This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of True Detective: Night Country, now streaming on Max.
Midway through our penultimate installment, the combined investigation of Annie K’s murder and the death of the Tsalal scientists seems to grind to a halt. The forensics team in Anchorage attributes the Tsalal deaths to a “weather event.” And if Ted Connelly isn’t in the pocket of Silver Sky Mining, he’s at least political enough to decide that law-enforcement is not well-served angering big business just to solve the years-old murder of a single Native woman. He threatens Danvers with what he believes to have happened with Wheeler, and tells her to shut everything down.
That should be that, right? A wholly earthbound explanation for the frozen scientists, and pressure from a higher authority to leave it all alone. But Danvers knows that a weather event couldn’t explain everything that happened, both at Tsalal and out on the ice. And by this point, she and Navarro are so invested in the two cases — and so superhumanly stubborn — that there’s no way they’re letting this go. So instead of the plot grinding to a halt, the fifth episode instead starts bringing everything together, particularly where Silver Sky is concerned.
The tension between the mine and the local population has simmered all season. Annie K devoted her life — and perhaps gave it up — to protect her community from all the harm Silver Sky has been doing to Ennis and its ecosystem, and Leah and her stepmom’s uneasy relationship started to go south due to Leah’s own activism on the subject. Here, the tension goes full boil. The protests rise to the point where Navarro and her fellow state troopers are called in to protect the mine — and, really, to act as government-funded strikebreakers. Things become so violent, so quickly, that a horrified Navarro finds herself protecting the protesters and fighting another trooper. She’s been caught between worlds her whole life — between the rational world and the one her late mother and sister claimed they could hear (and that Navarro seemingly keeps slipping into this season), and between law-enforcement and the Indigenous community she doesn’t wholly feel a part of. She doesn’t wholly abandon policing, since she and Danvers keep investigating the murders. And perhaps you can just consider this another instance of Navarro, like Danvers, not caring about the bigger picture when faced with something upsetting in the moment(*). But the whole sequence is impressively ugly, and Danvers’ response — putting Leah in a jail cell and refusing entreaties by the other cops to stop being so tough on the kid — is even uglier. When Danvers briefly tries to play ball with Ted and let the cases go, Navarro loses her patience and releases Leah, who’s sad about how bad things have gotten with her stepmom. (“She’s not good with people she cares about,” she explains.)
(*) Navarro does, however, make a choice regarding Qavvik, finally allowing him to be the little spoon, and affectionately kissing him on the mouth before heading out to work. She has accepted this as a real relationship, and also that she’s deserving of the adoration of this big-hearted guy with the lush beard.
But the discovery that Silver Sky has been funding the Tsalal research in exchange for the scientists falsifying environmental impact studies — along with the revelation that Ennis has had nine stillbirths in the past three months as a result of the damage Silver Sky is doing — finally spurs Danvers to action. (If you got a look at the tiny coffin of a stillborn baby boy, you’d have trouble letting go of it, too.) She agrees to go with Navarro out to the ice caves — the titular Night Country — with the help of Otis Heiss, who insists on a drug fix in order to do the job. This is Danvers going way out of policy, but she does it, and then things explode in spectacular fashion. We learn Hank has been messing with the case because he actually is being paid off by Kate from Silver Sky, who needs to shut down any talk of bribery and environmental dangers, and implicitly tells her hired gun to murder Otis.
This leads to a brutal climax where an armed Hank comes to Danvers’ house, murders Otis, and is preparing to kill Danvers when Pete comes in at the right moment, his own gun drawn. We know things have long been bad between father and son. (Even when Pete temporarily moves back in with Hank, it’s only because it’s the least-bad option after Kayla kicks him out of the house for being more loyal to his boss than to his family.) Earlier in the episode, Hank recalls the day when nine-year-old Pete fell through the ice while skating, and Hank had to save his life by smashing through the ice with an ax. He should forever be his son’s hero, he feels, rather than this embarrassment who, like Kayla, resents the fact that Pete cares more about Danvers’ opinion of him than anyone else’s. He is also, as we were reminded last week, a sad and lonely man with little to look forward to, even in the event that he successfully murdered Danvers and took her job. So it’s not surprising that he would go for suicide-by-cop in this circumstance, even if he so cruelly allows the cop in question to be his own son.
It’s an utterly harrowing, awful sequence of events. And while none of it solves the central questions of what happened to the scientists, and who murdered Annie K, it puts our heroes on a path they can no longer get off of until they find answers. While poor Pete has to bury his father’s body in the ice with help from Rose, Danvers and Navarro are heading straight into the Night Country, and into an appropriately nasty blizzard, whatever the hell comes after.
