‘True Detective: Night Country’s Final Unsolved Mystery: Who Put Annie K’s Tongue in Tsalal Station?

The True Detective: Night Country finale neatly tied up almost every loose end last night on HBO, except for one big one. Even though we now know who killed Annie K (Nivi Pedersen), why the Tsalal scientists were discovered frozen on the tundra, and what Evangeline Navarro’s (Kali Reis) native mean is, True Detective Season 4 creator and director Issa López left one question unanswered: who cut off Annie K’s tongue and left it on the floor at the Tsalal Arctic Research Center?

**Spoilers for the True Detective Season 4 finale, now streaming on Max**

If you think back all the way to the beginning of True Detective: Night Country, you’ll remember that the discovery of Annie K’s tongue on the kitchen floor of the Tsalal Arctic Research Center was kind of what set the investigation in motion. The eerily empty Tsalal Station was creepy on its own, but the tongue confirmed foul play. Add to that the fact that it appeared freshly cut from a corpse that had been cold for six years, and Annie K’s tongue is a wild mystery.

“In the end, the series is about storytelling and the stories that we tell and how we tell them. So at the beginning of the series, we start with the mystery of the disappearance of these men. And the first thing we find is a cut tongue,” True Detective: Night Country creator and director Issa López said. “This tongue is telling us there’s a story that hasn’t been told and this is it.”

The True Detective: Night Country finale offers the theory that Hank Prior (John Hawkes) cut out Annie’s tongue while moving her body from the Tsalal underground lab, but is that really what happened? If he did that, why would he stage it at the Tsalal Arctic Research Center six years later for Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) to find? How did it not decay? Not only that, but True Detective: Night Country‘s finale goes out of its way to leave the tongue as a mystery, which Decider asked López about.

“Who put that tongue there?” López said. “There’s many possible explanations and I think it’s a little bit of an ink test, you know, for you to decide who put that tongue there. You can go very, very real with it or you can go very, very magical with it.”

True Detective Season 4 star Kali Reis told Decider that like her character, Evangeline Navarro, she felt Annie’s tongue was “part of a spiritual thing.”

“Those little breadcrumbs — the other side, whether you believe in it or not — is always leaving something,” Reis said. “I mean, the [cleaning] ladies, they didn’t do that and they didn’t need to know that because they were assigned their job and they followed it through and through. That tongue was just sometimes we need to get pushed. Sometimes the universe and the other side needs to scream at us, and the only ones with the ears to listen are going to actually listen.”

“So that’s my own theory to it. But again, it’s like, did Hank do it? Who did it? And how did it end up there? And if she was killed six years later, why does it look fresh?” Reis said, echoing our own lingering questions.

Ultimately, Issa López wants the audience to decide for themselves how Annie K’s tongue wound up at the Tsalal Arctic Research Station after all those years. It’s, as she puts it, a Rorschach test that reveals something about the True Detective: Night Country viewer. Are we here for logical explanations or a more ghostly ending?