REVIEW: True Detective: Night Country (S4 E1/6)

It’s almost a decade since True Detective crept onto our screens, heralding a new age of TV crime drama. Because of the success of that HBO series, and its two towering performances by award-winning leads Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, it showed that well-made TV shows could be a home for the best talent out there.

Two subsequent series promised much but didn’t quite deliver, but still attracted big-name stars.

And there’s another Oscar winner in lead character seat in this fourth series. Jodie Foster is back playing a law enforcement character but heralded showrunner Nic Pizzolatto is now only an executive producer.

I’ve read some reviews that this show is a ‘return to form’, so I was looking forward to watching this first instalment. What they meant by ‘return to form ‘I’m not too sure – I saw a lot of good stuff, but also some quite laboured and leaden tempo.

But let’s set this up: this time around we’re not in the humid, heavy atmosphere of the swamps of Louisiana, we’re up near the North Pole in Alaska. There in the mining town of Ennis, lives police chief Liz Danvers (an impeccable Foster), a little bit no-nonsense and a little bit world-wary. Think Mare Sheehan without the empathy. It’s clear she has experienced things; things she’d rather not recall or talk about. Yep, we’re talking about past trauma here.

She’s called out to an isolated research station, where eight scientists have mysteriously gone missing. They were there one minute, and disappeared the next, with only one of them hinting that something was wrong (“She is awake,” he says, cryptically). While snooping around, Danvers and her team find what looks like a severed tongue on the floor. After a bit of testing, they find that the tongue is that of an Iñupiaq native American woman called an anti-mining activist Annie K, who was murdered some years before. Her killer is still at large.

This brings into play former detective Evangeline Navarro (a brilliant Kali Reis), who was banished to become a trouper after the Annie K case and its aftermath. She and Danvers have history, but at the moment we’re not quite sure what.

With this set-up, the hunt is very definitely on.

We meet some local characters, too (most notably Fiona Shaw’s former scientist and Danvers’ own team of deputies), but while atmospheric and things moved a a glacial pace. We also got a lot of devices straight out of horror films (blurred people passing in front of the camera, a hand on a should in the middle of the night), and a dollop of the supernatural. Perhaps even too much, as it flirted with Fortitude territory.

In fact, I got the feeling that this opener was a bit of lots of things we’ve already seen before. A bit of The Killing, some Trapped and certainly a bit of Fortitude. And certainly about a dozen 12 Nordic Noirs you’d care to mention.

Also throughout episode one of True Detective: Night Country, we are told repeatedly that Ennis is the end of the world. One character says, “You see people sometimes. It’s a long fucking night. Even the dead get bored.” It’s very keen to tell you that, which means that some of the horror devices don’t quite have the impact they desired.

Series one, while having these elements, was really about the relationship between the two leads as they became corrupted and violated by evil forces so nefarious that their journey was not one of redemption like most crime dramas, it was merely survival. And this might turn out to be the case for Danvers and Navarro, two compelling characters, so we’ll have to see.

Paul Hirons

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

True Detective: Night Country is broadcast in the UK on Sky Atlantic