True Detective: Why I'll Never Go To Night Country Again

The fourth season had the premise, the cast and the budget to be brilliant. Instead it was an embarrassment to not only the True Detective name but also to the HBO seal of quality.

I’ve not long finished the final episode of True Detective’s fourth season “Night Country” and while I’m an infrequent TV reviewer I was compelled to get to the keyboard in order to try and exorcise some of my disgust. It started off average and nosedived from there serving up an entry in the anthology series so bad it might have killed any interest in resurrecting the branding for a fifth time. Given my own love affair with the series it’s kind of hard to process how this show was allowed to waste a talented cast and a huge budget to serve up something that would be utterly unforgettable if it wasn’t for its comically bad low points.

Season one is a masterpiece. On the surface it’s just an excellent procedural with stellar casting and performances that match. Go beyond that and you’ll find both the kind of earnestness and profundity that most TV shows cannot achieve and actively avoid. It is a story about grief, family and how no matter how broken you are there is always a way back to functionality. In a genre filled to bursting with tropes revolving around jaded anti-heroes it makes the viewer watch as the mesmerising jaded anti-hero in this story evolves from pessimist to optimist. It looks incredible too and is shot with a level of technical expertise usually reserved for cinema.

Season two crumbled under the weight of expectation. It had an impossible act to follow and in trying to make the central theme of repressed trauma almost larger than any of its characters it was clumsily ambitious. The tonal incongruence of Lynchian surrealism and gritty crime drama will keep you off kilter throughout and that isn’t helped by a string of hammy performances, with Taylor Kitsch in particular being so far out of his depth with the material it’s almost embarrassing. The peaks are still high and it has something to say but ultimately it falls short of the impossibly high standard set by the preceding season.

Season three was an incredible return to form. That Mahershala Ali, one of the best working actors right now, was very nearly matched by Stephen Dorff sounds almost unbelievable and yet it’s true. The support cast here is exceptional, particularly the always brilliant Scoot McNairy as a grieving father. The multiple timeline framing device is back and once again used exceptionally. We see Ali’s Wayne “Purple” Haze switch between his youthful, stoic veteran turned detective and vulnerable, elderly retiree with dementia and it’s never implausible. That’s not just the exceptional make-up by the way, it’s Ali’s perfect performance. Critics talk of how dark season one is and yet this is the saddest of them all, a meditation on how life goes by all too quick and the impossibility of avoiding regret.

Season four is irredeemable dogshit.

Too much? OK, look, I can at least admit it had an enticing premise. An Alaskan research facility sees its entire team of scientists disappear, their clothes and shoes neatly folded on the ice and no sign of their bodies. Detective Liz Danvers, still embittered by the death of her four year old son, is tasked to investigate and immediately runs into resistance as corporate and political interests around the facility and local mine insert themselves into the investigation. Somehow this set-up is wasted and what we get instead is a dreary drudge through the snow, meeting characters we absolutely do not care about and listening to them say the most tediously predictable things interspliced with cheap jump scares that makes Five Nights At Freddy’s seem sophisticated.

I forced myself to watch until the finale even though I had mentally tapped out by episode three, which was incredibly a filler episode in a six episode mini-series. I’ll avoid explicit spoilers mostly because typing them out would likely give me a migraine but basically everything telegraphed in the first episode is kind of where it goes. It turns out an unsolved murder was linked to these murders because of what’s going on at the research centre with a big secret hidden in an ice cave beneath it. People die along the way. No one cares. It’s covered up. No one cares. The supernatural shit is never explained, the plot plays out like an edgy reboot of Scooby Doo and one of the main characters becomes a ghost after committing suicide to avoid a possible future suffering with schizophrenia I think. I can already feel the pain growing behind my eyes.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment the season jumped the shark. It could have been the needless insertion of the ghost of Rust Cohle’s father dancing on the ice to lead his ex to the victims. It could have been the scene where a 60 year old Jodie Foster is gratuitously ejaculated into by Christopher Ecclestone. It could have been when a coma patient sat upright in bed and said in a demonic voice “your mother says hello, she’s waiting for you” because the script feels comfortable ripping off The Exorcist. I do know for sure that by the time a suspect they’ve been searching for turns up to declare “we’re all in the Night Country now” I knew I was done. How can any writer think to themselves “oh then this character will say the name of the show and it’ll be freaking epic” in 2024? Did they miss the whole “It’s Morbin’ Time” meme? If these writers had been anywhere near season one the scene where Marty finally puts together who the suspect might be the line “fuck you man” would have been replaced with “well partner, I guess that makes you the TRUE DETECTIVE!”

