Review: True Detective: Night Country (Patreon)

I would have liked True Detective: Night Country more if somebody had spoiled the ending for me earlier. To be clear, I’m about to spoil the ending: Jodie Foster and Kali Reis’ characters discover that Indigenous women have executed a group of murderous scientists who’ve conspired to destroy Alaska’s environment by forcing them to walk naked into the Alaskan winter. Foster and Reis not only excuse them but seem to approve of their act. It’s the single coolest denouement of any True Detective season, exactly the sort of thing television should be doing in 2024, and better than any idea Nic Pizzolatto has ever had.

It’s just a shame that Night Country takes so long to get this good. The pacing of this season damn near kills it. I’d mostly given up on Night Country before I watched the back half. Showrunner Issa López seems to struggle in the first few episodes, not quite getting how to pace an HBO television series. This season needed to be either two episodes shorter or two episodes longer (despite Night Country’s fleeting similarities to Paul Abbott’s State of Play, six episodes isn’t working for it). True Detective Season One’s ingenious structure is not one of the virtues Night Country has inherited. The first episode is a slog, with a mediocre opening scene that, despite offering True Detective’s most overt flirtation with the Weird since Carcosa, fails to kick off a suspenseful hour of television. The first cliffhanger, depicting naked men frozen in the ice like glacial Pompeii victims, would have been the first scene in Season One. Night Country begs the comparison to Season One, with cameos from Rust Cohle’s father, a structure that overtly mirrors the first season, and a frankly contrived throwback to “time is a flat circle.” Night Country ultimately is more than the sum of its callbacks, but oof, those callbacks derail it for a bit.

It’s a shame, because there’s a lot of great stuff here. There’s some fun engagement with the Weird. Jodie Foster and Kali Reis are a killer duo. We’ve got another one of True Detective’s Deadwood callbacks with the casting of John Hawke. And doing a story about ecological exploitation and its ties to the disappearing of Indigenous women is more politically incisive than anything in Pizzolatto’s seasons (which probably prompted Pizzolatto’s frankly pathetic reposting of edgelordy fan rants about Night Country). The core of the show is golden; I just wish it didn’t take so long to get there.