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

(and the second the Spice Girls song came on I just tensed up, expecting a ghost and/or car crash to be immanent)

I prefer the procedural/arctic community soap opera elements to this than all the gobbledygook squiggle nonsense.

I mean, a dark, gritty Northern Exposure reboot isn't the worst idea.

Watching E2. Foster’s character is a marvelously hard person

I *do* adore “bury a friend”

I thought the first episode was terrific. Not so sure about second episode. Some weird tonal shifts from scene to scene and honestly a lot of the set-up for this season is daffy rather than eerie or mysterious. Like, for instance, a pile of frozen naked men, all in mid-scream, thawing out in a local hockey rink where people can apparently just come in and out without any kind of security?

It is hinting at supernatural elements which were absent in the previous iterations of this show. I think that will turn out to be a red herring and they will chalk up some of what we've seen so far to just being hallucinations related to their isolating circumstances. On the other hand, if they do choose to lean harder into the supernatural, then I'll wish they just gave this show a different name and let it be it's own thing.

Yeah, Fiona Shawms character getting guided by a ghost to where the bodies were is…very different from Colin Ferrell et all descending upon a grisly corps on the Pacific Coast Highway.

Caught up. Is this a sequel to Dan Simmons the Terror? Maybe a bit too much of that going on.

did you all catch that Fiona’s ghost boyfriend Travis was Travis COHLE ie Rust’s dad (survivalist, alaska, died of leukemia)

did you all catch that Fiona’s ghost boyfriend Travis was Travis COHLE ie Rust’s dad (survivalist, alaska, died of leukemia)

Colin Farrell’s sad kid should appear as a ghost.

tbh i dont think it means much to the story, i just think lopez liked the idea of adding some easter eggs to tie it into the series

The lady being led by Travis Cohle says something along the lines of “don’t confuse the supernatural for the psychological” re: navaro’s sisters visions of their dead mother, emphasising it’s probably all psychological. Seems to me that’s how all this will be explained as has been the case for all previous seasons. The mask will be pulled of the ghost in the final episode and the big corporation behind the white sheet will state “we did get away with it! But it woulda been easier without you meddling kids!”

lol
otm

What if the real cosmic horror was the world that surrounds us?

The next episode better be a 50 minute long take of the dude who woke up with his hand breaking of giving us an explanation about all this nonsense. The final 5 eps can be Billie Eilish music videos I don’t mind

don't know that I'll ever erase the image of the 9th Doctor banging Clarice Starling from my brain

don't know that I'll ever erase the image of the 9th Doctor banging Clarice Starling from my brain

Was not expecting a slow haunting Lykke Li cover

So close to getting a ‘your mother sucks cocks in hell.’’

choompa loompa

goddamn they just keep turning up the dial on creepy-ass creepy shit

Caught up on the show today. Disconcerting. (That is a compliment.) Yeah _Terror_ vibes a bit. Already sensing a too easy out/explanation with the supernatural stuff so I want it to absolutely lean in on the cosmic horror now.

HBO completely botched the Christmas Episode rollout for this series.

Man the writing in this episode took a serious dip….. the car ride prayer scene to the Qavik quid pro quo scene was maybe the roughest run of dialogue in this series so fair. Still love the setting and want to see how this all gets tied up in the last episode but lord, dunno about this particular ep

I do like this Pete kid tho

scientists discover virus/organism/whatever in the ice that drives people crazy with fear/hallucinate/bad-stuff, big mining has drilled down to it. Maybe the virus thing was a time bomb, mining company hit something, trying to get tsalal to ya know, fix their mistake. Hence miners have to be loners, can’t date outside. Clark breaks the rules, dates the girl, spills some beans, she gets the chop. Time bomb goes off, tsalal guys either run off to die as a result of it, or to try kill it off if it’s an infectious thing. Old mate Oliver up north wanted no part and ran away from it all. I dunno, I’m getting hung-up on the “she’s awake” thing, but it’s clear that something in the town, and most likely something environmental is causing people to hallucinate, stillborns to happen, and scientists to convulse. There’s dirty water being drunk. The hallucinations are easily passed of as “this is Ennis, these things happen” by hippie lady earlier. But whatever was merely hallucinations and stillborns in the past looks to be potentially something worse now.

Episode 3 probably should’ve been two episodes

I have a bad feeling Pete is gonna snap and do something crazy before this season is over you guys

Ehhh I don’t know about the last scene of this latest ep.

I'm very interested in seeing how the Danvers/Navarro/Wheeler(?) stuff plays(played) out. My current theory is the flashback of Wheeler in the chair was accurate and Danvers was lying when she said "He was dead when we found him." Danvers killed him and they covered it up. Maybe this was the origin of the subsequent break between her and Navarro: Navarro likely would have approved of Danvers doing extrajudicial execution on a violent lowlife, but Danvers couldn't continue to work with someone who had seen her emotional nature take over like that. Somewhere in there, her kid dies; maybe she sees that as divine punishment, or maybe it's the reason she kills Wheeler. (Could his teenage wife have been pregnant when she died?) Danvers becomes a bitter asshole who quotes protocol at people, as a sort of atonement.

