‘True Detective: Night Country’ Episode 4 Recap: Now Entering North Carcosa

Ennis, Alaska is a place where the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead is ragged and porous, and sometimes, the dead bleed through. That’s the story, anyway. It’s a story that everyone from the eccentric pothead professor hermit Rose Agineaux (who cleans up real, real nice) to the alleged nonbeliever Police Chief Liz Danvers buys into in one way or another. 

The big question that animates this season of True Detective, beyond that of who killed Annie K. and the Tsalal scientists, is how much of any of this any of us should believe. Are dead people and spectral polar bears and so forth communicating with Liz, Evangeline, Rose, and the rest? Or is there a rational explanation — like the schizophrenia that runs in Evangeline’s family, or the mining chemicals in the water that have made it poisonous to drink, or some kind of ancient microbe buried under ice and released by the research scientists, or hell, even the sprawling and creepy but ultimately non-supernatural Tuttle conspiracy from Season 1 that Season 4 keeps alluding to with all the spiral stuff? “We’re all in the Night Country now,” goes the line. We were once all “in Carcosa now” too, remember? Will it work out the same way this time?

The answer’s kind of uninteresting, to be honest. At a guess, we’ll get some copout that’ll explain most of it away but still leave the doorway open enough for spiritual-but-not-religious agnosticism to slip through, but that’s just spitballing. The real issue with all this stuff remains that whether the murders and the ghostly phenomena are paranormal or plain normal in nature, they’re not scary. All these limp homages to The Blair Witch Project and The Ring with none of the intensity or originality.  Jumpscares by distorted-faced ghosts with wet black hair like we’ve gone back in time about eight horror trends. Spooky spirals, as if Junji Ito isn’t a household name in America by now. (Wait, what? He isn’t? Well, my point stands.) The show can do better. Viewers certainly can.

If I’m accentuating the negative, it’s because it’s frustrating to me how much it gets in the way of the positive. On that side of the ledger remain the performances by — well, by everyone in the cast. Jodie Foster playing Liz at her drunkest and horniest on Christmas Eve is a scream; whether she’s slurring her words while ordering her deputies to round up a murder suspect or jumping all over Captain Connelly and getting her ass pawed, every choice works. But you really get a sense of her damage in this episode: From Pete to Leah to Evangeline to Julia, everyone wants or needs her to be their mom in some way, but she’s out of the mom business for good following the deaths of her husband and son. At least, she can’t admit it, so she does things like stroking her stepdaughter’s hair while she sleeps, then allowing her to leave home after she picks her up for defacing the big mine’s office building. She’s a strong character, and Foster galvanizes her.

Kali Reis tears through the episode like a rolling fireball from Indiana Jones or something as Evangeline. Comforting a sister she knows on some unconscious level is doomed, then reacting with understandable fury when she’s allowed to walk out of a mental health facility and into the freezing ocean to her death. Getting the absolute shit beat out of her by the town bros after she picks an ill-advised fight. Unburdening herself to Liz over and over and, surprisingly, getting the best rather than the worst out of the woman in return, something I don’t get the sense Hank or Ted could do if they bared their souls to her similarly. 

Aka Niviâna as Julia Navarro at the end of her schizophrenic tether, visibly mustering every ounce of will she has left to stay on her feet. Finn Bennett as Pete, a young man who already knows his marriage has failed, or that he failed his marriage, or that his wife never wanted to be married to him to begin with, or all of the above at once. Even Jon Hawkes as Pete’s dad Hank, who strikes the right balance of pathos and comedy when he discovers his mail-order bride is bogus but continues to put on a brave face about it. And while Fiona Shaw is definitely doing a type of character rather than a character per se, there’s no one I’d trust to do it better. And again, hubba hubba in that Christmas dress.

But similar to Ennis, the ghost of a better show that actually really deserves all these performances bleeds through here and there. In a long conversation they have in their police car, Liz and Evangeline are, for once, shown in naturalistic nighttime lighting, not the tedious blues and oranges draped over every other scene. The inside of that car has depth, and so do their faces. If the show trusted itself to let the mood come through instead of adding it in post, we’d really have something.

And while it wasn’t the worst needle drop of the episode — that would be the ghastly slowed-down spooky-female-voice cover of “Twist and Shout” that closed it out, like something Twitter would have joked about eight years ago — the brutally stupid use of a song that begins “Everybody dies, surprise surprise, we tell each other lies” as a character we’re supposed to care about takes her own life by walking naked onto the ice and out into the water…

How can I put this. Okay, so let’s say you write and shoot that scene and put it in your episode, and now you have to decide if you should show this emotionally devastating scene with nothing but the sound of her sobs and shivers and her feet on the snow, or with a song that goes “Everybody dies, surprise surprise, we tell each other lies.” If you choose Plan B, that’s fine, but you’re making a worse show than this potentially very good show is capable of being.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.