The Finale of 'True Detective: Night Country' Was, Ironically, A Crime
*SPOILER FREE SECTION*
Just to set the backdrop, True Detective is obviously a flawed product. The first season set the bar impossibly high. The second season not only missed that bar but set a new, impossibly low one. The third season hit somewhere in-between. The big change for this season is that creator/showrunner/writer/director Nic Pizzolatto was not directly involved. Instead, Issa López got the call despite not really having any Hollywood work in her filmography.
When the trailer for this first dropped, I wasn't against it. Pizzolatto's track record was far from perfect and you could argue that the success of the first season had as much to do with director Cary Joji Fukunaga + the phenomenal casting as it did him. Not to mention this season was diving into the long nights of the artic circle + the pseudo supernatural stuff that made the first season interesting. Oh and we had Jodi Foster taking her first TV role since 1975. Basically every piece involved was either an unknown or something I liked.
The first episode sets up basically everything I could have hoped for. It's the cold, bleak mystery with cops a la Wind River. There's a Dyatlov pass-esque core mystery. There is the supernatural undertone combined with native spiritual elements. Everything is looking solid! After that, everything falls apart. We end up with 4 very long filler episodes that go off on about 15 side quests with little to no connection to the story. The two main characters, Danvers and Navarro, are essentially the same and have no dynamic or chemistry. The one thing that kept me, as a viewer, going was how they wrapped up the main mystery.
Last night's finale wrapped up in about the most disappointing way possible. They had about 20 loose threads going at once and only wrap up about half of them. The main and most important thread, the core mystery of the entire show, wraps up in maybe the least satisfying way possible. But that is hard to talk about without spoiling so I'll talk about that in this next section.
SPOILER SECTION. DON'T READ IF YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED YET
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So even with all the bullshit going on with the mine, the extrajudicial murders, the kids, the visions, the spiritual stuff and all that I STILL WANTED TO KNOW ONE THING. Why did those scientists go out on the ice??? Just give me a compelling reason and I would at least be reasonably happy. Lets just break down how they tested the suspension of our disbelief.
The first is the sort of "realization" of Tsalal. They reveal that these scientists were got the mine to up their pollution by a factor of 11x in order to make their digs into the permafrost easier. Yea that seems like something a corporation would do. Increase their pollutants by a comical and easily discoverable number because a group of their stooges told them to.
What are the scientist's digging for, you ask? Some sort of DNA that help humanity. How will it help? Fuck you, thats how. What type of DNA? That's on a need-to-know basis, buddy. Any details at all? How about you jump off a bridge, viewer! Whatever information is in that DNA, it's not important enough for you to know or for scientists to commit a brutal group murder over. Oh wait....
So Annie K's murder was obviously a big sticking point of this series. It turns out that Annie, a regular person, conducted a full-scale investigation within Tsalal without anybody in the facility ever noticing. Without accesses to anything, she discovered every bit of this corporate espionage (which must have had a an easily accessible, written paper trail with written out in laymans terms like all crimes do) and, despite being smart enough to figure all that out, is dumb enough to decide that the only recourse is to not tell anybody and destroy the research instead. Sure.
Then we have this group of academic nerds that all instinctually decide to join in on her group murder. They see a man stabbing a woman to death and, without even a moment's hesitation, they all immediately join in. Then all continue with their lives like nothing ever happened. Yup.
Then, we get to my favorite part. "Mop Team 6" as some are calling them. A group of janitors from the town launched their own investigation into what was going on. And, like Annie K, managed to do a full investigation into Tsalal from within the facility without anybody ever noticing. They were so good that they noticed even the most minute details (like the fact that a 1/4 inch drill bit in the basement matches the star shaped puncture wound on Annie). Like Annie, they were also able to find the written out paper trail left by the scientists and digest all the scientific data that must have been left in laymans terms. In addition, they also went through all the evidence of the murders from within the police department without anyone noticing. Because they don't trust the police, the janitors launch a full scale assault on the facility, covering every exit and forcing the Tsalal men onto the ice. Smart as this group of lethal operators/investigators are, they somehow never got a roster of who actually works there as they missed one of the scientists during the process. These warriors then managed to keep this completely secret from the entire town, investigators etc and would have gotten away with it if Danvers didn't realize mid-hypothermia that she should go check if she could recognize any fingerprints on the hatch with her naked eye. Right.
It's just a bummer, man. Fantastic setting, good actors, great core mystery and they just had nothing to string it all together except this? Massive, massive bummer. And I feel like I didn't even hit every bizarre part of this episode to be honest. I think people rightfully judge this harsher because it's part of the True Detective banner and it really shouldn't have been. They even through in a super cringey "time is a flat circle" too. Even if it was it's own thing, I think this season is a resounding failure. Banger start, flop ending.
