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And just like that, the fourth season of True Detective wrapped up and put another thrilling TV mystery down in HBO’s history books. While it was the most suspenseful since the original and came with many interesting turns, it also fell short on a laundry list of things, leaving lots to explain.
True Detective: Night Country features the dual investigative narrative of a six-year-old cold case of Annie K. and the seemingly unnatural murders of the scientists conducting research at the Arctic station known as Tsalal. As you piece together the puzzle and see the ending for yourself, you’ll certainly be left with some questions.
You don’t have to be a true detective to find out that major spoilers for Night Country are ahead.
What Happens In The Ending Of True Detective: Night Country?
Episode 6 kicks things off right from where the fifth one ended. Danvers and Navarro are already at the entrance to the ice cave and going inside, while Peter is cleaning the crime scene at Liz’s house, where he shot and killed his father.
After reaching a dead end in the tunnel, Liz decides the duo should go back rightbefore Navarro and Liz fall throughinto the cave’s sublevel.
They end up coming across the murder site of Annie K., an ominous prehistoric fossil frozen in the ice ceiling above just as in the video she recorded before her death, and the room is seemingly where the scientists were extracting their data on the ice cores.
Soon after, Raymond Clark shows up, and quickly climbs back up a ladderthat leads to a room inside Tsalal Station. Danvers and Navarro are in pursuit, but he locks Danvers in a freezer and knocks Navarro out.
Danvers is able to escape and Navarro manages to get free of Raymond and is seen beating him to a pulp, before Danvers stops her and gets her tohelp carry him and restrain Raymond to a chair.
After going through the torture of having the final recorded words and screams of Annie K. playing on a loop duct-taped to his ears, Raymond becomes ready to talk andhe spills the truth about what happened to Annie.
It turns out thatthe climate scientists needed excessive quantities of pollutionfrom the mine to help with extracting the cores to conduct their research (a little counterintuitive). Annie Kowtok, Raymond’s then-girlfriend, found out, tried documenting it, and was killed for it.
A flashback plays showing what really happened.Annie destroyed all the cores and research the team worked on, which triggered the anger of one of the scientists, Anders Lund, to repeatedly stab her. Soon, the other Tsalal scientists joined him and gruesomely took turns stabbing her to death.
Raymond claims to Navarro and Liz that he wouldn’t touch Annie and that he loved her, butthe truth reveals that he suffocated herto put her out of her misery and speed up her death rather than leave the station with her and get her medical help.
You also find out Peter’s dad, Hank Prior, was the one behind the cover-up of Annie K.’s murder, under the orders of Silver Sky Mining.
Eventually,Raymond Clark commits suicide and dies on the icein the same way the Tsalal scientists went out, before Liz and Danvers get a chance to question him further.
Raymond remains under the impressionthat Annie’s spirit took vengeance on the scientists, and that he was alive only because he went down to the sublevel and held the hatch closed, keeping the rest from escaping with him.
Meanwhile, Peter drives Liz’s daughter to his wife, so she’d have some company on New Year’s, and thentakes the bodies of his father and Otis Heiss to Rose Aguineauwho has the location of the dumping spot in the lake.
Back at Tsalal, Liz follows Evangeline Navarro’s trail onto the ice following a heated argument they had about her deceased son, which leads to Danvers seeing him underneath the ice andfalling into the freezing depths.
Navarro comes to her senses and quickly rushes to get Danvers safely out of the water. After they rest, warm up, and get on better terms, Danvers gets an idea to check for fingerprints and handprints on the hatch,only to find Blair Hartman’s set(the domestic violence victim from the season opener!).
Next comes the finale’s biggest revelation and twist that will make your jaw drop. Who murdered the scientists? The answer isTsalal’s cleaning lady, Beatrice, or ‘Bee,’ along with Blair and a few friends.
Bee discovered what happened to Annie K. andturned to vigilante justice. Bee and Blair, together with their armed group of Indigenous women, cut the power, rounded up all the men to transport them in a truck to the middle of nowhere in the ice, and forced them to strip naked and run to their deaths.
Seeing it is a fitting end and a more than reasonable punishment for Annie K.’s murderers, and with Silver Sky already having closed the case asnatural causes due to an extreme weather event, Navarro and Danvers can now put it all behind them.
One final ending twist shows that Raymond went on record to detail everything about the mine, Tsalal, and the extremely harmful pollution they were causing, thusshutting the doors of the mine for good.
