Night Country: Part 6

I had never watched True Detective before this Night Country season four campaign. It was Jodie Foster--and pretty much Jodie Foster alone--that brought me into the fold. It seems as if I stumbled into the party at exactly the wrong time.

For a very basic overview, Night Country tells the story of a mass disappearance of a group of scientists working at a research lab in Ennis, Alaska. Police chief Liz Danvers (Foster) and deputy Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) investigate the odd circumstances (a human tongue laying on the floor, for instance) and are pulled into a tangled web of intrigue both personal and mystical.

Simply put, Night Country is a rare major misfire form the HBO prestige TV department. Usually renowned for their hallowed Sunday night fare, this True Detective slate ends up an extreme disappointment. Though the production values are high enough to render each episode baseline watchable, this is a series that struggles to incubate a single coherent or interesting plot/character angle over its six episodes.

The first two installments aren't all bad--teasing an intriguing mystery and introducing all the interrelated personal connections in Ennis. But the next three episodes really go off the rails, setting up a finale that means well but by that point has lost almost all hope of mattering in any meaningful way.

The biggest problem here is that the six Night Country episodes are obscenely overstuffed--bursting at the seams with too many characters and hairpin plot zig-zags. Those impossible expectations aside, show runner Issa Lopez clearly wants Night Country to be a nuanced look at Inuit culture while also adding a mystical aspect to the proceedings. Add it all up and you get a giant mess of dead ends and false starts.

What Night Country needed was either 2-3 more episodes to let the content breathe, or a large pair of garden shears to prune away some of the storylines (however well-intentioned they might have been). As it stands, however, viewers got six episodes of irregular plot mechanics, far too many characters to handle, and a mysticism that belies the True Detective moniker. It's a shame to see such acting talent as Foster, Finn Bennett, Isabella LaBlanc, John Hawkes, and even Christopher Eccleston wasted in such a poor overall effort.

Foster is one of the greatest actors of all time and doesn't know how to give a bad performance. Reid is a revelation and I can't wait to see what she does next. But the screen writers are the BIG problem.

Fortitude and The Thing are great, but they don't need a 2024 remix. True Detective is a mixed bag. Season 1 is peerless, season 2 was seriously underwhelming, season 3 was great but with the original creatives gone season 4 suffers the same issues as 2. It's not fundamentally bad, but it's too derivative and also doesn't know quite what it wants to be.

Season 1 and 3 had the slightest injection of magical realism. Are these hallucinations? Exaggerations? Everything can be explained rationally but there is just the subtlest question marks. Here the whole season has leaned out right into the supernatural. True Detective is not supernatural horror. The solution shouldn't be ghosts, it's rarely satisfying in a detective story and it isn't here. Also the fate of one person makes no sense at all and counts on a group of people not acting in anyway like actual humans. It's not "spur of the moment" it's terrible writing. Unbelievable revelation is stacked on irrational behaviour in this episode. Plus people are freezing to death with no hope only to not be in the next scene- what? Just profoundly disappointing.

An average horror movie stretched over a season of TV that thinks it's much smarter than it is.

My wife and I really enjoyed episodes 1 to 5. Great characters, great mystery. But the conclusion just felt weak. The Navarro conclusion was okay although unnecessarily ambiguous. The conclusion to the main mystery was unsatisfying. Without adding spoilers, it seemed out of the blue and unsupported by earlier episodes, the sort of ending a hack writer tosses in at the end when they have to tie things up rather than something the writers knew was the underlying solution from the beginning.

Overall, very disappointing. 7 for the Navarro ending. 3 for the main plot. 5 overall.

Loved all the characters though. Wished they had a better finale.

Other than Jodie Foster and Finn Bennett, the show has no redeeming qualities.

We suffered through every episode with the convoluted plot and bad mysticism. Instead of telling a story, the writers took you in a multitude of directions to merely stretch out the series. It was certainly not for entertainment purposes.

It must be a huge town. When flipping between scenes occurring at the same time, it would be a terrible snowstorm in one location, but perfectly clear in another. The power would go off in part of the city, but not another parts of the city.

At least one thing became clear at the end. The polar bear gouged out his own eye after watching this series. I felt he same eay as the beat.

This season wasn't very good and you don't need to try to guess why I think this. It's not because I'm a misogynist. It's not because I'm a season 1 fan boy. It's not because I'm afraid of examining history. And it's not because I don't understand the story.

It is really quite simple. Season 4 had a fantastic setting, a mediocre story, terrible dialogue, and mostly terrible acting. The pacing was poor. Almost entire episodes would go by with no plot advancement and minimal character development. There were too many ancillary characters that did nothing to develop the main characters. And by episode 6, when I should have been invested in the characters, I flat out was not. The moral lessons some are going on about were told with the subtlety of a brick to the face.

I will say it again - like what you like. I'm not going to be so arrogant as to assume why you like this season if that's how you feel. Most of these negative reviews quite clearly state why they didn't like the season - and there are plenty of reasons to not like this season. There's no need to hypothesize why when there are glaring reasons staring you right in the face.