The Big Picture

True Detective: Night Country
Episode 5 fails to follow up on the disturbing events of Episode 4, which takes away from the show’s creepy atmosphere.
Personal dramas are integral to the development of the core mystery, making for an enthralling episode.
The mine becomes a more relevant and malevolent force, highlighting the show’s exploration of justice in a dangerous way.

When is it time to stop asking questions? Is there such a time? What happens once we give up and decide to accept the world as it presents itself to us? What do we become when we choose to simply bow our heads to what we are told? For four episodes now, True Detective: Night Country has been prompting us, through Detective Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster), to always ask the right question. It does so through a repetitive line that doesn’t always sound as witty as the series believes it to be, but that still drives home the message: asking questions for the sake of asking is hardly ever enough. We must learn what’s really important to interrogate if we are ever to find answers that will help us move forward in our own stories. Now, in Episode 5, the series shows us that its protagonist may have been deflecting some of the most relevant questions about her case. It also puts its characters, from Navarro (Kali Reis) to Hank (John Hawkes), in the position of having to decide whether it’s time to start asking some real questions or to stop pressing further.

The overall result is a pretty successful episode of a show that has been dwindling in quality over the past few weeks. It hasn’t gotten to the point where it might be considered bad as a whole, but it sure has failed in more ways than one when it comes to sustaining its creepy atmosphere and making us care for its characters. In Episode 5, personal dramas are integral to the development of the core mystery, and everyone finds themselves trapped in a web knit by Silver Sky, the mining company that runs and poisons the town of Ennis. It is because of Silver Sky that Danvers is told by Connelly (Christopher Eccleston) to drop the Tsalal investigation. Navarro, however, isn’t willing to let her give up so easily. At the same time, Hank Prior lets go of all his moral qualms as he agrees to do unsavory favors for Silver Sky, while Pete (Finn Bennett) finds himself in the awful position of having to question his father. In the end, all of these things come together in a dramatic ending that we can only hope will be given consequences next week.

True Detective Anthology series in which police investigations unearth the personal and professional secrets of those involved, both within and outside the law.Release Date January 12, 2014 Creator Nic Pizzolatto Main Genre Crime Seasons 4 Studio HBO Streaming Service(s) Max

‘True Detective: Night Country’ Episode 5 Fails to Follow Through on Episode 4’s Bombastic Ending

If there is one big issue to be found in Episode 5 of True Detective: Night Country, it’s the fact that it seems to completely forget the creepy note on which its predecessor wrapped up.Episode 4 ended chillingly with Danvers finding Navarro in a trance, her eardrums ruptured, as Otis Heiss (Klaus Tange) went on and on about some bizarre other realm called the Night Country. Episode 5 not only reveals the Night Country to be nothing more than the name given by the locals to the underground cave system in which Annie Kowtok was murdered, but it also acts as if what happened to Navarro was completely chill and normal. Nobody even brings it up. We get to see the aftermath of other events in the trooper’s life, like her visions and the death of her sister, but that one moment in which she found herself practically on equal footing with the dead Tsalal scientists? Zilch. Nada. What happens in the dredges stays in the dredges, apparently.

With so little attention given to the truly bizarre events that go on in the world of True Detective: Night Country, some of the most horror-adjacent elements of the show end up losing impact. So, again, in Episode 5, we see Navarro traveling to that desolate otherworld in which she first encountered Danvers’ son, and we see a creepy child pointing at her on the street, bringing back memories of the same gesture in the hands of ghosts, of her mother, of Lund. This is all very strange and unnerving, but if the show fails to act as if any of this is meaningful, it feels empty, remaining just a little something for viewers that prefer style to substance.

It even hollows out the show’s whole discussion about faith. While much lip service is paid to praying or not praying, on which John Hawkes’ voice delivers, in this episode, a rendition of what seems to be an original song about the non-existence of God, True Detective: Night Country never actually realizes what it wants to say about believing or not believing. Despite all those distressing events, the only instance we ever get of someone questioning their beliefs is when Navarro flips out about being possibly victimized by a curse. Of course, Episode 5 also features Danvers being forced to confront the fact that the mine is indeed a problem for Ennis. That’s a kind of belief being questioned, but, so far, we’re talking about believing in the metaphysical sense. There is still another episode to go, and it might wrap up the whole faith thematic arc quite nicely, but, so far, it just seems that the spiritual comes and goes in the world of True Detective: Night Country without anyone properly paying attention to it.

The Mine Becomes a Greater Evil in ‘True Detective: Night Country’ Episode 5

Where Episode 4 of True Detective: Night Country was devoted to the spiritual realm, Episode 5 is all about palpable, material dramas. Forget the ghosts that haunt Ennis. This week’s big bad is the mine that makes the town’s life nearly unbearable. After finding the entrance to the underground cave system and discovering that it has been blown shut, Danvers is called to the office of mine manager Kate McKitterick (Dervla Kirwan) and told to drop the Tsalal investigation. McKitterick isn’t happy with her and Navarro digging around on Silver Sky property, and Connelly brings some distressing news from Anchorage: the forensics team has concluded that a freak avalanche was responsible for killing the researchers, even causing their bizarre wounds. This is another page that writer Issa López takes from the real Dyatlov Pass story that inspired her, as both reports from the time and recent data point to an avalanche as the thing that caused the awful death of the Soviet hikers. It’s a pretty fun nod to people familiar with the actual story: by incorporating this into the show, López offers True Detective fans a safe space to play around with crazy theories about what might have happened, far from the more damaging conspiracy theories.

Still, in the show, this avalanche theory is deeply at odds with Heiss’ account of how he suffered his injuries in the past. According to the explorer, he was in the cave with a handful of other guys when it all came down. They managed to escape, but something outside called out to them. Heiss lost consciousness, and, when he came to, he was already in the hospital with his eyes and ears completely ruined. This adds a new layer of mystery to the overarching plot of True Detective: Night Country, as we are left to wonder two things: what exactly caused the cave to collapse — was it foul play? — and what did the men hear out there in the tundra? Whatever it is, Heiss sure knows something that Silver Sky doesn’t want to get out, as McKitterick offers Hank the position of chief of police in exchange for the explorer’s life.

The mine also rears its ugly head in Danvers’ drama with Leah (Isabella LaBlanc). After Navarro arrests Leah during a protest in front of the Silver Sky headquarters, Danvers goes head-to-head with her daughter and even allows her to stay in jail to teach her a lesson. When the two of them finally get a chance to talk, Leah tells Liz about the alarming number of stillborns that have been delivered in Ennis in the past few months because of the heavy pollution released by the mine. With the info that Tsalal was funded by Silver Sky’s same parent company — Tuttle United, of course — in order to provide them with bogus environmental reports, Danvers starts to question her whole non-interventionist approach to the problems going on at Ennis and decides to move forward with the investigation no matter what Connelly has told her. Much like the “this is my jurisdiction” pissing contest in Episode 2, this is a development that is nothing if not expected in detective stories. However, it is played out in a satisfying way, framing Danvers’ insistence on doing a job that isn’t even hers anymore as a fight for justice.

‘True Detective: Night Country’ Toes a Fine Line When It Comes to Its Depiction of Justice

Image via HBO

The whole point of the show seems to be that the powers that be — the mine, Connelly in his mayoral race — are more interested in hiding the truth than in uncovering it. Thus, it is up to Danvers and Navarro, two rogue-ish detectives, to actually bring closure to cases such as the Tsalal mystery and Annie’s murder. The problem, however, may lie in how exactly they achieve this closure. Let’s take a step back for a second here: earlier in the episode, Peter asks Danvers what actually happened in the Wheeler (Kasper Leisner) murder-suicide case. His question is whether Danvers and Navarro killed him and made it look like he took his own life. Practically confirming his suspicions, Danvers tells him that sometimes it’s best to stop asking questions. Add to that the info that Danvers and Navarro were powerless to stop him during their numerous domestic abuse calls to his household, and you come up to the conclusion that they believed killing Wheeler to be the only possible choice.

Now, writing a problematic character isn’t akin to spouting harmful worldviews, so we’re not saying here that López is championing vigilante justice in any way. But True Detective: Night Country Episode 5 does end on an iffy note, especially when we consider how much we have learned in the past few years about what truly happens when police officers decide to take matters into their own hands. At the end of the episode, Hank goes to Danvers’ house and shoots Heiss, who had been recruited to help her and Navarro find an alternative entrance to the caves. Upon hearing the gunshot, Pete, who is sleeping in Danvers’ warehouse after being kicked out by Kayla (Anna Lambe), shows up, gun in hand. Knowing full well that his father is not to be trusted, as he was the one who leaked information about Wheeler’s murder to Connelly, Pete shoots him in the head.

Alongside Navarro and Danvers, he decides that the best course of action is to hide his father’s body and place Heiss to be found in his truck. Effectively, this amounts to basically the same thing that happened in the Wheeler case: holding Hank accountable for a murder that he actually committed, but getting rid of him through less-than-official means. This, the show and its characters tell us, is the only way to ensure that Danvers and Navarro will not be stopped in their search for the truth. Where that search will lead them and what conclusion we will be able to draw from the whole of True Detective: Night Country remains to be seen. As far as Episode 5 goes, though, it seems like the show is toeing a fine line.

True Detective REVIEWEpisode 5 of ‘True Detective: Night Country’ delivers an enthralling story, but fails to give consequences to the events of the previous episode.ProsJohn Hawkes’ beautiful song is the show’s best needle drop.Episode 5 perfectly connects personal stories and larger mysteries.The role of the mine becomes more relevant as the show’s real malevolent force. ConsThe disturbing events of Episode 4 go completely unexplored.The show’s overall take on justice falls into dangerous territory.

True Detective: Night Country Episode 5 is now available to stream on Max in the U.S.

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