True Detective
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Episode five ofNight Countryends on a precipice of interpretation.
you’re free to believe thatHank intended to commit suicide by patricideor not.
(Ultimately, I dont.)
you could believe Navarros cover-up plan is justified or not.
(Hell yes.)
you’re free to believe the ends justify the means or not.
(Poor Otis.)
The series actually gives itself 75 minutes to wrap things up.
It also crucially side-steps the shows most searching question about what happens after we die.
Thatthere can be more than one answerto even the most straightforward question: Whodunnit?
Part Six begins on New Years Eve and remains narrowly focused on Danvers and Navarro for almost its entirety.
Its safe, Navarro shouts to her reluctant partner, but nothing about this place feels safe.
Theres a presence lingering nearby.
They chase the AWOL scientist through the caves into a subterranean ice laboratory not entirely unlike Mr.
Freezes Snowy Cones Ice Cream Factory (Joel Schumachers version).
Where has Clark disappeared to (again), and where are they now?
Behind storage shelves laden with ice tubes, Navarro finds a ladder leading up a tall chute.
Meanwhile, Navarro follows wet footprints, the same as the ones she pursued through the dredge inPart Four.
Clark makes one last stand at the station, temporarily trapping Danvers in a freezer and knocking Navarro unconscious.
When Clark declares he wont talk, Navarro asks a strikingly personal first question: Did you love Annie?
The point, it turns out, is to determine how best to torture him.
It doesnt take long for Clark to surrender.
He tells the cops that Annies death was his fault via negligence.
And they already had the supposedly unmineable substance in their wicked clutches.
A fugue of collective vengeance.
That must have happened later, Clark theorizes.
The lab called the mine for help, and the mine sent Hank, its favorite stooge.
Part Six is strewn with allusions to previousNight Countryepisodes.
So what is the significance of all these recurrences?Night Countrydoesnt insist on one particular interpretation.
Navarro, for example, believes in God.
The world is richer than what we can see, and coincidences are clues to its concealed depths.
Danvers takes the opposite position that theres a careless randomness to the universe.
Of course, that leaves plenty of room in between.
One doesnt need to believe in ghosts or God to believe in the felt power of symbols.
A one-eyed polar bear can be a chance encounter or a talisman.
Clark held the door closed for hours or days or weeks, he says.
Hes still down there, really, unwilling to surface and face what hes done.
And what does it matter if he was down there for days or years?
If Annies been haunting those caves since her death or in the centuries before it?
Time is a flat circle, Clark calls out in a belligerent echo of Rust Cohles season-one philosophizing.
Its a task best performed alone, as ritualistic as it is frantic.
As Pete drives Hanks truck now a mobile morgue toward Rose and the ice, the towns power fails.
The power is out at Tsalal Station, too.
Unable to take a minute more of Clarks ranting, Danvers falls asleep in his room.
Danvers finds Navarro staring at their only witness in the snow, frozen to death, like his colleagues.
Something has clicked for Navarro over the last few hours since she stalked Annies voice deeper into the caves.
The ghosts she thought were haunting her have instead assured her shes not alone.
Except its not ice to Navarro.
Shes holding hands with her mother, who faintly murmurs Evangelines Inupiat name.
Or is it just a hallucination brought on by the early stages of hypothermia?
In the same cold, Danvers thinks she sees Holden trapped under the ice and yelling for help.
Maybe the thunder of Danvers falling through the ice reawakened Navarro to the world around her.
Maybe Liz is right when she tells Navarro that Julia just gave up.
Or maybe we can fight against the heavy current of both.
He says, He sees you.
Jodie Foster has this way of crying that sounds agonizingly nasal and young to me.
Lizs reticence to feel stands in tension with her capacity to care.
you’ve got the option to believe that Holden died instantly and peacefully or not.
(Either way, Im crying.)
And yet its not hopeless.
Its a teenagers guarded version of calling out for Mommy.
Eventually, every storm passes.
It may not have the cleansing symbolism of daybreak, but it is a new year.
Now, despite her near-death experience, Danvers still doesnt really fuck with metaphor.
But Navarros soul-searching declaration does make Danvers realize theyve been asking the wrong question.
Not: How long did Raymond Clark hold the door closed?
Not: Who killed Annie K?
But: Who else knows about it?
The women who cut hair, clean offices, and spin up the laundromat.
The women, like Wheelers girlfriend, who die at the hands of a known abuser.
The women, like Blair, who arent safe from their violent husbands even at work.
The women who are burying their babies.
No, worse than that.
Women like Annie K., who protest the mines and lose their tongues for it.
Navarro and Danvers drive out to the villages and knock on Beatrices door.
Blair is already there and listening when Beatrice asks their names.
Siqinnaatchiaq, Navarro tells them, an answer lifted from her mothers spectral whispers.
And I do mean storm.
They loaded the other scientists into a truck and delivered them naked onto the ice.
But they didnt kill the men, Beatrice is careful to distinguish.
And Annie didnt kill them either.
It was up to Her whether she wanted to take them or not.
Night Country comes for those who deserve it.
It just so happens to be the same story Kate and Connelly are pushing.
Call it a storm or a slab avalanche.
Call it Alaska itself.
Something bigger and stronger killed these men.
Everyone in Beatrices cabin has what they want.
Navarro and Danvers can stop carrying Annie K. now.
Not: Who left Annies tongue on the lab floor?
But: What good can come of asking any more questions?
Weeks later, when the sun creeps back up over the horizon, there will be more interrogations.
We learn that Navarro is missing, too, though she leaves parting gifts before she splits.
The SpongeBob SquarePants toothbrush she took in Part One for Qaavik.
She must have snagged it.
While Danvers plays coy with the authorities, we learn that she and Danvers are actually still in touch.
Eventually, light will find its way back into the darkest places and, sometimes, the darkest people.
Evangelines mother knew that, too.
