After a welcome, but inconsistent season, TRUE DETECTIVE NIGHT COUNTRY, almost landed smoothly in the dark winters of Alaska. Almost, but not quite. What was welcome:
- An interesting setting, one that caused me to go down multiple rabbit holes to learn more about the northernmost American towns that Ennis was based on.
- A female lead show in just every way. Writer/director/producer Issa López was the showrunner with leads Jodie Foster (Danvers) and Kali Reis (Navarro)
- A unique mystery that tied together the old world of the indigenous people of Alaska and new science
From there NIGHT COUNTRY went up and down. After a strong start, later episodes bounced between exciting and boring. Too much exposition and never enough. In my earlier review of this season, I lamented how I prefer to watch shows that drop weekly over full-season binges, and yet TRUE DETECTIVE with its many twists and turns played so much better as a binge.
PART 5 was easily the best episode of this season. We, the audience were given so many episodes, even though at that moment not all of them made sense. But I was very enthusiastic coming into the finale. “Ok, we’ve got these answers now, and next we’re going to find out why…” I told myself. The good news is that we do get A LOT of what and why in the finale, but we’re still left hanging without explanations of what happened last week.
Outside of the always stellar acting, the best thing about the finale was seeing how justice was served and accepting that. To me, it was a theory I had been thinking about since right after PART 1 or 2. It didn’t bother me that I’d “solved” some mystery. It was a natural answer greater than ‘Who killed Annie K?” or “What happened to the Tsalal scientists?”. But there was still so much left dangling. My biggest fear about this show was that it was all going to be supernatural in the end. But now as I write about the finale, that never mattered. I guess I too, “asked the wrong questions.”
If you haven’t started NIGHT COUNTRY yet, now is the perfect time to start binging it. It’s heavy and you may not get through 2 or 3 episodes at a time, but it will still play best and make the most sense this way.
TRUE DETECTIVE NIGHT COUNTRY, the entire season, is streaming on Max.
