Time Is a Flat Circle After All

By
Jen Chaney,
a TV critic for Vulture and New York

With True Detective: Night Country, Issa López has taken a masculine text and subverted it to tell a story about women.
Photo: HBO

Spoilers follow for True Detective: Night Country finale “Part Six.”

When True Detective: Night Country begins, Ennis, Alaska is entering its darkest season, a two-week stretch where daylight ceases to exist. During the finale, light finally begins to peek through the endless night, first via the glow of the aurora borealis as New Year’s Day 2024 dawns and, later, in the brightly lit police station where Chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) speaks to investigators on May 12, the longest day of the year.

That dark-to-light arc reflects the natural cycle of things in this part of the world and a bend toward something close to optimism after a palpably chilling season of television. It also serves as an allusion to the finale of the first season of True Detective. In its concluding moments, cops-turned-private-detectives Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) discuss the stories Rust used to tell himself as a younger man, looking up at the skies when he lived in Alaska. “It’s just one story,” concludes Rust, still recovering from injuries sustained while capturing serial killer Errol Childress. “The oldest. Light versus dark.”

Callbacks to season one pepper Night Country’s six episodes: the omnipresence of that spiral symbol; the appearance of the ghost of Travis Cohle, father of McConaughey’s Rust; the mention of Tuttle United, a business that shares a name with season one’s influential, cult-operating family. While some viewers questioned the point of all these allusions, it’s clear by the end of season four that showrunner, director and co-writer Issa López hasn’t just been recycling details for the hell of it or attempting to rearrange our understanding of season one’s narrative. Night Country has resurrected the familiar to highlight history’s tendency to repeat itself, also a running theme in season one, and to emphasize the differences between telling a story focused on women versus men.

Season-four finale “Part Six” has a whole pile-up of moments designed to give the audience a strong sense of season-one déjà vu. In both finales, the protagonists discover weapons that match the wounds on victims in long-unsolved murder cases. In True Detective, Rust walks through tunnels to reach Carcosa, the underground lair where he confronts Childress, aka the Yellow King killer. Night Country matches that encounter by sending Danvers and Navarro (Kali Reis) into the bowels of the ice caves where they track down Clark, the surviving Tsalal scientist who reveals (mostly) how Annie Kowtok and the scientists died.

After finding Childress, Rust and Marty share information about his connections to influential public figures with law enforcement agencies and the news media, something we learn through footage of a news broadcast that credits their efforts. (The same broadcast also notes that Louisiana’s Attorney General and the FBI have “discredited rumors” that Childress is connected to Sen. Bill Tuttle, proof that the establishment will always protect its own.) Similarly, Navarro and Danvers leak s video confession from Clark in which he explains Tsalal’s complicity in the poisoning of the water in Ennis. But they must do this anonymously, to protect themselves as well as the cleaning women and other blue-collar workers who may (or may not) have killed the scientists as punishment for the murder of Annie K. While Rust and Marty may be deemed heroes in their world, it is much more complicated for Navarro and Danvers to take credit for solving these two controversial cases. They have too much to risk.

That’s why the parallels between these seasons are so important. When Night Country zigs or zags away from what we’ve seen on True Detective before, it highlights a reality that season one could not address: Women can only feel safe when they stand in solidarity with each other. That’s especially crucial for the Native women in Ennis, who are consistently dehumanized and devalued by those in positions of power, including, initially, Danvers herself.

For all of its links to the past, the Foster/Reis True Detective is pointedly different from the McConaughey/Harrelson iteration in a number of ways. It’s set in frigid Ennis, Alaska instead of swampy Lafayette, Louisiana. It’s much more interested in the supernatural and aesthetics of the horror genre than the more procedural vibes of its predecessor. Most importantly, with López at the helm and the focus on cops who are women rather than men, Night Country takes a far more nuanced, considered approach to its female characters. Even though Hank Prior dismisses the dead Annie K. as some unremarkable, promiscuous victim — “That woman was sleeping with half of Ennis,” he tells Navarro when she screams at him for not adding information about Annie’s relationship with Clark to the case file. “What did you want me to do? Log every dude she was banging in the region?” — the show does not. Through flashbacks and other reveals, we learn about her life, including her work both as a midwife and a resistor sounding the alarm about water pollution in Ennis. Night Country renders her as a human being, not some dead girl needed to kick a murder plot into motion.

By contrast, the first season of True Detective does not show its victims, or really any of its female characters, the same courtesy. As Emily Nussbaum wrote in this 2014 New Yorker essay (headline: “Cool Story, Bro”): “While the male detectives of True Detective are avenging women and children, and bro-bonding over ‘crazy pussy,’ every live woman they meet is paper-thin. Wives and sluts and daughters — none with any interior life.” Night Country does the opposite.

Even its sly pop-culture Easter eggs take the masculine and turn it on its head. Take the oranges that recur this season and seemingly function as a symbol of death as they so famously did in The Godfather. In the finale, Navarro tells Danvers, “My mother used to love oranges,” adding, “She used to peel them in one long strip.” Nora Ephron-heads will immediately recognize this line as spoken, almost verbatim, in Sleepless in Seattle, when Tom Hanks’s character remembers how his late wife could peel an apple in “one, long, curly strip.” Later, Danvers actually peels an orange in one long strip, which of course comes out looking like True Detective’s signature spiral. That, too, echoes a scene in Sleepless in Seattle when Meg Ryan peels an apple in one long strip, offering evidence that she’s perfect for Tom Hanks even though he doesn’t know it yet. Do you remember the name of Ryan’s character in that movie? It was Annie.

These are small details that speak to the larger ways in which López has taken a masculine text and subverted it to tell a story about women. Contrary to some complaints about this season, though, she has done nothing to willfully alter our understanding of season one. Night Country never establishes, for example, that the Tuttles mentioned here are the same. That’s an assumption the viewer makes, for understandable reasons, but one the show leaves open to interpretation. The spiral symbol that plays a significant role in both seasons also does not necessarily mean the same thing in Night Country as it did when Marty and Rust encountered it. By the end of Sunday’s finale, it’s clear that such iconography existed in Ennis for a long time, possibly millenia, and its significance predates its affiliation with a pedophile cult in Louisiana in the 1990s. By recontextualizing details from the first season, López and her collaborators are showing us that the stories we tell ourselves have all been told before. They just manifest themselves differently depending on the culture and climate that gave birth to them.

“Someone once told me time is a flat circle,” Rust Cohle famously declared in True Detective. “Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over again.” Night Country agrees with Rust (and, technically, Nietzche). Time is in fact such a flat circle that we hear the words “Time is a flat circle” again in the finale of Night Country, when Raymond Clark repeats that phrase, almost causing Danvers to explode from frustration.

But Night Country also demonstrates that there are truths in every narrative that get left out of the official history. Neither Liz nor Evangeline ever confesses the true circumstances surrounding the death of William Wheeler, a man who, in his final moments, whistles a tune that sounds eerily similar to the one Childress whistles in the season-one finale. Clark insists he would never hurt Annie, but we see in the flashback that he’s the one who suffocated her, depriving her of her final breaths. While talking to the interrogators on May 12, Liz leaves out all kinds of important details about what happened to Hank Prior and Navarro that will remain invisible from the broader narrative about what transpired during those two dark weeks in December of 2023. Night Country ultimately acknowledges that there’s always more to every story, even the ones we think we know, even the oldest one about light versus dark. When more voices get to tell stories, they only become richer and more illuminating.

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Time Is a Flat Circle After All