I don’t think I can accurately convey just how dreadful the writing is in this series but here’s some things that are fresh in my mind from the last episode. One of the female leads tanks a hit from a fire extinguisher to the back of the skull that would outright kill somebody, only to be upright and rumbling seconds later. An even smaller woman does the same after being stabbed five times. A storm descends on the research centre but doesn’t touch any of the surrounding areas and stops as soon as the detectives “solve” the case and need to leave. The ice they walk on is thin enough to punch through but capable of holding people’s weight. Someone falls into sub-zero water and is then pulled out in a blizzard but is fine after a change of clothes and a fire. The cave network leads under the aforementioned research facility but with impossible geography, the building nowhere in the exterior shots, but a short walk has them right inside the heart of it. It turns out the murderers are an all female Inuit A-Team who turn up armed with assault rifles and send the scientists out to die as revenge for the previously unsolved killing. This completely contradicts an earlier episode which, in a bid to ramp up the supernatural element of the show, has someone point out the corpses being frozen in terror suggests they died before the cold got to them. It also romanticises suicide so much you might think it’s an advertisement for Canadian health care. It’s all such a mess.

It’s biggest crime though is cannibalising the far superior first season to paper over the cracks of the script’s shortcomings. As soon as Alaska was announced as the setting my gut started to churn because I knew they wouldn’t be able to resist some kind of reference. Not out of bounds, as season three did have a throwaway reference to a newspaper clipping of the first case. The callbacks here though were egregious and did not serve the story. Rust Cohle’s Ghost Dad does nothing for the story. Introducing us to the Tuttle Corporation does nothing for the story. The spiral ultimately does nothing for the story and it’s fucking everywhere. To lift the line “time is a flat circle” and just drop it in to the season finale is so cheap it’s embarrassing. The first script contains immense monologues, the broken down present tense Rust Cohle delivering rambling segments of his pessimistic philosophy, which were Nic Pizzolatto channelling Thomas Ligotti. Issa López didn’t write a single bit of dialogue that comes close to memorable and then cheapens the work of her predecessors by serving up memberberries to the morons who would clap like circus seals receiving their treat.

Watching this season will do that to you…

And so we get to the elephant in the room. This project was written and directed by a woman who wanted to tell a story from a different viewpoint that is typical of the genre. She wrote a script for two female leads to investigate a scenario where it was the men who were victims. The killers also turn out to be women, the regular workers who figured out that these outsiders were responsible for multiple crimes. It also focuses on a community where indigenous people have been pushed to the margins in a land that was once entirely theirs. Myself and doubtless many others would have loved it to have succeeded for these reasons and see it stand next to Killers of The Flower Moon and the criminally underrated Wind River, which this series “borrows” from on more then one occasion. There’s no pretending though. This was a woeful TV show, perhaps the worst HBO has ever signed off on.

The elephant? Well, it’s the baked-in culture war bullshit where, because of all the aforementioned qualities of the project, there’s a need for it to be heralded. This is happening due to the misguided principle that sober critique would harm the prospects of similar projects in future, a patent falsehood. While I can accept wildly differing opinions on pieces of art I find it impossible to believe that anyone could watch this season from start to finish and not conclude it is deeply flawed especially when compared to its predecessors. Yet most of the reviews seem completely oblivious its most glaring of failures, missed its smug, self-satisfied film-student tone and made no mention of the plot-holes and cringeworthy dialogue. The Metacritic scores placing this season above True Detective’s third and within touching distance of the first have no basis in reality.

Noble intent should never be a shield from failure and make no mistake this show failed on almost every level. Sure, it no doubt suffered as a result of the writer’s strike, which is why it was only six episodes, but it was billed as one person’s singular vision and a worthy continuation of the True Detective legacy. This feels like a first draft, somebody’s memory of a TV show and the memory is fading. A detective show where the detectives are incompetent and outwitted at every turn. This is a world where nothing is solved.

Season one told us “everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again.” I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been in that room watching Rust Cohle build a stick figure from a can of Lone Star. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been in that ethereal bar watching Ray Velcoro fall asleep soaked through with whiskey. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been sat on that stoop with West and Hays urging them to go and stir some shit up one last time. I can promise you I’m never going back to Night Country.