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

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?

At this point weeks have gone by - what does that mean that there would still be some kind of substance still there?

Ectoplasm, obviously.

otm re cinematography — also the myriad ways they made all the different types of snow/ice look beautiful and/or creepy

my one complaint, or a complaint, and maybe it's a question of the shorter season, is at the end when beardo is like "we could've saved the world", I feel like the show could've spent more time setting that up, so you felt like these guys really felt like something was at stake. Not that that would justify killing Annie obviously, but it just seemed to come out of nowhere. Until then I read the tsalal guys as well-meaning scientists who maybe fudged numbers for their funder, maybe it would've felt more impactful if it built up the sense of what they thought was at stake instead of introducing it at the last minute?

Also, all of Clark's Carcosa-style sculpture work, his notebook, they did lay groundwork for him going insane. Just guilt about Annie with some fan-service for season 1 stans?

I assumed guilt, coupled with his obvious loneliness, guilt over his distance from his son, slowly going a little batty in the long, dark winter. It may have been fan service, but I'm glad they just obliquely hinted at that stuff rather than leaning into it (obviously aside from THAT line).

yeah, and I know everybody already said this, but that pure groan-worthy cringe.

The falling through the ice a few times on the other hand I found very effective.

Honestly, after the Tuttle namedrop earlier and the Cohle revelation, I was bracing myself for some dumb "oh look, Bobby Ray Tuttle killed those scientists because they found their new ritual sacrifice room buried in the ice" twist so I was pretty pleased by the ultimate reveal. The more I let the finale sit, the more I like it.

my one complaint, or a complaint, and maybe it's a question of the shorter season, is at the end when beardo is like "we could've saved the world", I feel like the show could've spent more time setting that up, so you felt like these guys really felt like something was at stake. Not that that would justify killing Annie obviously, but it just seemed to come out of nowhere. Until then I read the tsalal guys as well-meaning scientists who maybe fudged numbers for their funder, maybe it would've felt more impactful if it built up the sense of what they thought was at stake instead of introducing it at the last minute?

otm - this was the weak part of the story. Like... in what was is the ancient DNA locked in the permafrost supposed to save humanity exactly? That it's worth secretly poisoning a whole town? That is a fairly large MacGuffin to just gloss over.

On the other hand I thought the twist with the ladies from the town was terrific, even as their story was only peripherally told in the previous five episodes.

I think they mentioned in passing that they’d discovered the secret to ending cellular decay.

yeah like generalized “cancer” cure was i thought thrown in amidst the technobabble

That just feels so fantastical... like the writers were just throwing darts at why it would be important for scientists to be doing the work they were doing. It feels totally half-baked.

I’m telling you, they needed at least two more episodes to really make this a satisfying season.

yeah i agree with that for sure

Yeah I've worked in a lab processing fresh blood & tissue samples for DNA and RNA, and no part of the science here makes sense. It's not important though, I just treated it like pure fantasy magic and pretended to hear something other than the words they were literally saying.

^yeah the “explanation” was just a bunch of science words put together. I treated it the same way.

Well I find it irritating how tossed off it was, considering it's the main driver for the scientists' behavior.

Are you familiar with the term "MacGuffin"? Remember how in the movie Ronin everyone's chasing a suitcase, and at one point Robert De Niro's character literally asks another character, "What's in the suitcase?" and she says, "You don't need to know"? Same deal here. They were working on Magical Mystery Miracle Science Stuff.

but WHY is that one ring so powerful

I don't need it to be scientifically accurate or even make sense. But a macguffin only works if you know it's there. This was more of a negative deus ex machina, something I just made up.

overall this season (I didn't watch seasons 1-3) does feel like it had huge swathes of narrative edited out of it