On the one hand, “True Detective: Night Country” (Season 4) Episode 3 is where the plot moves incrementally while resolutions disguise character arcs in lockstep with plot progression. As the Tsalal case becomes more and more bizarre, the secrets of the town of Ennis and its past regarding the mines come to light. The show also proves itself to be delving more blatantly into its supernatural roots than just teasing or acknowledging them.
True Detective: Night Country (Season 4) Episode 3 ‘Part 3’ Recap:
The episode opens with Hank Prior, Danvers’ immediate second and Pete’s father, in charge of the search for the missing Raymond Clark. The fact that he is recruiting any citizen with a gun as his search party is a recipe for disaster. The show is not disguising how much it looks at Hank with contempt. Navarro, too, joins the search, but with the long night and with so much ground to cover, it slowly becomes a fool’s errand. Considering that the only clue she finds is an orange, perhaps the search should be conducted in a different fashion.
The “different” fashion, as it stands, is good old police work by going through the evidence recovered from Clark’s trailer. But before Danvers could order Pete to take the evidence out of the locker and ensure those filthy ones weren’t touched, she had to mitigate Pete’s curiosity regarding the last case when Navarro and Danvers had worked together. The Wheeler case had apparently been one of domestic abuse, whereby the 18-year-old girl living with the 50-year-old Wheeler would be beaten black and blue, and she would defend him when the authorities were called.
Until the inevitable occurs, and Navarro and Danvers investigate the Wheeler house to find the woman dead and Wheeler having killed himself, or so she says to Pete. In reality, we see Wheeler sitting in front of the dead body of his girlfriend and smiling malevolently at the two female police officers pointing their guns at him. The episode then cuts back to the present day but doesn’t answer what actually happened. How long before Pete actually finds out what occurred? He even asks his father later on, but his father doesn’t know, or more importantly, isn’t interested.
The cold open before the opening of this episode shows the first meeting between Navarro and Annie K, which establishes her as a midwife working at the last birthing center. Navarro comes up to her location to arrest her for her activism but instead joins her in helping her deliver another child. It takes Annie a minute to resuscitate that child, but that experience was enough for Navarro to soften up to Annie.
Perhaps that is also why she is so gung-ho about investigating her death and the reappearance of her tongue in the current case. Most importantly, she is confused about how Annie would be linked to this weirdo. But that isn’t the question. As Danvers tries to play “Ask the question” with her, a tactic that clearly irritates her, she does ask, “Why keep it a secret?”. But as revealed through a candid photograph found amidst the evidence, someone always knows. Because who else could have taken the photograph of Clark and Annie?
As it turns out, it was Susan, Annie’s best friend and also a hairstylist and colorist, who was responsible for coloring Annie’s hair that distinctive blue shade. While Danvers goes into the next room with Susan’s kid to distract her, Navarro interrogates Susan, whereby she learns that Annie met Clark for the first time when she had tagged along with Susan at Tsalal station.
Susan would give haircuts to the scientists there, and Clark and Annie had hit it off, much to the surprise of Susan. She didn’t know why Annie wanted to keep the relationship secret, but it suited Susan because she had a squeeze of her own: Oliver Tagaq, one of the equipment engineers, who had skipped town just before the deaths of the scientists. Navarro is understandably mad that Susan would keep such information to herself, but it turns out that she had actually phoned in an anonymous tip to the Ennis PD. It had been picked up by Hank and had never been followed.
As they drive down to Ennis PD, Navarro is angry. She believes that Hank is covering up for the mines, which really doesn’t add up because the mines account for the employment of 50% of the population of Ennis. It also doesn’t account for all of the strange occurrences that have happened so far, though considering Liz’s beliefs and her proximity to the supernatural, she feels like a person open to unexplainable cases being the norm. For a person who chooses to pray when she is alone and listens, it sort of tracks. Their interaction also shows a sense of comfort between the two women, and even Reis and Foster feel at ease while sharing the screen together.
At the skating rink, where the bodies had slowly started to thaw, Hank had come to meet his son and give him the ice skates Pete had when he was younger. It’s an olive branch, offering to take his grandson out after the interaction in the last episode where he punched his son in anger. Navarro enters the rink, accusing Hank of withholding evidence. Hank doesn’t entirely disagree, admitting that the only reason he didn’t follow up on the complaint was because of Annie’s promiscuity around the town.
