True Detective: Night Country, Episode 6: Who Killed the Tsalal Scientists?

The answer was hiding in plain sight all along. In “Part 6,” the conclusion of True Detective: Night Country, detectives Liz Danvers and Evangeline Navarro traverse the treacherous ice caves of Ennis, Alaska and discover who was responsible for Annie K’s murder, and what really happened to the Tsalal scientists. And none other than Jodie Foster drops by Still Watching to discuss the  shocking finale and the lengths she went to shoot her harrowing underwater scene. 

Danvers and Navarro descend into the interconnected ice caves, which led them into Tslalal Research Center. There, they finally found missing scientist and prime suspect in Annie K’s murder, Raymond Clark. Once captured, Clark finally came clean as to what happened to Annie, revealing that it was the entire team of Tsalal scientists who murdered her. After confessing, Clark runs into the blizzard, committing suicide. 

With one mystery solved, Danvers and Navarro still have to crack what, exactly, happened to the other Tslalal scientists. A handprint on the hatch tells them everything they need to know. The two detectives confront the cleaning women of the Tsalal Research Center, who reveal that, in an act of vigilante justice, they broke into Tsalal and dragging the scientists out into the tundra and let nature have its way with them. 

“The native women of the town who worked in Tsalal, who cleaned and cut the scientists hair—and were mistreated and ignored—banded together,” Murphy says on the podcast. “They stormed in and humiliated these men, stripped them naked, took them out to the tundra and just left them there, and said, ‘If Annie wants them to live, they’ll live. If Annie wants them dead, they’ll die.’ And guess what? They die.”

Executive producer and True Detective star Jodie Foster signed on to Night Country without knowing exactly how the series would end. “You say yes based on one script, which is the pilot. Then there’s little summaries about what potentially could happen in Episodes 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. So, it’s sort of a leap of faith,” she says. But Foster said yes trusting showrunner and writer Issa Lopez to stick the landing. “Having met Issa Lopez—knowing what a great writer she was and what an extraordinary, intelligent, amazing, emotionally connected person that she was—I was like, ‘Oh, I want to work with her.’” 

That work involved one incredibly difficult stunt. In perhaps the most climactic moment of the series, Danvers falls through the ice and is submerged underwater. Filming that scene was no easy feat. “It was a big challenge in the show for me because I’m wearing coats, but I had to have a wetsuit on and it had to be weighted in order for me to be able to fall without popping up to the top,” said Foster. It also was shot at night, making the process that much more difficult. “I can’t wear glasses. I’m completely blind. The only way to get to the top is a very small, narrow little window, which I can’t see, and I can’t get myself up because I’m so heavily weighted.” They had to have a free diver on hand to get Foster between each take. “Basically, [Issa] said ‘cut’ and he had to rush in and grab me and pull me up to the surface because there was no way I could get up to the surface on my own.”