True Detective Night Country: What Happened to Navarro in the Season Finale?

Still reeling from Sunday night’s True Detective: Night Country finale? Yeah, same here. For everything that Night Country answered in episode 6, the HBO anthology series left quite a few questions up in the air. Why is everyone obsessed with the “Twist & Shout” scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? How did Annie’s tongue get to Tsalal? Most importantly: is Evangeline Navarro dead?

If you ask Night Country showrunner Issa López, we’re supposed ask all of these questions after the credits roll. “You should be making theories,” she told The Hollywood Reporter. “[Not revealing the tongue] was a fight, because so many people working with me were like, ‘No, really? You’re not going to give that to us?’ And you know, in life, you don’t always get all the answers. Some of them are for you to figure out. I’m not going to do all the homework on my own for you.”

OK, fine—we’ll do the homework. Let’s dive in.

Lilja Jons//HBOIs this even real?

Is Navarro Alive or Dead?After finding out how the Annie K. and the Tsalal scientists died, Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Navarro (Kali Reis) finally put the case to rest. And yet! We have more questions. What happened to Navarro? Did she fake her death to live out her days in peace, or did she end the series by committing suicide and/or ascending into a spiritual realm? On Reddit, which you can take with a grain of salt since a good number of viewers thought Navarro was the killer, audiences are absolutely losing it over the “vague” and “ambiguous” ending.

López confirmed that the ambiguity surrounding the murders, the supernatural elements, and Navarro’s fate, are all entirely intentional. “I’m not saying that she’s alive, and I’m certainly not saying that she’s dead, she told Deadline. “I very carefully crafted this as an ink block test for you to discover yourself as an audience member. I do love that Navarro states very early in the series that she has this impulse to just walk away and leave everything behind. On the other hand, the entire series is an exploration of the fact that she feels a calling to the beyond… You can read it both ways and it’s up to you to interpret which one fulfills your heart.”

Kali Reis, the actress who plays Navarro, is also keeping her interpretation close to the (puffer) vest. “I have my own answer as to what happened,” Reis told Elle. “Whether you choose to believe that she followed her sister’s footsteps or she’s peaceful and happy, or just she’s at peace with who she is now and she feels accepted, so she doesn’t have to walk around like this, she can just finally take a breath out, the first and only person she would go see would be Danvers.”

There you have it, folks. For a series about ghostly revenge and freezing to death, the scariest outcome turned out to be one thing: deciphering an open-ended finale for ourselves. Still, I wouldn’t recommend going down into any ice caves to find any answers.