Time is a flat circle: All of Night Country‘s connections to True Detective season one
That spiral symbol! The Tuttles! Creepy found footage! Here's how the current chapter of HBO's crime drama links with the first.
TV Features True Detective
True Detective: Night Country showrunner, writer, and director Issa López has told the story of how the fourth season came to be many times by now, including in an interview with The A.V. Club. She’s spoken at length about how she had a pitch ready to go when HBO came to her in search of ideas for a revival of the show, because she’d already been working on one. All she had to do was retrofit her original story about a pair of detectives investigating a mass death at an arctic research station into the universe of the show. One of the ways she did it was by going back to season one for inspiration, a “dark mirror” of the series she wanted to create.
Evidence of that influence is everywhere in Night Country. The season has all the elements that set True Detective apart from your average crime procedural: an unlikely pair of detectives, connected cases across multiple time periods, a potential criminal conspiracy, eerie atmosphere that establishes the show’s moody tone, and hints of supernatural forces at work. But it also includes more explicit references to Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and the lore of the cult that he and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) uncovered while trying to solve the murder of Dora Lange all those years ago.
Now that we’re coming up with theories to explain season four’s new mysteries, we thought it might be helpful to gather evidence of all the connections we’ve spotted as of episode four. Some may just be Easter eggs for the benefit of fans paying close attention, but perhaps others will offer clues to explain what happened to the men at Tsalal station, or who killed Annie K., or the links between the two cases. All we have to do is ask the right questions.
