True Detective Is Over, But Its Ghosts Remain

By
Roxana Hadadi,
a Vulture TV critic who also covers film and pop culture

Photo: Michele K. Short/HBO

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

In season finale “Part Six,” True Detective: Night Country gives us certainty about what happened to the men from Tsalal Arctic Research Station: The characters known on set as the “Justice Ladies” gave the men the deaths they deserved for killing Annie K. That mystery is solved, but “Part Six” leaves open two other questions that audiences must answer for themselves based on the evidence provided throughout Night Country: How does the series’ supernatural component play into the Tsalal men’s fate, and is Navarro dead or alive at series’ end?

Showrunner Issa López and actress Kali Reis have different levels of reticence about their personal readings on the ending. “I think that’s the beauty of this, where you can make it yours. And if I tell you what mine is, I’m going to be completely hacking yours,” López says. Nonetheless, they shared with Vulture their replies to both questions — though, in typical Night Country fashion, their answers still contain plenty of ambiguity.

Who is the supernatural “She”?
This season’s heavy incorporation of supernatural elements has been a talking point since its premiere and as each following episode has leaned further into horror with ghosts, possessions, corpses, and hauntings. Disparate moments hint at the same culprit: Kayla and Pete’s son draws a picture of a monstrous woman whom Kayla describes as “a local legend,” and Navarro hears a woman’s screams and senses her presence around town, including in the finale’s ice caves. The figure is the whispered-about She the scientists woke up with their experiments and pissed off by killing Annie K.; to Reis, She is “Mother Earth,” while López says she overlaps in abilities and aesthetics with Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the sea.

When López showed the actresses who played the “Justice Ladies” an early cut of their attack on the Tsalal men, “they were so happy; they were screaming, and we were all laughing because they were so excited to see themselves,” Reis says. The actress praises the Justice Ladies for their act of accountability and is convinced — as Navarro was — that they were helped by the “She” who leader Beatrice (Diane Benson) suggests “ate [the men’s] fucking dreams from the inside out and spit their frozen bones.”

“This is such an Indigenous story because we’re so matriarchal. Women are warriors, truth seekers, truth tellers,” Reis says. “I’m totally Team Navarro. I totally believe it. Whoever she is, Shorty awake and Shorty mad. She did that. She’s handling business.”

What is Navarro’s final fate?
After Navarro and Danvers learn what the Justice Ladies did, they agree to keep their involvement in the men’s deaths a secret. Silver Sky Mining had already prepared a slab-avalanche cover story, and Navarro tells the women their explanation means that “this case is officially closed.” A year later, when Night Country nods to the first season of True Detective by sitting Danvers down for a recorded interview about the case, she holds on to that explanation. The greater mystery now is that Navarro has been missing ever since, and we see in a flashback that Danvers (in a scene not unlike Good Will Hunting’s finale) visited Navarro’s house to find her dead son Holden’s polar-bear stuffed animal and Navarro’s own cell phone but no Evangeline.

Navarro considers disappearing over and over in Night Country. She talks about wanting to “just walk out, never stop” in “Part Three,” rages about her loneliness in “Part Four,” and talks about struggling with “holding the hatch” on her mental health for years in “Part Six.” She fears that the mental illness that plagued her mother before her death and caused her sister Julia’s suicide will affect her, too, given how often she sees ghosts and other inexplicable things. By “Part Six,” Navarro seems to have accepted that she’ll always be on the same odd frequency as Ennis and insists to Danvers that “There is something out there, calling me … There is more than this, Liz. There is so much more than just this.” If Navarro were to have died by suicide off-screen, her increasing self-doubt and paranoia would probably be what people pointed at to try and explain her decision.

López won’t confirm any specific reading of Navarro’s final fate, but she insists that if viewers “very carefully look” at “Part Six” — like when Danvers says she doubts Navarro would be found “out there on the ice” — they’ll have an answer. “I will say something, and I don’t know if I should, but I will,” López says. “Often when I set out to write a story, I think of myself as a really badass writer who is going to be mercilessly going in whatever direction, dark or dire, that the fate of the characters becomes. And then as I live with these characters and learn to truly love them, the softer and kinder I grow, and in the end, I’m incapable of hopelessness. It’s just not who I am.”

In “Part Six,” Danvers says to Navarro that even if she does leave, “just try to come back.” The last scene of the episode is set in a cozy lakeside home, where Danvers — after working on a newspaper crossword while seated at a window nook — walks out onto her back porch and is joined by Navarro; the two women turn toward each other, and the episode ends on their shared gaze. (There is a distinctly queer reading of this scene, Vulture features writer Rachel Handler notes, and it’s that the former partners “got together at the end and are at a lake house doing crosswords and drinking tea.”) For her part, Reis says she left her character’s conclusion “open.” Maybe Navarro is still alive and living off the grid, or maybe she’s a ghost dropping in on Danvers from the supernatural plane. Regardless, Reis is convinced there’s only one person who would bring her back to Ennis: “Whether the scene is in the spiritual world or the real world, it’s gonna be Danvers.”
Perhaps the answer for what happens to Navarro lies in her Native name, which Beatrice defines for her as “the return of the sun after a long darkness.” There might also be clues to glean from “Bury a Friend,” the Billie Eilish song that serves as this season’s theme: “I wanna end me / Why aren’t you scared of me? / Why do you care for me?” Either way, it’s up to us to keep looking, because López is done talking: “Over mezcal, I will tell you what my vision is … off the record,” she laughs.

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True Detective Is Over, But Its Ghosts Remain