True Detective always secretly wished for a happy ending

19.02.2024 - 14:53 / polygon.com / Agatha Christie

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.

This isn’t about lore, or Easter eggs. Sure, Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) talked about being in Alaska a bit in True Detective’s debut season. And yeah, maybe he spent some time in Night Country’s Ennis, looking up at the stars without a TV, the town’s permeable relationship with the boundary between this world and the next soaking up his subconscious, its Uzumaki-esque penchant for spirals setting his mind off-kilter just so. There are plenty of connections for those looking for them.

While Night Country is happy to haunt viewers with the same cosmic horror trappings as the original series, the real full-circle moment, the thing it posits that True Detective is all about, is in how its characters respond to that cosmic horror: with hope. Rust Cohle’s last line in the first season of True Detective is a simple statement of the bleeding heart at the core of True Detective, almost hilariously so following eight episodes of nihilistic pablum.

“The light is winning,” he tells his partner Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) as they stare up at stars in the night sky.

[Ed. note: The rest of this post contains spoilers for all of True Detective: Night Country.]

Eventually, the light wins in Night Country too. The Long Night ends, and the sun finally rises, as Navarro (Kali Reis) and Danvers (Jodi Foster) follow the spiral of the Tsalal station mystery to its horrific center. The riddle posed by the corpsicle of researchers has its answer in the solution to the other case that has haunted Navarro and Danvers, the murder of Anne Kowtok. In an Agatha Christie-style twist, Annie was ultimately murdered by all of the men working at the Tsalal station, after she discovered a conspiracy between the researchers and the Silver Star mining corporation to increase the pollutants churned into the environment to benefit their research.

Everything cascades from there in a propulsive denouement that neatly ties all of Night Country’s themes together into an astonishingly cohesive whole. Danvers finally concludes that she has been asking the wrong questions: Not merely who would want Annie dead, but who knew who those people would be. The answer was hiding in plain sight: