True Detective News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

True Detective season 4 just ended, and while many fans have made their dislike of it loud and clear online, others have started pointing out significant flaws they noticed earlier in the series. One season in particular is receiving all the heat.

The True Detective season 4 finale premiered last night on HBO, resulting in mixed reviews, and some are more pessimistic than others. Today, after the show’s dramatic conclusion, fans of the anthology series aren’t holding back on what bothered them about the show this season.

So what is True Detective, really? Before this year, it felt like a collection of aesthetic trappings. Two cops played by prominent actors. A crime spanning multiple timelines. Some kind of weird fiction/supernatural horror bent. Thematically, the anthology’s concerns shifted from season to season, their strongest throughlines being heavy ruminations on masculinity. But in its final, stunning hour, True Detective: Night Country tries to buckle down and answer, once and for all, what True Detective is really about — by going back to where it all started.

Despite the name, True Detective has really never been about tying up every loose end to a mystery. Sure, the detectives at the heart do their damnedest, but if you’re here for procedural and ethical police work, you’re probably barking up the wrong tree; this tree is more about glimpsing supernatural terror, refracted through the prism of human cruelty and violence.

Before she crafted the icy horror of True Detective: Night Country, showrunner Issa López made her mark with a wrenching horror fable about children facing off against human traffickers. Released in 2017, Tigers Are Not Afraid would become the writer-director’s calling card, a bleak horror-fantasy that established López’s knack for atmosphere and revealing characters via the things they dread. It also broke my damn heart.

We’re currently in the midst of the winter season, when the temperatures drop and the night grows darker and longer, clawing away more and more precious minutes of sunlight. It’s the perfect time of the year for True Detective: Night Country, the fourth season of the crime drama anthology starring Jodie Foster and Kali Reis. This season has already done a lot to differentiate itself from past storylines, with nods to the supernatural interspersed with prominent callbacks to the series’ first season.

There’s nothing on television quite like the moment in a thriller when a character finally breaks and does something even they didn’t know they were capable of. For True Detective: Night Country, that moment arrives late in episode 5, and it hits just about every character at the exact same time.

It seems relatively routine — some “hillbillies” scuffling in the waiting room of a hospital, calling Danvers (Jodie Foster) away from an interrogation. Navarro (Kali Reis), left behind to monitor the bedridden victim, pokes her head around the corner, craning to see the commotion. And then, behind her, the man in the hospital bed suddenly sits up.

The central mystery in True Detective: Night Country seems easy when the credits roll on episode 1. It’s not that viewers already have the answer, but it at least feels like we can see all the puzzle pieces in front of us. That is, until episode 2. The second, even better episode of Night Country deepens the season’s central mystery with clever world-building and the most disgusting and disturbing ice sculpture on television.

True Detective: Night Country’s premiere last week signaled a return to form for the series, introducing a chilling (pun intended) mystery in form of the disappearance of a group of arctic researchers and a compelling pair of protagonists in the form of Chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis). Their case is miles away — both linearly and literally — from the one True Detective dealt with in season 1. And yet, the show keeps echoing key details of that season, complete with all those supernatural elements, and of course, that goddamned creepy-looking spiral. What does it all mean? Follow me into my Rust Cohle-shaped hole as I obsessively connect the dots.

It starts as a flash — the briefest glimpse of something horrific, something freezing to the point of black. We get more: a head, a limb, a grimace. It starts to come into focus, around the scene, through bits of dialogue: These men froze to death in clearly agonizing terror, their bodies suspended mid-writhing as well as in the ground. Frostbite abounds; some even clawed their eyes out. Once they finally excavate the bodies, it will be as a singular, frozen mass, transported on a tongue of ice to the local rink so they can slowly defrost. It is Lovecraftian and spectacular. It is exactly what True Detective: Night Country production designer Daniel Taylor hoped it would be like.

It’s time to get those conspiracy boards out again. True Detective: Night Country’s opening features a quote that, on first showing, may not seem like much – but it’s actually got ties to the acclaimed first season of HBO’s crime anthology series.

*Warning! This article contains spoilers for True Detective: Night Country episode 1*

True Detective is the rare show that was much more exciting and complicated after seven episodes than it is after three seasons. What started out as a brooding series about detectives looking into the dark heart of senseless, seemingly occult killings eventually transformed into a detective show mostly about men being sad. What is remarkable about the show’s newest season, True Detective: Night Country, is that in just one episode, new showrunner Issa López has managed to bring back the creeping, supernatural horror vibe that gave the first season so much promise.

Let’s dispel any trepidation you might have from previous seasons of True Detective, and all the baggage they carry: True Detective: Night Countryis astoundingly good television. A six-episode stunner where a macabre murder unspools into a layered exploration of an Alaskan town at the edge of Earth, its relationship with its Indigenous population, and the things the Arctic’s long night can do to a person, Night Country is about as good a start to television in 2024 we can ask for.

2024 is revving up, and 2024 TV is following suit. This week, some big name players are coming to grace our television screens, and tee up some genuinely good TV to get our new year really rockin’ and rollin’.

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True Detective is almost back, and it seems like this time around the show is all-in on the supernatural undercurrents of season 1. A new trailer for True Detective: Night Country was released on Monday that shows off the show’s central case, and hints at the spooky forces that could be at work behind all the blood and murder. The show returns to HBO on Jan. 14.