Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for the True Detective: Night Country finale.

The Big Picture

Episode 6 of
True Detective: Night Country
features beautifully shot scenes and a touching, but deceivingly sad, conclusion to Navarro’s journey of self-discovery.
The final scene of the episode is an overly convenient wrap-up, and the ending of the Tsalal mystery feels unearned, despite its empowering undertones.
The series doesn’t give viewers enough clues to follow its mysteries, resulting in an unsatisfying finale.

“Nobody ever really leaves.” This line by Detective Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) wraps up the final episode of the latest season of True Detective, better known as True Detective: Night Country. It is a line that packs a lot of meaning. It says something about how Danvers has accepted the existence of another realm, one that intersects with the town of Ennis, and it says something about how Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) will continue to be around, no matter what happens to her. It sums up how the people of Ennis have existed long before the Alaska Police Force, Tsalal Research Station, and the Silver Sky mines, and will continue to endure long after they are gone. But it also points out to us that the ghosts of those institutions will remain in the land for years to come. In the end, that’s what True Detective: Night Country is all about: ghosts that haunt our world through material or spiritual means. These ghosts exist in the form of translucent beings that roam the tundra, but also in the form of pollutants that will take centuries to disappear or in the form of flesh and blood people enacting vengeance in the name of the dead.

True Detective: Night Country’s finale is a beautifully shot, but lukewarm episode of television. The conclusion to the mystery of who killed Annie Kowtok (Nivi Pedersen) is less than satisfactory, kind of like the revelation about what happened to the Tsalal men. Sure, the latter plot has more empowering undertones to it that make it feel a little more satisfying. However, these are not necessarily earned. Good detective stories offer us clues that allow us to keep up with what’s going on and put together our own pieces of the puzzle. Showrunner Issa López, in turn, just throws the completely unexpected our way and hopes that it will be enough.

True Detective Anthology series in which police investigations unearth the personal and professional secrets of those involved, both within and outside the law.Release Date January 12, 2014 Creator Nic Pizzolatto Main Genre Crime Seasons 4 Studio HBO Streaming Service(s) Max

‘True Detective: Night Country’s Finale Reveals Who Killed Annie Kowtok

Set mere minutes after the conclusion of Episode 5, True Detective: Night Country Episode 6 kicks off with Danvers and Navarro entering the ice caves under Ennis while Pete (Finn Bennett) disposes of the bodies of his father and Otis Heiss (Klaus Tange). Guided by voices, Navarro leads Danvers to a narrow spot, and the two end up falling through the ice into a kind of underground laboratory. There, they find none other than Raymond Clark (Owen McDonnell), hiding in the night country just like Heiss had told them. They also happen upon a star-shaped tool that seems to match the wounds found on Annie’s body, something that the show makes a point of reminding us through a flashback that would not have been necessary had this element of the investigation been given proper weight in previous episodes.

Clark manages to elude Danvers and Navarro by escaping into Tsalal Station. It turns out that the underground lab is built right beneath the research facility, so all the while they were looking for him, he was hiding right beneath their feet. Navarro and Danvers, of course, follow him, and after a brief confrontation that ends up with Clark beaten to a pulp, they tie him up to a chair and begin their strange line of questioning, which involves forcing him to listen to the video of Annie dying on a loop until he decides to talk.

The story that Clark tells them virtually clears the mine of any wrongdoing, though the show doesn’t quite seem to understand it. According to him, Tsalal Station was forging numbers for Silver Sky — not at the mining company’s behest, but in order to force them to pollute more, thus creating a better, safer environment for the kind of research they were doing, collecting DNA from a microorganism that, in Clark’s words, might help save the world. By the end of the episode, a video of Clark spilling the beans on the bogus numbers will have hit the internet, and we will hear all about the political unrest that has been going on around Ennis as a result of what the mine has done. However, what has the mine really done if Silver Sky wasn’t even aware of how much they were damaging the town?

Well, the mine did have a hand in the murder of Annie K. — or, at least, they had a hand in hiding her dead body. It turns out that Annie realized what Clark and his scientists were doing and broke into their secret lab to put an end to their research. Caught in the middle of destroying all the researchers’ work, Annie was attacked by Lund (Þorsteinn Bachmann), who stabbed her with the star-shaped tool. The other scientists soon joined in, and Clark found himself completely powerless to stop them. Or did he? While he claims to love Annie and swears that he would never hurt her, a flashback shows us that he was the one who smothered her to death with his shirt as she was fighting for her life. It’s an interesting touch, one that brings up a discussion similar to the one presented in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon: how much love can there actually be in a relationship that is ultimately based on lies, exploitation, and death? A relationship that exists not just in itself, but as a reflection of colonialist power. After all, Clark was not just Annie’s lover, but also a white businessman responsible for bringing destruction to her home, her people, and her way of life.

‘True Detective: Night Country’s Finale Tackles the True Meaning of Justice

Clark’s confession to Navarro and Danvers is the end of the story of Annie Kowtok’s murder. Left alone by Danvers, who is seriously off to take a nap, Navarro allows Clark to escape the station and commit suicide by walking out into the freezing cold. Danvers is pissed because Clark was their only witness to what happened to the Tsalal men. Though he spent all the time hiding in the underground lab, holding the hatch to stop whoever was wreaking havoc on the facility from coming in, he did hear a lot of noise out there. So the correct thing to do would be to take him in for further questioning, which would have the added bonus of rubbing in Connelly’s (Christopher Eccleston) face that the scientists at Tsalal were not killed by a freak avalanche. However, True Detective: Night Country is not a show to put its trust in standard police procedures. It is a show with a particular view of what justice means.

