5 unanswered questions from the True Detective: Night Country finale
We may know who committed the crimes, but there are still plenty of mysteries left in Ennis
TV Features True Detective
For a series that makes a big deal out of asking the right questions, the finale of True Detective: Night Country sure left us with a lot of open-ended ones. Or maybe, as Jodie Foster’s Liz Danvers puts it, “Some questions just don’t have answers.” That’s not going to keep us from asking them, though. While season four’s two big murder cases were solved in the 75-minute episode, there are still some lingering mysteries that left us feeling less than satisfied. That’s not unusual for a show like True Detective, which always leaves some room for ambiguity and speculation. In fact, that’s part of the fun of it. So now that the final credits have rolled, let’s pull on some of those dangling threads and puzzle over the enigmas left behind at the end of the season.
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Did Navarro clean up Clark before making him tape the confession? Or was his lack of blood just a continuity error?
The showrunner explained that he cleaned himself up prior to making the video to remove evidence that he was beaten and tortured. Would have been cool to have shown that.
That is a great question. I was going to go back and rewatch it, but given that they beat him to a pulp, taped his head with duct tape and then he supposedly died like the others, the whole thing made no sense at all. There was a scene after he was dead where he came back that just confused me. I realized it isn’t worth multiple rewatchings so decided to just read comments sections and move along
You’re asking the wrong question…
I think it was a video Clark made on his own phone to only be seen after he died. I believe it was recorded before Danvers and Navarro found him, when he was at the station alone.
That’s what I thought at first, but you can hear Navarro say, “go ahead” or something right before he starts talking. He’s also got a messed up eye from being punched.
ah, you’re right. Her voice is clearly audible in the video
I thought that was possible, but you can hear Navarro say something before hand. Terrible writing candidly
It’s really more of a continuity error rather than bad writing. If Clark had looked in the video like he did when we’d last seen him, it would be less confusing. It is possible given the time they had alone that Clark agreed to the video and cleaned up so it didn’t look like it was coerced. I liked the season and didn’t think it had as many issues as others are saying, but this video is the one thing where it is kind of a big ask to get viewers to connect the dots on it.
Yeah I was wondering that too. Plus there was power.
If I wanted to extrapolate and guess an answer, it’s probably that it wouldn’t look great if he was covered in blood and tied to a chair for his confession, someone could have argued that he was being coerced that way, so the detectives apparently cleaned him up well enough to not look like they were torturing him a few hours earlier. Episode could have pretty easily thrown in a line like “clean him up for the video” and didn’t, so it’s probably just a continuity error.
Most of these are valid questions, except (kinda) the skeleton one. The teacher that Danvers asked about the caves identified themselves as a prehistoric whale, he specifically says “Monodontoides”, which is likely meant to be Bohaskaia monodontoides, a prehistoric member of the Monodontidae family that includes the modern beluga whale and narwhal.
Lmao there were *far* more plot holes than 5 in this muddled mess.
There was so much about this series that I liked and then… it just ended…
Who left Annie’s tongue at Tsalal Station? “Some questions just don’t have answers” Was polluted water causing mass hallucinations or was there something supernatural going on? “Some questions just don’t have answers”What happened to Otis Heiss and how did he survive? “Some questions just don’t have answers”It’s the mark of truly great writing that you can tie up all of your loose ends with “Some questions just don’t have answers”
The miners that came to take her body away did as implied…If everything is spelled out for you then where is the mystery…Otis is dead and put under with that guys corrupt cop dad cause that dad killed him then got killed…again if you need everything handed to you then you don’t understand mysteries and just like life you don’t know all the answers…
Always interesting to consider a piece of culture that is less than the sum of its parts.
I liked this show. It wasn’t another goddamm Law and Order. It was an atmospheric thriller and character study. It was nice to see the women get the win. All the ends don’t have to fit.
The MacGuffin of the microbe was just that. The scientists were murderous loons and trusting that they actually had found something useful is putting faith in an unreliable narration.My major complaint is I would have liked to have seen more of a supernatural bent. All of the King in Yellow/Carcosa stuff has just been one big tease throughout True Detective. I also can’t believe that Turner D. Century would care for the degenerate fiction of Robert W. Chambers. Scandalous.
“Hey! That chick broke our robot arm and dumped some tubes of shit!”“ON NO OUR MICROBE! GET HER!”
How else will they summon Hedorah?
LOL excellent. Cue up the psychedelic dance party stat!
Save the Earth!
Goddamn it I you really had me going until the requisite Turner mention.
The King in Yellow being published at “The Turn of the Century” was just too much of a hanging curve ball.
#2: We all know someone who claims to see spirits, ghosts, or the dead. I think Navarro also had the same visions as her mother and sister. If we want to be grounded about it, it’s a mental condition these women had. The series shows us most of the supernatural stuff from Navarro’s POV, and so they’re probably hallucinations. She also probably suffers from PTSD due to her military service. Rose also has this curse for seeing the dead.
PTSD is largely patterns of avoidance. Navarro broke her PTSD by exposure to the scene of the trauma when she went to the desert, unlocking her true self as reflected in her finding her true name. She becomes at this point a channel for the unseen to enter the world of men and woman by way of the thin ice in the Night Country (that which divides the unseen from the seen), and becomes a shaman healer of her people (as in real life, the actress that plays Navarro is a bonafide Medicine Woman for her native tribe…look her up). Her being in this role was one of the best casting roles I can remember.
Girl Bosses celebrate suicide!!!
