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

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

ums otm. Setting doing a LOT of heavy lifting this season

There’s a theory that Danvers is catfishing Hank

That would be hilarious but I don't see it. Someone who's as much of a mean asshole as she is wouldn't have the sense of humor necessary for that.

Hahah yeah that theory I'm not buying at all.

Setting doing a LOT of heavy lifting this season

And brilliantly so! A show (movie, etc.) can't really just be vibes, especially something that's a procedural no matter how you slice it, but I love what it does here.

setting doing 90% of the work is just barely above average for cosmic horror

Danvers, as played by Jodie Foster, is a pretty compelling character. I guess I don’t see it as mostly vibes and setting. Remains to be seen if they can wrap up the central mystery in a satisfying way.

The polar bear looked really funny around the eyes, almost like it had tried to claw them out and given up, so are we supposed to assume it's part of it too?

first watching is purely for the vibes...

second watching (sometimes just from the second /first ad break) is for the compelling characters..looking for plot points I have missed.

very mixed feelings about how far I want it to go into Cosmic Horror, as with only a few episodes left... I need a good resolution, but feel its too much Mare of Innsmouth to give me proper police procedural closure.

I was struck this past ep by how difficult this production must've been to execute, all the snow and night shoots and cold temperatures. Looks like hell to make. It does feel as if this was an 8-episode script, shot as planned, that had to be severely edited down to six episodes... the editing feels strange, each scene plays out at an appropriate pace but this sneaking feeling that there are many, many scripted scenes that've been edited out. (The fact that there were no scenes depicting Anchorage coming for the bodies felt very absentee, and the sewing up of Danvers concerns about this major plot point felt like the product of re-shoots). I'm enjoying it still but more like a six-episode B-movie than vanguard HBO television, I guess

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.

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.