When Danvers calls out his negligence as well, Hank accuses her of playing “Mrs. Robinson” with her son, leading to Danvers throwing her coffee at his face and then admonishing him to “do his goddamn job.” Navarro, angry that Hank is let off with a slap on the wrist, walks away in anger, presumably to search for Oliver Tagaq. Meanwhile, Danvers asks Peter to try to crack Annie’s cell phone while wondering how to conduct a forensic analysis, with no forensic team having arrived yet. Peter has the bright idea of asking his cousin, a veterinarian, to have a look at the bodies.
Navarro, meanwhile, goes to meet Qaavik to ask for information regarding Tagaq. Qaavik agrees, on the condition that she furnishes her with information of her own because as much as he or Navarro would like to hide their soft hearts within tough exteriors, they do like each other. It also allows for the exposition of Navarro’s family to flow naturally, as Qaavik’s query about her mom reveals how Evangeline and Julia’s mother had left Alaska for Boston with their father. But her father had been a cruel man, drunk and abusive, forcing her mother to finally return to Alaska. Their mother, like Julia, had been ill and prone to listening to voices. And then, one day, she just left and was later discovered to have been murdered. The killer had never been found.
But this is the push and pull for Navarro herself. She slips on the ice, hits her head, and sees a vision where a kid carrying a one-eyed polar bear tells her something about the case. She goes to comfort her sister near the icy shipwreck where she had escaped to be alone. Solitude is the other reason why Tagaq had been hiding in a nomadic settlement, and he looks extremely angry and uncomfortable upon seeing Navarro and Danvers breaking his door open. Angrily, he asks Navarro her true name, taunting her that she had forgotten, not realizing that she and her sister had never been cognizant of their true Inupiaq names given by their mother before she had passed away. But the fascinating reaction is that Tagaq, upon learning of the deaths of his colleagues, is deeply affected, such that he almost chases them away.
It is part of a piece, this reaction. It dovetails nicely into Danvers’ stepdaughter joining the protest group against the mines, which points out how the mines are destroying the environment and poisoning the locals through the water. But again, Leah’s rebellion elicits a pretty extreme reaction in Danvers, almost tending towards the scary. It’s questionable, too, because the overreaction in Episode 3 feels much more like a racist rant. Especially considering, after hearing Leah’s taunt, Danvers goes to the house of one of the locals who had a stillborn baby, and the dour environment around the house overwhelms her. This feels far more personal to her.
But she is also running out of time. Captain Ted Connelly would arrive within a day to ship these bodies out to Anchorage. But an interesting nugget of information is delivered to Danvers in the form of Peter’s cousin, who informs her that these scientists had died before their bodies had frozen in the ice. And even though he would be unable to conduct a post-mortem, it is pretty clear that these men had died due to screaming in terror, and their hearts had given out. Danvers does try to convince the man to conduct a “little post-mortem,” but Peter stops her.
True Detective: Night Country (Season 4) Episode 3 ‘Part 3’ Ending Explained:
What caused the events on the ice?
Danvers and Navarro drive to the hospital from Tagaq’s location because Anders Lund has finally woken up. Both his hands had to be amputated, and he is rushing in and out of consciousness and screaming in pain. Danvers tries to ask what caused this to happen, to which he replies, “We woke her. She’s awake”. But who had been awoken? Annie? And before Danvers could ask further, a commotion in the hospital occurs because the hillbillies hired by Hank to search for Clark are now causing havoc. While Danvers tries to calm them down, Navarro is left alone with Lund, where, for the first time, we see the dead being awake. Lund’s body rises on the bed and calls out Navarro by her first name before pointing his blackened finger at her and stating that her mother is waiting for her before crashing back down on the bed and dying.
It tracks with the visions that Navarro had been getting, but this one feels too vivid to be a vision. Unlike “True Detective” Season 1, where the supernatural had been hinted at and acknowledged, the final scene where Peter appears with Annie’s phone unlocked, showing the video of Annie in a cavern before being pulled back by something, her screams reverberating through the phone and the hospital, is a clear sign that the supernatural is going to be equal, if not the predominant aspect of the show. It could turn out to be divisive, but considering the deliberate pace with which the show is moving, I am eager to give it a chance.
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