This, to me, is the most interesting part of the mystery, along with: What does the spiral on Annie K mean? Surely it can't be a symbol of evil, on this character who is presented to us as near sainthood. I have some theories but want to wait and hear what others think.

I don't think it's a theory. What we saw (or as much of it as we saw) is what happened. Danvers = unreliable narrator.

Yeah I mean I'm taking the unreliable narrator part as a given, just trying to fill in the blanks on what actually happened that we haven't been shown yet, on that day and in its aftermath.

I've been seeing the carpet in my gym differently.

https://i.imgur.com/9Ynr7TO.jpeg

O_O

that's what you get for working out at Tuttle Fitness, imo

They’re really going to have to crank up the pace in the last two episodes if they’re going for a self-contained resolution this series. There hasn’t really been any police work going on, per se, and they haven’t leaned in to the Laird Barron Alaskan cosmic horror angle that much.

Six episodes doesn’t feel like quite enough for this season - eight might’ve been more realistic.

that's what you get for working out at Tuttle Fitness, imo

lol

after four episodes this show has some fun dialog and great performances but there really isn't anything interesting going on. and how come whenever they're talking in the car it's daylight again?

enjoying the Ninth Doctor sounding like Michael Rapaport though

i am enjoying this show a lot in spite of the constant darkness. i assume "Ninth Doctor" refers to Dr Who, which I have never seen, so that sex scene was just sort of pleasantly awkward imo. I was glad they had some ugly (but not coercive) adult sex in there.

other thoughts:

* Travis reminded me of BOB and therefore I found him terrifying (interesting backstory, ty VG!)
* Did not expect to hear The Unthanks in Ep 1 -- pleasant surprise!
* can we hear it for Qavvik please? What an appealing male character (so far)
* worried for Pete and Kayla
* Alina subplot hopefully continuing to go nowhere

Ninth Doctor = Christopher Eccleston

another thing from ep 4 that was fun was that a woman got to go on a beat up rampage and then have a man tend to her wounds afterwards, not sure I've seen that reversal before

when the song about everybody dying came on when the sister was dying, i died

Everytime that whorl appears now I'm further creeped out, I admit.

That Christmas tree on the dredge was fuggin creepy

Yeah that whole sequence was kinda great. I retain the right to be disappointed if it's all explained away but hopefully we won't go down that road.

keep going back and forth on whether or not I actually like this or do I just find the setting/look of it so compelling?

So

There’s a theory that Danvers is catfishing Hank

woah

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

Wouldn't the True Detective MacGuffin be the supernatural elements? The mumbo jumbo sciencey explanation (and most of the finale) was more like opening the Pulp Fiction suitcase and revealing that it was just full of LED lights.

but WHY is that one ring so powerful

If you'll allow me to explain. *several centuries pass*

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

that's ok, seasons 1 & 2 are huge swaths of narrative that go nowhere (I like season 1 actually but the misdirection with the supernatural or weird elements is way more irritating there in the end). Season 3 is exceptional storytelling though, feels like everyone has over looked how good it is.

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

that's ok, seasons 1 & 2 are huge swaths of narrative that go nowhere (I like season 1 actually but the misdirection with the supernatural or weird elements is way more irritating there in the end). Season 3 is exceptional storytelling though, feels like everyone has over looked how good it is.

Never got past two episodes of season 2 but really liked season 3.

I'm still kinda annoyed that they just let the explanation of "yeah were researching something and it cures EVERYTHING" stand as a plot point.

And here we go

https://deadline.com/2024/02/true-detective-renewed-season-5-hbo-issa-lopez-overall-deal-1235834470/

Mostly I'm just amused about how much this'll piss off Pizzolatto.

it's a long fucking night, even the dead get bored

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.

― sctttnnnt (pgwp), Tuesday, February 20, 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Interesting contrast can be found in the new Apple show Constellation, where Jonathan Banks is fixated on the discovery of a "new kind of matter and a double quantum helix" or whatever it is he says. It's equal to True Detective insofar as it's a totally outlandish MacGuffin. But him telegraphing its importance early on, vs the way it felt kinda tacked on in TD, just shows that the right writer can make a macguffin feel meaningful.

Perhaps another reason why it felt like a harder sell in TD is because it felt like a piece of sci-fi storytelling in a show that, while flirting with the supernatural, was not a science fiction show. Whereas that's squarely Constellation's genre.

the moment Danvers got trapped, put her gun away and then proceeded to find some useful tool to break glass was offensively dumb by even this show's standards.

uh shooting toughened glass in a confined space? dude that would mean shooting herself via ricochet

we're talking television show logic, c'mon. toughened glass bullet ricochet is the least of a screenwriter's concerns.

thing is that every circle is flat

Good thing Jodie Foster is in this. Otherwise it would be some second tier Netflix horror schlock.

Great interview with Reis here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/17/style/kali-reis-true-detective.html

Despite the taste of HBO fame, Ms. Reis has no plans to change: Authenticity is nonnegotiable with her. “On the red carpet, you’re supposed to wear Gucci, and I’m like: ‘Listen, I don’t wear heels. I wear all black,’” she said.