sadness is a place outside that you can go and it can kill you

“You’re posting the wrong opinions”

In general I wish the script was tightened, there had been a better editing model so the series didn’t feel so clunky, but it was totally fine and good

Interesting that Dr Who and Mining Lady were just absent in the finale but that’s ok I guess

My wife said that as a nonwhite woman (since we've been in Montana, multiple people have thought she's Native) the finale had a great deal of impact for her. She was thrilled by the fact that it turned out to be the Native women who'd done everything, and that no one had even thought that it could have been them because they were effectively invisible in the first five episodes, and indeed in the world of the show. "What? The cleaning ladies?" Yeah, motherfucker, the cleaning ladies, who watched you poison their water and kill their children! Of course they came for you!

otm

So did this turn out to be better than Fargo s5, or

I am not sure it worked as horror, as a mystery or as a policier but I didn’t hate it. Leaving aside the forced True Detective references, it would be interesting to know whether the original vision was so heavily focused on the two lead characters or had more balance with the community at large.

Unperson’s wife otm — the reversal of roles in that scene plus the fact that no one would have considered it was them made for a very satisfying conclusion to that storyline for me.

I’m still a little confused about who Holden is/was? I get the emotional impact of losing him but unless I’m just forgetting, idk more than “kid who died” about this character.

Also the scenes in the ice cave were SO stressful. I’m scared of caves I think.

We're going to Iceland next month and this show really got me in the mood for parkas and crampons. We will NOT be exploring ice caves.

I'm not easy with caves or confined spaces, even in movies. I'm haunted by that irl story about the caver who crawled into an extremely narrow dead end, got themselves firmly wedged in there and couldn't be rescued.

I’m still a little confused about who Holden is/was?

Danvers' son, that seemed fairly explicit. I'm not sure who the father was or what happened to him.

Yes -- I gathered that she was his caretaker/mother, but was he adopted? Who was the father? I guess it doesn't matter ultimately, maybe that is the point? IDK.

xp I actually really like small spaces and am not claustrophobic for the most part. Still, I remember very clearly one time my boo and I were hiking and there was a known cave entrance. We walked up to it, talked about checking it out, I was feeling brave and got about half of my body inside and was immediately seized by a wave of ABSOLUTELY NOT and scooted right tf out. The prevailing feeling was "not going out like that" and I was glad my body's danger sensors still worked. Do NOT crawl under the earth's surface.

When I was watching these scenes I kept worrying they wouldn't remember which way they turned and would be lost down there. When they finally found the entrance to the lab I was SO relieved. At least they can chill in this cursed lab.

My read was that Danvers married Leah's dad, they had Holden, and Holden + dad were killed in a car accident, leaving Danvers and Leah as the family unit.

Ahhh, ok. I guess I missed that, or forgot. That makes sense.

One thing I thought was cute was whenever someone was chomping on a bag of chips (Cheetos, Funyuns) they always offered to share it with the person they were with -- Prior and Leah in the jail, Danvers and Navarro in the lab. That was a nice realistic touch.

haha, I had to go back and watch previous episodes when Holden was mentioned because I forgot who he was! Like I was talking about earlier, the medium changes the way you watch these things.

I think I was also confused because I thought Danvers was relatively new to this environment, that she had been transferred there in spite by Dr Who, so it was confusing that she had a whole family storyline that, apparently, was also set in this same town.

I think I was also confused because I thought Danvers was relatively new to this environment, that she had been transferred there in spite by Dr Who, so it was confusing that she had a whole family storyline that, apparently, was also set in this same town.

Some stray thoughts & questions:

—I can’t remember if this was mentioned upthrasd or elsewhere in the internet but major kudos to the cinematographer for making a show set almost entirely at night but always keeping the action visible. All other tv shows please take note, it can be done.

—re the mysterious tongue… one clue which I can’t put together is on that last night in Tsalal when Danvers and Navarro solve the mystery of the hatch - at one point Danvers looks under the table and sees a residue where the tongue had been. At this point weeks have gone by - what does that mean that there would still be some kind of substance still there?