Thankfully, Episode 6 does not go the same way as its predecessor, which ends on a strange note about how cops going rogue might not always be a bad thing. Instead, the series presents a more nuanced debate on the limits of the criminal justice system and the people who are left to suffer at its margins. Too bad it does so in a way that feels unearned. Clark tells Danvers and Navarro that it was Annie who broke into Tsalal that night, and, in a way, it was her; her rage lived through the women who were part of her circle and who, while working at the station as cleaners, realized what had actually happened to her. Together, they hatch a plan to kidnap the scientists and release them naked in the tundra. The idea was to offer them to Annie’s spirit, and apparently, she accepted the offer, because none of them came back alive. Why did they choose to do this instead of going to the police? Well, the police never helped them in any way, so why should they trust them?

Related What Does “Time Is a Flat Circle” Even Mean? A deep dive into one of television’s most iconic lines of dialogue.

This is, to some extent, an interesting and even empowering turn of events, insofar as it centers the strength of the people, particularly the women, of Ennis to fight those who mean them harm. It is also in keeping with the supernatural theme of the season, as the women act as conduits for Annie’s desires, something that is made clear through the revelation that neither they nor Clark were responsible for chopping off Annie’s tongue and leaving it at Tsalal. Much like in the rest of the series, the mundane and the spiritual are interconnected.

So why is this conclusion unearned? For starters, there’s the whole thing where this is never once brought up as a possibility. We’re not talking about Danvers and Navarro actually investigating Annie’s group, but about the plot doing something that might indicate a certain relevance to these women, such as giving them personalities or even names that we can remember. Secondly, there’s the problem of how Danvers and Navarro conclude that the women were responsible for the deaths of the Tsalal men: they see a handprint missing two fingers on the door, and Navarro later remembers seeing that hand before, in the assault case she handled in Episode 1. Again, it’s an element that had been shown before, but related to a character that was completely absent for about four episodes of the show.

‘True Detective: Night Country’ Wraps Up with a Convenient Timeskip
Image via HBO

Upon listening to the story of how the Tsalal men were killed, Navarro and Danvers decide to uphold Connelly’s version of the whole thing. They leave the women to their lives, and the show cuts to five months in the future. Danvers is being questioned by a couple of internal affairs officers and conveniently explaining to them everything that happened afterward. Where is Hank (John Hawkes)? He was probably killed during a negotiation gone wrong with Heiss. Maybe we’ll find his body, maybe we won’t. What happened to Clark? Oh, that’s odd, he died the same way as his colleagues. What about the political unrest in Ennis? Eh, who cares? Where’s Officer Navarro? She left one day and disappeared into the tundra.

Okay, hold on, that last part is interesting! Navarro’s journey in True Detective: Night Country’s finale is both the conclusion and the summarized version of what we’ve seen of her character throughout the whole season. While trapped by a snowstorm at Tsalal with Danvers and Clark, she goes on a journey to the spirit realm where she is finally given her Inupiaq name, something that Tagaq had asked her about in Episode 3. She then decides to stop fighting the forces that have been calling for her and leaves to join her family in the other world. It sounds like a tragic ending, but it’s not. In Ennis, no one is really gone: the final scene of True Detective: Night Country has Navarro standing by Danvers’ side.

This also wraps up Danvers’ journey of acceptance. For episodes on end, the detective has fought against all evidence of the supernatural, and the finale is no different in that aspect. Initially skeptical and even enraged by Navarro’s claims that she has seen Holden (Inuik Lee Nielsen Shapiro), Danvers eventually comes to accept that her son is always by her side, particularly after seeing his ghost trapped under the ice and nearly drowning trying to save him. It’s a breathtaking shot that is ruined seconds after by the gloomiest, worst possible version of “Twist and Shout” ever recorded.

It’s an experience that changes Danvers entirely — not just opening her mind to the existence of ghosts, but also allowing her to enjoy her life beside the people she has left. The montage that accompanies her voiceover statement shows her laughing beside a tattooed Leah (Isabella LaBlanc). It also shows Pete lying side by side with Kayla (Anna Lambe), indicating that Danvers has finally given him a break. It’s sweet, but it feels like an odd ending for the kind of story that True Detective: Night Country was trying to tell. It feels as if something is missing. It’s a convenient and unsatisfying way to finish a show that started with so much promise, but ultimately couldn’t deliver.

True Detective Beautiful images aren’t enough to save an unsatisfying finale that wraps up its story too conveniently.ProsEpisode 6 of ‘True Detective: Night Country’ is filled with beautifully shot scenes.Navarro’s journey of self-discovery ends on a touching, deceivingly sad note. ConsThe ending of the Tsalal mystery feels unearned, despite its empowering undertones.The series doesn’t give its viewers enough clues to follow its mysteries.In a show filled with needle drops, Episode 6 has some of the worst.

True Detective: Night Country Episode 6 is available to stream at Max in the U.S.

Watch on Max