True Detective: Night Country – Part Two Review

There’s a lot to unpack with this week’s installment of True Detective: Night Country, from the lingering questions regarding the role the supernatural is playing in the case (or is it something much more mundane, like mental health issues – something that has been suggested with Evangeline’s sister, Julia’s, continued refusal to treat what appears to be some form of schizophrenia) to the various layers of interpersonal crap that keep seeping into the investigation from all sides as all of the various detectives seem to have a bone to pick with each other. But the thing I really found interesting this time around wasn’t necessarily the investigation – which gave us a fun link to season one of True Detective with the reveal that Travis, the ghost who led Rose to the bodies, is Rust Cohle’s (Matthew McConaughey’s character) father – it’s Liz Danvers’ amazing ability to be an absolute manipulative asshole to everyone around her and the series doesn’t judge her for it.

One of the knocks on cop shows is that they utilize the same old archetypes with little change to the formula: There’s an old, grizzled cop who has a host of demons in his past (because it’s always a man) and a younger counterpart who sees things that the older cop can’t because of his age, his pride, his tragic past, his prejudices, take your pick. They end up solving the crime – often only after the younger cop has their eyes opened to the darkness in the world (“their” because this cop could be male or female) – but there’s a personal cost extracted in the resolution. Look at AppleTV+’s Criminal Record for a version of this formula that wants to be new, but stumbles on the way to getting somewhere different.

With Night Country, we’ve got a twist on this formula and one that has really intrigued me in Jodie Foster’s portrayal thus far. Danvers is absolutely our older, grizzled cop – she’s the Chief, she’s got skeletons in her closet, and she’s got some serious personal trauma that she’s not dealing with. And despite the gender swap of the genre archetype, the writing is treating her exactly as if she were a male detective in this situation. She’s allowed to sleep around without attaching any emotional ties to the act. She’s allowed to be a terrible parental figure to her step-daughter, with little understanding of what the role of parent entails because she’s completely shut off her emotions following the tragic death of her late husband and what appears to be her young son (I assume we’ll get more of this story as the series rolls on). And she’s allowed to treat Peter Prior like an indentured servant, manipulating him into doing her bidding – while also treating his father and her second in command, Hank, pretty atrociously (although he’s no peach either) – with no real judgement from the writing. It’s pretty stunning to see.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the show is asking us, the audience, not to judge Danvers – it almost certainly is. But it’s not making that judgement for us. In fact, it’s doubling down a bit with the Evangeline Navarro character, using her both as an example of another cop going down the same path as well as a foil. We see her making some of the same moves as Danvers – sleeping with Qavvik and pretending there’s not any emotional connection in the act (although I think we can all see that her hard exterior isn’t nearly as impenetrable as Danvers when it comes to her personal life). But we see that Navarro cares deeply for her sister – even if she can’t make herself actually take steps to help heal her. She is deeply invested in the Anna K case – perhaps too invested, which is another cop show trope – and the realization that it’s linked to the Tsalal situation seems too good to be true for her. And she seems to care about solving Anna’s case to bring a sense of relief to Anna’s family – not simply because it’s a puzzle to solve. But we’re meant to see that Danvers is Navarro in 15 or 20 years if she doesn’t manage to keep her head together. Take away her sister, have the Anna K case fall apart once more, and Navarro could fall into the same cynical cycle that Danvers lives in day in and day out. It’s a cautionary tale. And then there’s poor Peter Prior, who is in such a precarious position with his personal and professional lives that it could all come crashing down should Danvers push him too hard. Poor kid. I hope things end well for him, but I can’t imagine a season that doesn’t end with him taking the role of the young detective who has his eyes opened to the darkness around him in a devastating way.

The case itself is certainly interesting – I really want to know just what happened to cause those men to seemingly willingly remove their clothes and freeze to death in a lake (although we do have a single survivor from that lake that can hopefully explain some things later in the season). I suspect it won’t be the supernatural options that the show is hinting at and something much more human – which is often much more terrifying in the end. But the smart way the writing is playing with cop show tropes – bending them, leaning into them, and not worrying if they seem rote because the series will twist them just enough as they go – has me all the more intrigued as to just how the rest of the story will unfold.