My understanding is that a lot of the supernatural stuff was based in Inuit culture. If so, the show made a mistake in delving into it. In fact, the show probably would have done better if they dealt with the culture a little bit more as Inuit women were the ones who killed the scientists and yet the whole plot point felt rushed.
there’s no explanation for the tongue being there that makes any sense, at all. the thing that connects the “annie k case” to the scientist murder and launches the entire story is a silly, improbable event that’s never explained. All the show’s attempts to link the present case to the past are like this; the heroin guy just lived like that for 10 years? really? The john hawkes character was promised the police chief post by the evil mine lady 10 years ago but nothing happened since then? really? the cleaning ladies all just sat on their big secret for 10 years until one day they randomly decided to go kill all the scientists? really??also, now that the “mystery” of what was happening at the research station was revealed, the tuttle connection makes NO SENSE AT ALL. what the fuck!
defenders of this type of show will (and are!) saying things like “questions don’t need to have answers!” which is such a funny cop out. This is bad writing. That’s it. If those folks are looking for an example of a season of TV that successfully weaves a sense of supernatural ambiguity with a crime mystery that’s resolved in a satisfying way I have a suggestion for them!
I thought the tongue was left there by Hank, and that he had originally removed it from Annie’s body when he moved her out of Night Country?
….why would he do that?
as a symbol to someone who would spill the beans is why…
Because no one would suspect he would!
Also, all the women just happened to be hanging out in that tiny house? They just kept coming and coming like an unending handkerchief. It made me laugh.
It was New Year’s Eve
Ah! That makes sense. Thanks
People like Clark live with enormous guilt and shame, torn up inside, so a fragment wants to be caught, another fragment continues to avoid the memories, actually realistic for persons living with horrific trauma that have done something terrible. So…I think he left the tongue to help the police find out what happened, to link the two deaths.
The other unanswered question: will there be a season 5?
Where’s Poochie?
The real mystery is why someone would willingly pierce their CHEEKS. Don’t you leak saliva out of your face holes? I don’t get this at all.
Well one mystery here that isn’t a mystery is what does that have to do with the story? Guess you Betty White…
Having cold metal in your face also seems like it would be painful in that subzero climate. That’s the only thing that really bothered me at all about those.
your realize the actress has those piercings in her real life, yes? Could be related to the esthetics of an indigenous world view that she is from…
I am aware and familiar that they are the actor’s. Just seems like in those temperatures it would not be terribly pleasant. I know ear piercings get painfully cold if not covered in that kind of climate and can cause medical issues. Maybe they’re actually silicone or something though?Another thing is I can’t imagine facial piercings are really allowed by the department or whatever for a trooper. They certainly seem like a liability for a cop. Getting hit in the face with those in? Or lords forbid, torn out? I was assaulted in my younger days when I had braces. Absolutely massacred the inside of my mouth. Lot of stitches and eating through a straw.Also none of the other local natives have them or anything similar. Only facial tattoos and paint.Don’t get me wrong, I think they look neat and fit the character. But the logic doesn’t make super sense for her job and location.
Another question—if the Tsalal research had the potential to unlock a cure of cancer and all sort of diseases, why did they need a ruse like the mine to melt the permafrost and speed things up?. Why not just build something at the facility that, like, generated heat without poisoning an entire town and causing all this death and sickness and unrest? It doesn’t seem like rocket science here–you need to heat something up that’s frozen to a temperature slightly above freezing. Feels like there’s a simple solution to the problem here!
Somethingsomethingmutationsacceleratesomethingpollutioncouldwork
The most important question: how did They Might Be Giants anticipate this plot?Seriously, though, I’m less bothered by the unanswered questions. It came to a satisfying conclusion in a way that it felt resolved.I was a little more bothered by how thinly spread the supernatural elements felt. I get it that it ties to Inuit culture, but it never fely like more than a plot mechanism. It reduced poor Julia to little more than a walking tragedy, ready to die to add a little more gravity to Navarro’s plot. I think the story might have been better served with a more grounded approach, the kind of dogged procedural suggested by Danvers’ “ask the right question” prompt. There can still be reference to supernatural/occult stuff, but it should stay that: a reference. When the dead are popping up every week, not only does it sap some of the spookiness, but it really takes the wind out of Danvers’ whole “this is all there is” conviction. Granted, that’s the trajectory of her character arc— “Some questions just don’t have answers”, after all—but it feels less consequential when it seems obvious to just about everyone else.* If you make it less explicit, it becomes a slow cracking of her hard, greving exterior instead of an eventuality.*(This is similar to the notion that there are no atheists in most D&D campaigns. When your party of adventurers has a member that can call on favors from a god and it actually produces a tangible effect, it is really hard to deny.)
The women didn’t wait 10 years and then suddenly go after the scientists. Bee was mopping and tipped over her mop bucket. The water went through the cracks in the floor where the hatch was, which led her to open the hatch and go down into the secret connection to the ice tunnels. That’s the evidence they needed to identify who really killed Annie. The revenge was pretty soon after that discovery, but they did play fast and loose with how soon after. The women did have to come up with their plan and coordinate the truck, etc. At least that’s how I read the situation – I have not rewatched yet.
When that delivery driver, who seemed like a normal down-to-earth guy, said something to Prior about how the dead don’t stay quiet in Ennis and “Come on, man, you know what I’m talking about” it was a nice bit of set-up for…oh, nothing.
The idea of a town that lives side-by-side with the dead in a generally accepted way is a great hook! Why didn’t we get THAT as an actual undercurrent, instead of cliché screaming pale lady ghosts as hackneyed jump scares?I liked the setting, the characters, and the central mystery. The actual detective work was good! It’s just everything around these things was rough, like the script they filmed was only a second or third draft.