Were The Murders Of Annie K. And The Tsalal Scientists In Any Way Supernatural?
Whether or not the murders were surpernatural has all beenpurposefully left to the audience’s interpretation by the writer and creator, Issa López, and this might be most disappointing to a lot of audiences anticipating a more Lovecraftian turn.
In the case of Annie, it wasn’t a supernatural murder, but rather she was the victim of a heinous and brutal stabbing by thesuddenly violent climate researchers wanting to cover up pollution.
What happened to the scientists is more uncertain. Did they see something before they died? Was it natural that they froze in such a way? Was it hallucinations from their intense hypothermia, or was there a being?
Beatrice keeps telling Navarro that it was"She"who would ultimately decide the scientists' fates, referring to the same entity that Navarro kept hearing in the multiple premonitions telling her “She’s awake.”
Certain analysis suggests that “She” might be a reference toSedna, goddess of the sea and the underworldin Inuit mythology, which would explain the superstitions of Raymond and the Inuit women led by Bee, and the paranormal phenomena happening around Ennis.
Darwin’s drawing of a woman bleeding from her hands as a result of missing fingers relates tothe legend of Sednaand is described by his mother as “a local legend.” In an Instagram post, creator Issa López also confirmed it was indeed Darwin’s childlike interpretation of Sedna.
It’s safe to assume that the scientists probably saw the goddess Sedna before their deaths and died in such a state after looking at a higher being, who also enacted her own judgment upon them for what they did to her land and indigenous women. (Again, this is pure speculation).
There is an underlying supernatural element in Night Country throughout the season, withNavarro entering in and out of a spirit planelike Marianne in The Medium and seeing Danvers' son Holden, as well as Rose getting visits from Rust Cohle’s father, Travis Cohle, which quickly loses any significance it had.
The Lovecraftian element and anything related to sci-fiseemed to bea giant red herringfor a more logical and reasonable outcome. The sinister spirals and straw figures tied to the Tuttle cult from Season 1, Cthulhu-like graffiti, and the ancient fossil of the organism went completely ignored by the end.
This calls back to the season one finale, where Rust and Marty confront Errol Childress and the Yellow King, who wasn’t actually Hastur from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, and Carcosa was never shown, only a cosmic portal seen by Rust andalso left ambiguousas to whether it was real or not.
Therefore, True Detectiveplays with ideas of cosmic horror, sci-fi, and Lovecraft mythos, only to be like Scooby-Doo andgive you a perfectly logical conclusionand still leave things up to you.
Navarro’s Fate, Explained
This is something that’s also left to the audience’s interpretation. Everyone will draw different conclusions as to how Navarro’s story ends or where it goes after the final episode.
The whole season, Navarro was grappling with the mental illness in her family, visions of a spirit world beyond and her belief in it, her sister’s suicide, and some pretty destructive behavior in the aftermath.
Then comes this impactful moment in the finale when Navarro is lured to the ice and the voice of her mother’s ghost finally comes through, where she tells Navarroher Iñupiaq name is Siqinnaatchiaq, which translates to “the return of the sun after the long darkness.”
All the spirit manifestations come full circle to give Navarro anew sense of identity and hopeand allow her to help her partner Liz Danvers heal by opening up about how her son Holden is saying that he sees her.
Some might think Navarro went to reunite with her sister Julia and her mom in the spirit realm, and some might think she just disappeared while still occasionally keeping in touch with Danvers, as agreed.
An orange rolls out in front of Navarro when she opens the fridge at Tsalal, and her sister Julia also sees an orange roll out in front of her before she decides to kill herself.
While you learn from Navarro that oranges are her mother’s favorite fruit, the rolling of an orange is also a storytelling technique and Easter egg to foreshadow death, stemming from The Godfather, where oranges almost certainly guarantee death.
One thing is certain, however. Liz Danvers assures the audience thatthey won’t ever find Evangeline Navarro out in the ice(a telltale sign thatshe’s out there somewhere and still alive).
Burning Questions The True Detective: Night Country Finale Leaves Unanswered
Even though True Detective: Night Country provides closure on the Annie Kowtok case and the murders of the Tslal scientists, as well as the fate of the mine and Liz Danvers' relationship with her adoptive daughter,so many things remain unresolved.
Here are some lingering ‘right’ questions we still have to ask:
