The Prestige TV Podcast - ‘True Detective: Night Country’ Episode 2 Deep Dive

Episode Date: January 24, 2024

Jo and Rob return to break down the second episode of ‘True Detective: Night Country.’ They answer a handful of listener emails and discuss the many connections to Season 1 that popped up in this episode and the complicated dynamics of the tight-knit Ennis community. Along the way, they talk about the unlikely similarities between Danvers and Navarro in how they handle their respective relationships. Later, they dive into theory corner to investigate the most pressing clues heading into next week. Hosts: Joanna Robinson and Rob Mahoney Producer: Kai Grady Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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One last gift from Travis Cole. I got to meet you. Can I ask? You seeing the dead. When did that start? Miss Travis, but I know people are born with it. And then, of course, is Ennis.

It happens around here all the time. I think the world is getting old. This is where the fabric of all things is coming apart at the seams. I'm back to the Prestige TV podcast feed where our theories are coming apart at the seams. Or are they knitting together? Who knows? It's only episode two. We're going to talk about True Detective Season 4, Episode 2, or Part 2, as they're calling it.

I'm Joanna Robinson and joining me today with his yarn, while already half full of freeze frames. It is Rob Mahoney. Hey Rob, how you doing? You know, Joe, we thought we were going to be the ones yarn walling, but then we get into a creepy trailer and we got yarned. We got yarned all over the place. We got hell of yarn.

It is like a, it is yarns all the way down. Tuttles and yarns all the way down. Okay. We are going to get into all the like astounding connections that are already here to season one of Tree Detective. We're going to go thematically through everything. But first, we have some very important business to take care of. What's that?

Last week on the pod, and erstwhile on this very feed, we had a really fun email address for our Fargo podcast, which was John Hamm's nipple rings at gmail.com. On True Detective episode one podcast, I asked our listeners to help us come up with a fun email for True Detective. We got so many emails about this. And so Rob, I thought, live on air. Yes.

I would read the best ones we got. They're all great. Here, I just had to narrow it down to a certain crop. We're going to read through them, and then you and I are going to decide real-time. I have my favorites, but we'll see. This is a democracy. Yeah. We'll keep it organic.

I love this, though. Let's go. Number one, this is the only one I texted to you already, which was John Hawke's Mail Order Bride. Very strong opener. We also got Vladivostov. Vlad of Stalk Brides at gmail.com I don't think we should use that

because I don't think people will know how to spell it. I don't even know how to pronounce it but I just, it made me laugh, so I just thought I would include it. Jody Foster's Missing Glasses at Gmail.com

floating fingies at gmail.com The Beatles suck at gmail.com. Okay, no. All right. Ruled out. Yeah, all right. You and I are aggressively against that.

Arctic Funnions at gmail.com and paired nicely with freshly thawed tongue at gmail.com. To go with the John Ham Nipple rings from the Fargo podcast, we have either Navarro's dimple piercings or Callieces dimple studs at gmail.com.

So just to get that nice, keep the piercings alive and fresh. Eccleston cop daddy at gmail.com. That's a strong one. That's a strong one. I got to be honest. Pretty good. Suicidal cariboo at gmail.com. I just think that would be an incredible band name

so if anyone out there wants to take that for a band name suicidal caribou feels very I mean suicidal kind of leans metal but I feel like it could be a good post rock group too something very like instrumental in touch with the natural world but also we're moving it into a new age

and a new direction. Oh I love that okay Jody Foster's Viking Viking's H hoodie at gmail.com alternatively Jody Foster's Fantasy League at gmail.com Corpsicle at Gmail.com or Bosch Popsicle at gmail.com. Spongebob

these are the most pop. The last two are the most popular that we got. We got many submissions for SpongeBob toothbrush at gmail.com. And John Hawksmanwich at gmail.com. We got many submissions for John Hawksmanwitch at gmail.com. And then I want to add the one that you came up with

that I really liked, which is Yellow King Spongebob at gmail.com. It's just right there. It's right there in the text. He is the yellow king. Prove that he's not. So, what are you, how are you leaning? If corpusicle is available.

Okay, let's just see really, we're in a real time see if corpuscle is available. Very evocative, very specific. Like, I want to talk all about the corpsicle this week. I think if that's available, that's got to be our pick.

Okay. Gmail's like, what do you want this for? For my business, Gmail. Mind your own. Cropical, come on. Oh, sorry. They're asking for the corpsicle's

data. And gender, what gender is the corpse? Well, it's male, obviously. Very male. Very male. Oh, it's taken. Damn it. All right.

I think my backup personally, I don't know how you feel about it. Eccleston cop daddy is, it's really speaking to me on a couple of different levels that maybe we can investigate on this podcast. But it feels true to the email address structure we have created for ourselves and true for what I want out of this show. Okay. So Eccleson copt, not Yellow King. SpongeBob. I mean, if that's there, I wouldn't,

I wouldn't mind that either. That's yours and I really like it. Hold on. I don't want to pick my own nomination. I know. I wanted to make sure you weren't holding back just because it was your own pick. Yellow King SpongeBob, not taken.

It's ours. You can submit your emails for this podcast to Yellow King SpongeBob at gmail.com. That's Yellow King SpongeBob at Gville.com. But we read all your emails that came in via Hobbit and Dragons and also John Ham Nipple Rings. Thanks for using all outlets available to you.

But now we will only be reading Yellow King SpongeBob at g-emel.com. It's a proper home for us, you know, a really cozy Alaskan getaway for us. I'm thrilled, honestly. Okay. So part two, written and directed by Issa Lopez as all of the episodes are of the season.

I did want to mention, though, I was looking back at the season one titles. episode one is called the long bright dark and episode two is called seeing things isn't it like it's kind of lining up a little bit it really is this is a very seeing things episode I listened to the HBO official podcast this week

and so I'll have like a couple shoutouts to that I didn't have a good place to put this so I just thought I'd put it here that Issa Lopez in addition to all the other references that we have talked about that she has talked about she was talking about how Silence of the Lambs informed 7, David Fincher's 7 and David Fincher 7 informed True Detective

Season 1. So she's like, I'm just taking it back to Silence of the Lambs for True Detective Season 4, which is why she thought of Jody Foster in the first place. Totally. Especially in the way of turning the very masculine true detective season 1 into a feminine place, I don't know of a movie that more literalizes the male gaze

than Silence of the Lambs. Like there's so many shots in that movie that are just the camera staring at Jody Foster from the perspective of her male co-workers, male weirdos, male creeps, male murderers. There's a lot of interesting inversion of the perspective in that that, yeah,

you can see how you get from the gender dynamics and politics of true detective and the interrogations here to silence of the lamps easily. I do another podcast. It's called Trial by Content and this week we are doing all the Jody Foster movies, the Jody Foster filmography.

Which means I've been watching a lot of Jody Foster movies. So I'll have a couple other references, but I love that I was listening to the podcast. I was like, oh, he says also been diving deep into the foster filmography. Though Sons-Lam is really the top of the filmography. You don't have to go that deep. Okay. Other emails that I just want to check in on really quickly, Rachel Rohn, to talk about how this week's episode, episode two, closes with the use of Florence and the Machine's Seven Devils.

And it cuts out before we get to the chorus. where she says seven devils all around me, seven devils in my house, see they were there when I woke up this morning, I'll be dead before the day is done. And so racial rights, can we assume this is an inner monologue for Clark, but only six are dead,

so maybe he will have to make sure all seven are dead, or maybe Annie counts as one. So just like let's count up the corpses in the corpusicle, right? Yes. Emerson, Meda, Kotov, Molina, Merenz, and G, and then Lund is the guy, who's alive and seems to have been extracted from the corpusicle and is currently in the hospital. They're doing surgery on him.

Yeah, medically induced coma, I believe. He's going to lose a leg. Already lost an arm. Oh, my God. I literally- Just got snapped off. I yelped when that happened. But if we want to count devils, that's six in the corpsicle.

Clark is out in the wild somewhere, so he could be the seventh devil or something like that. But I don't know, any thoughts or feelings about that as a on the nose in a fun way needle drop? Or are we counting them as devils? They're the victims. Are they the devils? They could be both. Yeah. I think we're still learning a lot about what Solal Station was up to and what the motives of the research were.

And certainly the insidious patrons of that research, we'll talk about in depth in this episode. But I'm not ruling out that these could be the seven devils in addition to the seven victims, right? And whether you think of that from Clark's perspective or just from our outside perspective in terms of what they were doing or what they were working on, whatever it was was very secretive, very insular. And I think unraveling the nature of that research is going to be something that we figure out over the course of this season two. We also got an email from listener, Rebecca, who says, Rob went through all the DVDs, but what about the board games? Yeah. Pandemic, David and Goliath, and shit happens were a few of the titles that Rebecca. Rebecca Cot.

So she wanted to make sure we saw those. And then our listener EJ wrote into the polar bear in the street that we got in episode one, there was some debate going around about like whether or not that it feels like a spooky supernatural thing to happen or whether it's just like just another day and Ennis Alaska, you know. And our listener ran into say that, I mean, I actually don't know how close Ennis is to like the sea. It's all ice, so I don't know.

given that it doesn't seem like it's a, well, there's a crab factory there. So I don't know. I really don't know. I have no answers. But EJ just wanted to point it out that like polar bears don't hang out downtown. I wouldn't think so. Right, like by the water. Like maybe when the thaw happens, they'll wander around closer to town.

But usually they just stay really close to their hunting habitat where they can eat. And I quote this email, walruses, beluga whales, narwhals, seals, and other marine species as needed in a bit. incredible life for a polar bear. So, yes, there was an odd thing to happen to have the polar bear wander in from downtown. For sure. But the nature of the show is odd things happening involving animals in nature, right? Like, Caribou don't just run off a cliff, I assume, on a regular basis. And so whether this is in conversation with the larger themes about what is happening to the natural world,

the Sol Station investigating things like climate change and global warming, obviously the mine keeps coming up again and again and again in the drinking water situation here in Ennis. There's a lot happening in terms of man's relationship with nature that I will say could disorient a poor, innocent, one-eyed polar bear and cause them to walk down Main Street unawares. It doesn't have to be spooky supernatural shit. It could just be terrible. Spooky real-life shit. Yeah.

And it's hell of spooky. Last and least, before we get sort of into our main episode themes, I didn't prepare you for like a needle drop corner, though we would do it from Time to Im Fargo. Chris and Andy on the watch this week were saying they thought there were too many needle drops in this episode. I'm not sure I disagree with them. I don't know that I needed the spice girls and this and that and the other

but I will say when Little St. Nick by the Beach Boys played as the corpuscle was going through town. I absolutely lost it. I thought it was the funniest thing ever. Anything you want to say a needle drop corner? Little St. Nick was just diabolical. It's amazing.

You know, as is referred to in this episode, a giant block of flesh being transported in a little parade across town to Little St. Nick, that was wonderful. The conversation about the needle drops more broadly, I think, is interesting and something we'll have to get a feel for. I agree that it feels a little more intense than other true detective seasons,

than a lot of other, especially older prestige shows. Some of that's just the way a lot of production is going now with a lot more pop music influence, a lot more of these exact kinds of needle drops. But by mid-season, will we even notice it anymore? I suspect not. I think we're probably just kind of getting used to the, the production climate.

Rob, mid-season is next week. Good Lord. You're so right. All right. So let's diving into episode two proper. We're going to start. I'm not going to make you wait. We're going to start with the connections to true detective season one.

And I've chosen a very specific order here. We're going to start with the spirals. Okay. So the spirals, there's a spiral tattoo on Annie. There's a spiral tattoo on Clark. And one of the poor devils in the ice had a spiral drawn on his fore. head. Lund, I believe. There you go. And Rose says this

very spooky thing. The spiral is older, old, older than Ennis, older than the ice probably. Don't like it. Don't like the sound of it. Not a big fan. If you were just, and we've heard from some of our listeners of being EMA that they have never watched a true

detective before and are just jumping in because they're just like, oh, we liked, you listen to a Fargo. We're going to listen to another murder. A little another frosty murder show with you. So the spiral Spirals were a huge part, have been a huge part of the true detective iconography throughout. We talked about this a little bit in episode one, but very much so in season one. And in the official podcast, Issa Lopez says the spirals represent Carcosa.

She just said it. She's like, that's what it is, okay? But she's like, but her version of Carcosa, this is what she said, quote, is the liminal space, the beyond in a way, the higher plane where reality and the wider connect, the beyond a mystic place where the veil between the place and the next is thinner. So that gets to some of the other things that we're going to be talking about in this episode. But more, more practically, and we talked about this in episode one, this idea of like, Issa Lopez came up with the idea for a show, let's call it, Night Country. And then Aishio's like, hey, we want to do something in the true detective franchise. So she's like, okay, I just tweaked my other concept to make it a true detective show.

So the question that I have for you based on the other two things that we're going to talk about in this section is like, how much do you think this is just a sort of veneer-level gloss of true-dedictive iconography and connections and how much will it matter to you if this is just a sort of surface-level connection

or do you need this to go profoundly deeper? What do you think, Rob? I think time will tell as far as like how deep this stuff goes, certainly. I don't know that I needed to be connected at all points. And based on our conversation last week, too, I think I made my perspective on some of the stuff pretty clear, which is it's almost the illusion of conspiracy

or the vision of conspiracy is as important as the idea of actual conspiracy. It's what we project onto the things we see and the truth that we bring to the evidence that we find. That's what true detective is all about for me. So the idea of the spiral is elemental to this story and to this particular franchise. the idea that Rose knows enough about it

to not only know that it's old and ancient and represent something dark, but that when she draws it in the snow, she covers it up afterwards. She's afraid of it in a way that is interesting for that character in this community and this story beyond if this is the exact same

like child abducting cults that we experienced in True Detective season one. To me, Carcosa and the spiral invoke an evil and an elemental evil, whether that's real or something that people think that they're tapping into. And so long as that is the case, I'm interested and compelled by where the story goes with that.

I think the territory we're in is something that Mallory and I talked about a lot when we covered Yellow Jacket season to you because Yellow Jackets is just show that it is also very much in the true detective vein, playing constantly with, like, is something supernatural going on, or is this just the actual evil of people?

and the question that we kept circling around in that show was, is evil an external force or is evil an internal force that is drawn out of you? Is it something that is put into you or drawn out of you? And that's how I kind of feel about the spiral connection thing is like, as a symbol of elemental evil, the elemental evil that exists in the world, be it the like pedophilic, culty stuff that was happening in Season 1, one of the detective or whatever the fuck is happening up here, you know, be it the mine or what happened to the corpusicle or anything like that, is it just sort of like this indicator

that like, but I don't think it's an external force. I think it's just to note there's deep evil in the heart of men and women no matter where you go. That is just a fact. And the spiral is sort of here to remind us of that. Does that make sense to you? It makes total sense. I got very, as we get into this part of the story, the spirals, and then later we get it invoked specifically that the company that is paying for Solal Station through these various shell organizations is Tuttle United, a very specific name drop and connection to season one and the Tuttle family that was involved in, if not orchestrating that entire plot and that entire cult that, you know, we're teasing out the threat of in season one of True Detective. I got very like

all of this has happened before all of this will happen again, Viya, from this, not in the sense that it's necessarily the tautils who are pulling all of these particular strings, but there is a recursion as fodder for our central mystery. And there's also recursion feeding this idea that you and I are talking about, the inevitability of evil that is coming from a different place, a darker place, a more metaphysical place than, oh, isn't this one family in Louisiana responsible for all of the world suffering? Right, exactly. But also it feeds into it both is that and also this idea that like conspiracies go all the way to the tautil, like if it all goes all the way up to the totals every single time,

like some back to the Pennsylvania Dutch tuttles or whatever, you know what I mean? Like it's, it wouldn't surprise me. This is kind of where the episode starts though, because once we leave the initial corpuscle crime scene, you know, Navarro and Danvers kind of go off on their own paths. And I think we're kind of chasing the two threads of true detective in that way. Danvers goes to visit her friend and occasional fuck buddy, it seems, our geologist pal, you know, kind of getting to the scientific realities of what the law

station is about, what they're studying, what is provable, what is empirical about the situation. And Navarro goes in a very different direction to go meet with Rose again and to talk to her about the vision she's been having, about specifically, you know, seeing the dead and this idea. And, you know, clearly she's doing it because she's curious about her. sister and worried about her sister who's having similar visions. And clearly a lot of the people of Venice are seeing dead people all over the place. So that's something as we get into our larger conversation about the supernatural nature of the show and what is and isn't real is worth flagging. But this is kind of where we're at in terms of the format of this show. There's usually

someone, one of our detectives, and Danvers kind of lays this out clearly over the course of the episode. She believes that answers are there if you know how to look for them. If you ask the right questions, you can find the answer. and Navarro is at least open to the idea that there could be other kinds of answers or maybe some things that can't be explained. I love that you put that way. I wrote on my notes this week, Liz is the Scully to Dan versus Mulder because I... That is exactly it. I was...

And that was actually inspired by me watching Contact in which Jody Foster plays the Scully to Matthew McConaughey's Molder. Pretty literally scully in that movie. Issa Lopez has something really interesting on the official podcast about this idea of like, she's like, I'm both, both Danvers and Navarro in that way. And she's like, I only believe in things that I can see, but I also believe there are things beyond that we can't see, right? Like, and it sounds contradictory, but I really understand that sentiment where I kind of feel the same way, where I'm just sort of like, I need to see it to believe it.

But if you told me that there's something that I am not seeing that also exists, I believe that that is true, but I don't believe that you can tell me what that is. I have to see it with my own eyes sort of thing. So that dichotomy, like, that that's what it takes to solve a case as both of those approaches, I think is really interesting. All right, let's get back to two rows. I basically want to, like, clip everything Fiona Shaw says in this episode.

Just on an absolute heater. But, you know, Bill, who's the Funyon Vending Machine guy, says to Pee says you see people who are gone sometimes. This is like a phenomenon Ennis where the walls are thin between the worlds, right? And you just see people sometimes. We see ghosts. One of our listeners, Jenny, pointed out that in season one a true detective in the finale, Marty asked Russ if he still sees things ever.

And Russ replies, it never stops, not really. And so we're about to talk about how Russ Cole might be. be connected to everything here, right? But like, this idea that could Russ seeing things come from time spent close to the edge of the world? Like, does it travel with you this idea? Let's hear what Rose has to say about ghosts. The thing about the dead is that some of them come and visit because they miss you. Some come because they need to take. tell you something that you need to hear. And some of them just want to take you with them.

You need to know the difference. This is inspired, of course, by Travis, who we met in episode one. And we find out his surname in this episode is Travis Cole. Hmm. And he is almost certainly without a doubt Russ Cole's father. Because Russ had a father named Travis who lived in Alaska. And who had leukemia. I don't know who had leukemia.

So this guy, fucker only comes when he wants something. that of leukemia, broader croissants. Okay, we got to talk about the croissants. Which he made himself. Incredible work. And put an idea in my head I hadn't really considered, which is that Alaska really is the ideal croissant-making environment. Yes.

I think the rises would be tough, but I personally have a very hard time with lamination. Lamination is tough. Keeping the butter cold is one of the hardest parts of baking for me. The butter wants to run. First of all, and I mean, I'm glad you let the people know that you were an extraordinary baker. It's a fun thing to know about Rob Mahoney.

But, like, yeah. But I wonder, I wonder what the elevation situation is because baking becomes so tricky at certain elevations. So you have to factor that in as well. For sure. But if we're by the sea, hopefully it's not too tricky. You know, we're close to sea level, perhaps. And I do worry about the rises,

but I'll take the trade off for the lamination. That's the cheat code for the hardest part. I think it's worth, if someone in episode two of a television show, gives us the rules of ghosts and why they're here. Yeah. This is check off ghost rules. And I feel like we have to ask ourselves, who else in the show has ghosts that might appear?

We have already seen a little ghosty arm wrap itself around Danvers in episode one. And in this very episode, you know, Liz finds her son's polar bear stuffy and has like a flashback. This is where we find out why Liz has beef with the Beatles. because Twist and Shout is playing when she has this flashback with her son Holden. So apparently it was like a song that they like to listen to. She finds the polar bear stuffy. Navarro finds what I believe to be her mother's crucifix, right? That's what's implied for sure.

A flashback to her as a young girl shielding her younger sister from her mother having a sort of mental break. And so finding these artifacts of the dead, the crucifix, the Pola Bear Suffi. We are reminded within the episode of the ghosts that are haunting our main detectives. What do you think about all that, Rob? Very fascinating fodder

for the course of this season and prelude to set up, you know, who all we could see? If we're going to see Travis Cole in this capacity, like, could we see Navarro's mother in a different capacity? Could we see, you know, we see in flashback,

Leah's father and her relationship, and his relationship with Danvers. Maybe we'll see him, you know, show up in one of these scenes. we'll have to kind of wait and see, but they really put a fine and specific point on the true detective experience when Rose is saying,

do not confuse the spirit world with mental health issues. That's really where we're at with so much of this stuff. And I love that we're doing it out of the gate. We are drawing a clear line between there are people who have visions because they have visions and they're at the end of the world, and there are people who have visions because they're dealing with a lot

in terms of their mental health. And the fact that Rose is delivering these kinds of lines and then literally lighting up a blunt is just pitch perfect direction and writing. I love the rust coal energy we're getting from Rose, especially given her association with Travis. I hope we see her every single episode. I love Fiona Shaw.

This is the problem I had when we were, or the gift that I had when we were covering Andor, is like any episode we did covering and or I just wanted to clip every single thing Fiona Shaw said. She's just that good. I want to talk you, you talk about, putting a drawing a line underneath the sort of thesis of true detective. I want to talk about something I noticed in this episode, which is I'm really loving the show

overall, but it vacillates wildly between clunky anvil heavy exposition and then these really subtle, slick little details that give you instant backstory between people. So like when copy-examble. when cop daddy Eccleston comes into the precinct and he's talking to this and she gives him this whole speech about why he sent her there. She's like, you remember why I'm here. I'm like, that was just like, yes, he does. So you don't have to say it's for, it's for our benefit. When Hank says to Pete, even your mother didn't steal from us when she left, like stuff like that where you're just sort of like, okay.

But then you get really fun and subtle stuff like when cop daddy Eccleston comes. in and calls her Lizzie. Calling her Lizzie when everyone else calls her Danvers is like a big moment. Or I think the best version is, did you change where you put the cans? Yes. Which is what Danvers says to Navarro. Which means she's not only knows Navarro's apart, like knows where she keeps the can. Like, who among my friends knows where I keep the cans in my kitchen?

Very few. Canned food intimacy is a very particular thing. We also get Leah Danvers' like stepdaughter hanging out. at Pete and Kayla's house. And she just seems to be, like, friends with Kayla? This is the thing that happens. Yeah. Honestly, one of the things that jumped out about this episode,

in particular, given the small town vibes of Ennis, is these families feel like they're all over each other. Right? When Leah needs a safe place to go, that's where she goes, Peter and Kayla's place. All the doors are open. People are walking into each other's houses all the time. They're in each other's spaces.

And you get some of the texture for that, moment, the canned moment, when you have all of that intimacy. When you have, it's very clear that Danvers and Navar have worked cases together before, that they have a background in which they would have been in each other's spaces, not unlike when Danvers had Peter Pryor over last episode to come like talk about the case files, right? This is just a thing and part of the fact of life of what they're going through. And so to see all those things played out in that kind of subtle way is really nice.

But I agree, there's kind of a, there's like a paired moment where like every piece of clunky dialogue and exposition, there is a corresponding very bit of elegant exposition. Another one that jumped out for me was when Leah and Peter get this moment. And that's another thing we really haven't had, especially in True Detective Season 1.

True Detective Season 1, every scene up until the finale is either with Rust or with Marty. You're spending the entire show with them. That's part of what makes that finale so creepy and so effective as you shift. Because it's like, it's an interrogation.

It's a flashback memory. So like, of course, we have to be with one or the other, this breaks the format, so we're all over the place. Exactly. And then in this show, in this season, we get these scenes where our true detectives are not in them, right? We're just spending time with Peter and Leah, for example, and Leah's instant recognition that the mark on Peter's face is from his dad. Like, that's the kind of thing where it's like, oh, these people, they know everything, they know all the dirt of this community, they know all the interpersonal dynamics, and we're getting clued in on them, again, some ways,

very subtly in some ways, we're getting clubbed over the head. It's, yeah, it's a fascinating blend. And, like, it's not, the exposition stuff is not too bad. Like, you fucked my husband. You know, like, that, that comes, anyway, we'll talk, we'll talk more about that. But that fits in nicely, too, another thing I want to talk about, which is being alone versus being in a community, which I think is, like, really important part of this, this episode and this series.

Something that Issa Lopez said, at the core of episode two, she says is like pay attention to what is keeping Navarro and Danvers apart and pay attention to things that's drawing them together. And I think it's interesting this idea of being alone, something we talked about a lot last week, that quote about the Salal Station guys, they live here all year long, all alone, just like monks. You have people like Navarro and Danvers who are like giving off hardcore lone wolf energy. Like that, you know, Navarro has a relationship with her sister, otherwise we are like strong lone wolf energy people and then you've got people like

Leanne Kela and what Danvers refers to as laundromat grandma maybe I should have seen if laundromat grandma jemal.com was available. I think we may also have to refer to her as laundromat grandma but the vibes are immaculate. I would love to spend time with laundromat grandma and have her tell me creepy stories about bloody fingies, Joe. Absolutely. 10-10. No notes. the crab factory ladies who we met last week are back again this week and they like there's that

community aspect there's the idea of like being an outsider because you you know cop daddy eccleston made you move here or being biracial in the case of navarro or um lea being indigenous but feeling disconnected from her culture. I think, and my favorite, actually my favorite version of this, there's just like so much talk about in this theme. But my favorite version actually, I want to get back to with the question of the mind because it's this question of like, there are the people who are angry at the mind because it is poisoning children, that's what they said, right?

The water is poisoning their own kids. Yes. So hurting the community. But then the mine worker's argument is like without the mind, we don't have a community. Like, we don't have anything. We don't have the schools. We don't have the resources. So like in what way are we being community minded and in what way are we being selfish?

Like this is my income, but also it's like the infrastructure of the community itself. And that's where the loneliness of Navarro and Danvers is interesting too. I think in the opening crime scene, you get this sense that Danvers is the only person actually near the corpusical who is taking this shit seriously, who's not trying to take selfies, in fairness to Pete, too. He also is, you know, the accomplice in this. But the other cops can't be relied on, can't be trusted, nearly chainsaw through bodies. There is a loneliness to this sort of solitary police work

that we're circling in this episode a lot. The whole idea of whether they should kick up the case to Anchorage or not is in part rooted in the idea that this is a very small community that does not have resources to do this, that does not have, like, forensic technicians, does not have the ability to really like dig into this evidence without shipping it off to other places. And so any, the only people that Danvers can rely on

in terms of her foreign policing are Peter and eventually Navarro. And like they kind of come together as the core here. Navarro's situation is interesting because while Danvers is clearly worn out her welcome with basically everybody in this town, like nobody has time for Liz Danvers anymore. I think the warm moments we get specifically with Rose and Navarro, show us a different thing. I think Navarro is isolated, if anything, by politics, right?

She's isolated by she dug too deep into this case that involved the mine and got a lot of pushback and a lot of professional blowback as a result of that. But you can see in the way she talks about Travis and the way she's talking to Rose. It's like that moment of her investigating that case was an empathetic moment for both of them. Enough of one that Rose is like, come over so we can talk. And in the way that in episode one, Navarro pointed out, like, we carry all these things with us, or at least she thought we did. Danvers pointed out, no, very much, she does not. So I think that's kind of the difference between them and how they ended up isolated is very different on both those characters' paths.

I completely agree. Different flavors of solitude. And Navarro's ability to connect with the community. We talked about this last week with Annie's brother Ryan, who appears again this week. her connection to the community are something that Danvers absolutely doesn't have unless you count all the people's husbands she is apparently fucked in the town. The list is mounting.

It's grown long. The way Navarro is like Danvers, though, I think comes through the most in her relationship with Eddie, he of the SpongeBob toothbrush fame, right? In that he is constantly trying to make bids for intimacy and she's constantly like, no, that's not what I'm here for.

shouldn't even eat his pancakes. That was very rude, I thought. Very rude, I thought. Uncalled for. We, I, I, the sex scenes in this show, because cop Daddy Eccleston and Liz consummate their flirtatious, frozen body thought protocol banter later in his hotel room. This is once again, a woman in a sex scene where she's just like, trying to have full control of the rhythm of the procedure, if you will.

What did you make of the power? Comparing this to Navarro last week and the power dynamics and the sex scenes of the show. Yeah, they invite the comparison for sure. And I think what's interesting about this one is that this is Danvers' work superior too, right? There is a laying out of the dynamic here. And they hint about it in the rest of the episode. it's like why Danvers was assigned here in the first place. And she kind of posits that that cop daddy felt threatened by her

and kind of sent her away in a sense. And I think we'll learn more as to what that means. But I got a shout out Chris Eccleston, who I thought did a great job of playing that he literally might die right there in the middle of it. Incredible salesmanship from our guy. Yeah, he was making faces I've certainly never seen him make before. Incredible.

I don't want to ignore this, but I also don't want to go too deep into this because I don't know that I'm like wholly qualified. slide to talk about it, but we got a couple emails from last week's episode discussion asking, like, if we had seen that sex scene but the genders were reversed, would that have felt like assaults, uh, you know, like the way in which Navarro pins Eddie's arms down and like, you know, he's saying no and she is going ahead. And I think that is a conversation worth having. Consent is both easy and clear to understand and also can be clouded and difficult inside

an established relationship. You know what I mean? Like Eddie seems fine with what happened, though also certainly inside relationships, dicey things happen all the time. So it's complicated and simple at the same time. I don't think the show is trying to frame it as her crossing the line,

but we're only an episode two. So, you know, who knows where we'll go and true detective can go into very dark places. But I read the emails, I appreciated them. I don't think that's what the show is trying to show us, but I understand the concern. It feels like a hypothetical that's asking us to consider the same situation, but if all of the specific details were different. Yeah.

Like within the information that we have on the show and the way those characters act towards each other and the way they act in that scene, it felt more like a power dynamic within that relationship. Right. And not an abuse of that power necessarily. I get why it would be disorienting given that we're just kind of getting introduced to these characters. and so for an opening impression of Navarro and an opening impression of Kavik in particular, we don't exactly know.

And I think sometimes in the storytelling, that's kind of the point, is to leave you wondering about some of the things that are walked up to a line and where that leaves the people involved. If you look at something like Liz and her relationship to Leah, where you're like, is that abuse or, you know, it is a clear disregard for someone

who could be a source of intimate, to see. But anyway, it's quite complicated, but also simple. I don't know what else to say about it. The other thing I want to say about, and this comes down to this sort of like Pete and Kayla, with Pete not coming home. And Kayla being pissed about that. Again, this is the second episode in a row where she's just like, you know, Denver snaps her fingers and you and you answer. I think it goes back to something that I think is very core to true detective, which is the cost of being a protector. If you're a protector of a community, it is also very hard to be part of that community. We got, we got, I'm like constantly dazzled by how many experts are among our listeners. Like, we got,

we got emails from people who have, like, worked in remote Arctic science stations. And we got email from someone who has connection to, like, the Alaska Police Force so they could tell us the specifics of that. And in that email, I learned that usually they rotate. because these towns are so small and the police forces are so small, they're constantly rotating those cops around from town to town to town so that they don't get entrenched

in the community because you kind of can't and also do your job. So this idea that Pete is being kept from his home by Danvers, but Danvers walks in... Danvers used to walk into his home and have quality time with his kid, but she is like, you know,

she's like with Darwin while he's playing with his Legos, but Pete's at the office. But this is like you don't get to have a home life. And it's also in the True Detective world, it's like, once you've touched the evil that True Detective pauses out in the world, how can you possibly fall back into the warmth of a community? You know what I mean? That's really like the Marty perspective in season one is this whole idea of like, I need

a buffer between all of this evil and coming home. And that leads Marty in all kinds of directions over the course of that season. But yeah, I think the Kayla character and the digital. dynamic of Peter's home life is something that we zero in a lot in this episode. And in particular the fact that Kayla already does not like Danvers in addition to everybody else. And the line from episode one that jumps out to me that you kind of refer to is like when he gets the call to come back to work, it's that's not work. That's Danvers, right?

Like it's not there's being on the job and then there's whatever this over the top extra hours thing that's happening that if anything is only kind of disoriented by the dark, I don't know about you, but I was so jarred by the fact that after Danvers and Connolly have their encounter at the, I assume it's like a motel that they're at where Connolly is staying. She walks out and checks her phone and it's like 8 p.m. And it's like this feels like three o'clock in the morning. Like it feels like it's been night all day and we're stretching deeper and deeper into the midnight hours. Navarro walks in to the restaurant one point.

Our sister's like, do you want some lunch? And I was like, what do you mean lunch? Absolutely not. It's clearly, it's clearly a lot. 11 p.m. Yeah, but I mean, that's great. We're thrown into the same disorientation that everyone else is thrown into. Snoring, gasping during sleep, feeling fatigued, ask your doctor about Zepbound, terseptite. The first and only FDA-approved prescription medicine for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and adults with obesity. Zepbound is a prescription medicine

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Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-9-9-9 or visit setbound.lily.com. I want to talk about family for a second, right? Hank says blood is blood, Peter. Remember that. Mostly I just want to talk about Hank. All right. We have a lot to talk about.

Hank is smacking his son around, acting really dicey around the antifile going missing, getting overtly catfished by a woman who is extorting money from him. Drop the cash app, Alina. But most importantly, for my records, is the fact that we get a call out that John Hawks plays the guitar and is a musician. Hank was a musician and played the guitar. And I'm like, did I know?

It is still on Spotify, King Strangler is the name of his band. You can go listen to John Hawks, kind of tox sing and play the guitar. if you want to. It's incredible. Maybe the ghost we will see in this season is the ghost of John Hawke's musical career. King's Dragler appearance, when? Musical episode of True Detective when. What do you want to say about Hank? Okay. First, I mean, he did nothing in this episode to make himself feel less creepy or suspicious.

So the point that this is where I'm at with Hank, in our introduction to cop daddy Connolly, you can hear Hank talking in the introduction to that scene where he says that like all the cell records for the scientists were checked and they're clean. There's like nothing of interest. And I'm writing it down. I'm writing down everything Hank says, being like, I do not trust any of it. I do not trust this guy. But I have to admit, I love the character beats. Oh, yeah. Like when Alina, and I say that in the heaviest possible air quotes, asks him for photos and he goes around his apartment taking photos of photos that he has on his shelf. I was so sweet. I was like, oh. I can't help but love John Hawks at the end of the day.

He's backhanding his son, and I'm still like, I just want to watch this guy. I just want to watch do stuff on screen. One of our listeners, Rio pointed out, you and I were saying, like,

we can't remember a role where John Hawks has played evil. We had one listener point out that I guess he's evil in his episode of X-Files, which I have seen, but don't have a clear memory of. And then in the film,

Martha Marcy, May Marlene, he is deeply sinister as a cult leader. And I was like, oh, yeah, Yeah, that's true. Great call.

You know, he can get as sinister as we need him to be. John Hawks is capable. He has done it before. Anything else I want to say about Hank? I mean, I agree with you. I'm just sort of like, Hank, you know, the only thing we haven't mentioned is like when everyone is acting so wildly unprofessional at the corpuscle and he essentially gives a let boys be boys kind of answer to Danvers,

they're just blowing off some steam. That's what he said. I was like, wow, great, great stuff. It's not ideal. I think two of the things to know with Hank. One, I think we now have a plausible explanation as to who he would have been texting last week at the crime scene, right? He's just maybe just... Connolly, you think?

Oh, I was saying maybe just popping off sweet text to Alina. You know, like, maybe he's just checking on her mother's meds and seeing how that's going. So that's at least plausible that he could be doing that. I think the other thing of interest for him from a relationship standpoint is there's clearly a lot more warmth between Kate, the mining lady who owns and operates the ice rink with Hank as opposed to Liz Danvers. She calls him Henry. There's a familiarity there. She's asking, you know, if Peter can teach her kids, you know, do some personal skating lessons. There's some involvement, I think, there, that we have yet to explain or explore. But clearly, there's a relationship there that if nothing else,

the former person who may or may not have been running this police department seems like he has a pretty cozy relationship with the mining interest. That brings this to the section that I am going to call every week. They call it to mine. All right. So the mining company, last week we got this name draw for Kate McClintock, right? Just to remind folks that Annie Kay went around pissing off a lot of people, including Kate McClintock, which got an oh fuck from Peter.

Oh, fuck, not Kate McClintock. So we meet her. She has the Rachel. She's sitting like haircut wise. She is sitting in the hockey rink. So the mining company owns the hockey. It owns the ice rink. There's also figure skaters there.

It's not just hockey, right? Owns the ice rink. Classic way to buy political and community support, by the way. Builds a sports thing and people love it. This is so Bairtown. I can't even stand it. The Bairtown vibes are off the charts right now. When she was like, Pete should teach my boys how to play.

He's so great. I was like, I just makes me want to reread Bairtown immediately. Anyway, so Kate Hayes-Liz. Navarro doesn't like Kate, though. And Kate sure does like Hank. Those are the three things we know. We get the impression Kate doesn't particularly like Navarro either,

but maybe doesn't hate her as much as she hates Danvers. Yeah, that sounds about right. Let's talk about the mine and pollution, okay? Yes. The fight we mentioned that happened in the restaurant, right? Here's what we hear. Fuck you. You think my kids don't drink the same water.

You mighty people are poisoning your own kids. You take it outside. We're sick and tired of you pretending you don't see it. We fucking feed your kids. Issa Lopez has said that she's extremely interested in the, and this is something that Chris brought up, she brought up in her interview with Chris on the watch. You should listen to it if you haven't already.

The environmental angle. So if we're looking for conspiracies and nefarious deeds that people are doing, I think poisoning the water in a community. And to bring kids in it, like to mention the kids a couple times. Yeah. Again, that makes you think of season one of True Detective,

which is like we're talking about the vulnerability of just the utter disregard and disposability of like a community, right? Like there was a kind of kid that was vulnerable in True Detention 1. Similar to how there's a kind of woman in Annie Kay's case who's vulnerable in this community. Right. And like this is a mixed but partially indigenous community, right? So how much does that feel disposable to the mine is a question worth of. Anyway, Kate, I've got my eye on you.

Oh, God, yeah. Hank, it is doing no favors to be friendly with her. That just doubles your, I'm suspicious. I will say this as far as the contamination plot and discussion. Yeah. Were I the kind of person to literally just explain how all the water is contaminated and children are being poisoned and the water quality is so bad, Were I that person, Joe. I would not then take a bath

and then plunge my entire head underwater. What is Eddie Kavik doing? And he doesn't even have a toothbrush to like brush it away, right? She still has his toothbrush. This is a good moment for an Eddie Kavik vibe check, actually. I don't know how you're feeling about him

at this point in our story. Yeah. I'm a little concerned on a couple of different notes. One, the more I think about the SpongeBob toothbrush, the more I think it's going to be one of those damning pieces of evidence in retrospect that feels like very juvenile and childish in a way that in a show that is often about abducting and abusing children makes me concerned. We also get, speaking of Chekhov's drops, Navarro casually drops one of these days those dogs are going to eat you in a way that makes me very concerned

about the role of the dogs. Eddie has four dogs. Yeah. And one thing that this, again, maybe I'm going full true detective pill brain here. This is something I saw on this episode. Get in the iron trailer. When Liz Danvers goes to visit Bryce, her geologist friend, to learn about Solal Station. Did you put the air quotes up for Friends?

You didn't. I did not, but it's implied. You know, they're just chatting about Solal, chatting about science, you know, just learning some stuff in a classroom environment. It seems like a high school, maybe a community college. I can't quite tell the level.

I'm going to assume high school. Yeah. On the back wall of that class, room is a mural. And it is a person on a dog sled with four dogs leading to a black star. And the fact that Eddie Kavik has four dogs hanging out outside his burger joint, I'm really concerned. Rob, this is just like pure uncut quackery. I love it. I'm going insane. I love it. I love it. I'm pro Eddie at this point. Yeah. It might just be the like energy to like breakfast for dinner. Who doesn't love it?

Make someone pancakes. He's just like making pancakes for people. I'm really, I think that is, I don't know, I like his energy. You make a good point about the bath. I would not take a bath. Oh, that's just bad judgment separate from any culpability or involvement. That's just a bad call. Let's talk about the science stuff.

That's what it's labeled in my notes, science stuff. Yes. Okay. This is what Bryce, wearing a tremendous orange sweater, by the way, says. They spent decades trying to sequence the DNA of an extinct micro- organism that potentially could stop cellular decay. I'm saying the work they were doing could end up curing cancer, autoimmune diseases, genetic disorders.

The fact is, the permafrost is too hard and it damages chromosomal material upon extraction, so it was never going to work. Like, like, never. So that's what the scientists were up to at Solol. Yes. Feels very like chasing a grail, kind of, you know, like a white whale of research that could be incredibly important and payoff, but realistically will not. Very Michael Crichton.

Yes. And then shout at all the listeners who emailed me to let me know that the things on the racks were ice cores. We got that sort of answer in this episode, but I got a lot of emails being like, I know an ice core when I see one, and I'm like, great, good to know. Before we leave Science Corner, one thing we haven't really talked about, or at least in detail, is the idea that Clark is the body who is missing. All the other scientists are accounted for. Raymond Clark, we don't know where he is, we don't know what he's up to, we don't know if he's alive.

On the loose. Yeah. What we do know is that at Solal Station, he is the paleo microbiologist. And so the idea that they were studying specifically this like ancient microorganism material and the paleo microbiologist snaps and goes missing, that certainly gives me like we dug up an ancient evil or like harmful organism kind of vibe. We dug too greedily and too deep.

Lots of mind references happening even in the corner of science. My brother Michael who is watching the show and listens to a podcast he was describing what Clark does in episode one and he says he threw a kibby fit and I was like what is a kibby fit. I don't know what that is

and he's in a medicine so I thought it was like a technical term. No, it turns out it's like a Massachusetts slang. Kibbing out is to freak out Kibi Fit or whatever. And I was like, and I googled it and it's like so hard to find out.

This is like niche specific Massachusetts slang. Oh wow. I thought I would, I thought I was sure with the world. Kibby Fit or Kibying out. Thank you for your service, Joe. I was really worried that the winner

wasn't Massachusetts enough, but I think we got there today. We had an email from listener Larry has nothing to do with Kibi Fits. where Larry says about Clark, he probably came back and was the guy the delivery man saw. He probably wrote,

We are all dead on the board. That's the least weird thing that guy has done in six years. And then he says, do these joodles in Clark's workbinder that he calls, quote, her eyes look like a crude topographical map. Yes.

In the classroom at the start of the episode, the drawing appears to be a cross-section of the layers of the earth. Similar idea. Those doodles might represent holes drilled into the ice like this one in Antarctica and Larry attached a photo that you can't see. We're back to, quote,

she's awake being something in the ice or a specific location they drilled at. So, yeah. Rob, do you want to share with the class what it is that Clark totally of sound mind and body wrote like a totally normal person in his notebook? Normal, well-adjusted

stuff, Joe. Science stuff, yeah. Science stuff in his little murder journal. Yeah. And this is what I have in my notes. I was transcribing as much as I could make out. Yeah. Oh, God. Never say her. Never say I can hear, feel her, her name, I can hear

her moving her fingers, and I have imprints these fingies. Yes. Cold, dark, her eyes. I can hear her calling. Her eyes, her face, her eyes, her face, her eyes, her face. Her eyes, her face. Oh, God, never sleep. All right.

So, an author that True Detective fans love to invoke is H.P. Lovecraft. So this is Like, very... This is more E. E. Cummings, if we're being honest. Very at the mountains of madness sort of vibes coming off of Clark here. But Clark is in mourning, it seems, right? Because Annie died.

The tattoo artist says he cried a little when I finished. Not because it hurt, you know, just sentimental maybe. Was he alone? Danvers asked. And then the tattoo artist says he was alone. Yeah, but like existentially alone, you know? Deeply, deeply, deeply alone. Yeah, so Clark, Annie died. Clark loved her, and then Clark lost the plot. We don't know if he

knows how she died, but everything that people described Clark's reclusive, even more reclusive than the reclusive monk scientist. He would hide in his room, super creepy weird guy. Then you thought the murder journal was something, wait till you meet the murder trailer, where we find what seems to be a facsimile of Annie, perhaps in a bed that he like sometimes cuddles upsetting. More upsetting, there appears

to me to be like a baby. Yeah, a baby doll. Also in that, like there's a little like not just a doll. Like he made a model of Annie and then he made a model of a baby. Like they're made of the same stuff. Or at least made a model of a person. Oh, yeah, it might not be Annie.

That's true. I think what's confusing about the Annie situation is Annie had the spiral tattoo on her back in basically the same place that Dora Lang did in True Detective Season 1. But that's just as she's going about her life, it seems that she had that tattoo because the reference photo that's brought to create Clark's tattoo is her alive and in good health with the tattoo. I kind of wonder if we're headed into a direction where Annie Kay is involved with the evil in some way. Like she is kind of the gateway for Clark into this world as opposed to vice versa. Clearly she's a murder victim. Like we're trying to solve what happened to her. But I'm trying to sort out how much of that is Clark originated and how much of that is Annie

originated in terms of how the trailer entered into this state. Oh, do you think Annie was it all in? I'm pitting this all on Clark. This feels like an arts and crafts project that he did through his grief. What is true detective without some arts and crafts for? sure. I think the most likely scenario right now is that most of what we're seeing from Clark is a person dealing with grief and not well. Yes. I think it points more to that than murder, but the fact that Annie had that tattoo, I just keep coming back to it. Yeah, it's a good question.

Because like, if the symbol is so scary that Rose has a scratch out on the snow, what is Annie doing? But then like maybe that fits with someone like Annie who is just sort of like, yeah, I'll talk back to the mind. Yeah, I'll put an evil symbol on my back. Like, I don't get a shit. sort of attitude. I want to ask you, famed, freeze-framed detective, Rob Pony, what did you find in the trailer

that you think is worth sharing? This was a very difficult one because we don't have DVD spines to parse. And the thing I kept zeroing in on, honestly, is the photos that are on the wall that are all yarned up.

I don't know if you had a better read on this than I did, Joe, but are those photos of Annie or they photos of somebody else? Because they don't really look like the pictures we've seen, of Annie so far. I thought they were of Annie.

That was my assumption. And maybe we just haven't seen the right view. Maybe it's different lighting, different haircut. People change. You know, a different fit. It's just given off a different vibe. But overall, man, this place is an absolute creep show. We got animal bones all over the places they call out.

We got dolls hanging from the ceiling. Annie's phone, we should note, is revealed in the trailer. And that's where it's been the whole time. That's certainly a piece of evidence of note, especially as we're unlocking other phones to watch videos and TikToks and whatnot throughout the rest of this episode. P.S. shout out Pete for unlocking the phone

with the Foresland Corsicle. Danvers would literally never have done it. Pete is scoring wins all throughout the episode on the detecting front. A very good episode for Pete, I would say, overall. I'm drawn most to the baby you identified. And specifically, I don't know if we've heard anything

about the idea that Annie might have been pregnant. If there's any implication of that at all, we haven't heard yet. She was a midwife, so maybe it's more symbolic. Maybe it's some deeper message. I don't really know, but Jesus Christ, a life-sized stuffed doll holding a baby life-sized stuff doll. That's about

creepy enough for me. It's a no. It's a no, thank you for me. That's like one of the worst things I've ever seen. The inside of that trailer. So upsetting. And then we get these like latent background human screams as we leave the trailer. The close captioned said eerie screaming. And I was like,

hoomps, and then shots of dead animals. Well, speaking of whomst, in an episode themed around asking the right questions, maybe the question is not was Annie pregnant, but if she was pregnant by whomst, you know, like who, what is the association or the implication of that if she was pregnant? Among the Jody Foster films that I watched this week for trial by content was one that I never seen before, very difficult watch, but a total classic, The Accused. And at the core of the accused, which is about a sexual assault that happens to a woman played by Jody Foster in a bar, the larger, like the sexual assault is terrible. It's based on a real case.

The larger legal question in that movie is not about the people who, it is about the people who assaulted her, but it's about the people who watched and egged on and didn't stop it. Encouraged it, didn't stop it. I went back and looked what Navarro said about finding Annie's body, right? She said in episode one, you didn't find her, you didn't see the hate,

you could see the disgust in the way they cut her. Forensics show that someone kicked her after they dumped her dead body, Liz. Poor girl's just lying there and they still kick her, broken teeth, broken ribs,

and then they cut out her tongue to show her the fuck up. Wouldn't have happened if she was white though. So I don't know, like, I don't know if we're literally talking about anything that has anything to do with the accused.

It was just sort of like rattling around in my brain. But, like, that idea of, like, Navarro is so stuck on Annie for a number of reasons, but one of it is, like, the way she found her body just alone there, that's, like, they had left her there alone to be found. That idea of, like, what does Clark know about that? I don't know. You know what I mean?

Like, what, is Clark just upset that Annie died and he loved her? Or is there something else that Clark knows, is the question? Is there something else that the other scientist? are involved in, right? If we're talking about the numerology of seven devils, like, you know, I think we're circling a lot of the ideas in which people are bumping up against systems of power, whether it's the mining interest in the town, whether it's the funding behind Solal Station. And look, in the year of, or I guess the, at least the Oscar season of Killers of the Flower Moon, like, it's impossible not to think about the way, as you're describing, people

protect and shield and obfuscate crime and where it originates and why it's happening. Connolly is very weird in this episode in terms of his interest in kicking the case to Anchorage. Drop the case? Yeah, okay. Okay, I both don't know why. I don't know why Danvers wants it so much. And I suspect that has something to do with more character motivation

than professional motivation. And we'll figure that out as we go. But I definitely don't really know why Connolly doesn't want her to have it so much. But it's fishy. Very. Just going to round up some things. Theory Corner here. The McConaughey watch, but you and I said in episode

one, we were like, we don't really need it. Yeah, remember when I, a dummy, was like, I hope we don't talk about when Matthew McConaughey is going to show up on this show, and then literally the next episode, his dad is on this show. Shout out to our listener, Catherine, who like emailed us that theory so quickly, and I texted it to you and Kai, like,

it was like immediate that we got that email from Catherine. So shout out to her, you were right. I was skeptical. You were right, Catherine. Like, all of us on that text were like, I don't think so, but Interesting email. Anyway, Travis Cole is here. I don't want Matthew McConaughey on the show.

No. There I said it. And it's not just because I just watched contact and watched Matthew McConaughey and Johnny Foster. I have my fix already this week. I don't want it. I don't need it. I think just the last name Cole is enough

to provide that sort of like connected tissue. Our listener Lauren wrote in about the color teal and I love a color theory. Yeah. She said Navarro's uniform shirt is that color, which is a big contrast to the, usual neutral cop uniform. It was a major color in the research facility. Again, bright teal doesn't scream science to me. Navarro's sister's hair is that color, even Hank painting the room

in his house that color. It just seemed to pop up everywhere, especially for a washup, Alaskan town, not a color palette you'd expect. Maybe it means nothing, but I couldn't help notice. And one thing I want to add to Lauren's color theory email is that in that tattoo reference photo, Annie Kay has a streak of teal in her hair. like we see her back, but she's got the same teal color in her hair. So I have nothing more insightful to say about that. I just love color theory and let's look for teal things. Why not?

I would be delighted. As we got, you know, so last week we got the first name, last name mention of Kate McClintock and you and I both were like, hmm, huh. I wonder if that's going to come back. We got a similar situation in this episode when Danvers and Navarro are in Navarro's kitchen trying to figure out where the cans go. Kai, can you play this clip, please?

The Wheeler thing was... Shut up. No, we did exactly what we needed to do. No, we're not doing that. All right? We're just doing this one thing. We're going to crack it. Close your case.

I close my case. And then that's it for the two of us. The Wheeler thing. That's the first and only mention of that so far. So we don't know what that is, but let's just know that. Danvers does not want to talk about it. Nope.

We're not talking about it. Completely stonewalled. All right. Anything else you want to talk about that we didn't get to? I mean, there's still so much. These episodes are insane. They're very dense. As far as theories go,

we kind of referenced them earlier in this episode, but as all the relevant true detectives are going around doing their law and ordering interviews, right? Like, you know, stocking vending machines and whatnot. Mopping, sure. Mopping, as one does. I feel like we're spending a conspicuous amount of time with Blair, the woman at the crab factory.

And we kind of circle back to her to ask her about the spiral and she clearly identifies it as something witchy or culty like right off the bat. And the fact that we're seeing her two weeks in a row when clearly a peripheral character in this story in this community, we don't have any other tie. The only reason we even saw her in the first episode

was because Navarra was there arresting somebody happened to be. incidentally, that feels flagable. Okay. I mean, diddo Bill Vending Machine guy. I mean, I guess he's more directly related to the scene of the crime. But, like, I think all of those people, I love that Chris and Andy, I mean, you might have, it didn't occur, because I don't watch Law & Order, it didn't occur to me that those were Law & Order scenarios. But I have seen Law & Order, and I'm like, oh, of course it is.

Like, I got to stack these crates, but I'll tell you, I'll tell you a thing or two. And usually one of those people is the murderer, right? So, like, sure. I would say all of those people who were interrogated. The guy in the... Chris Nandy called it the dorm room, but it's mining housing or whatever. Barracks or something. That guy who knew about the trailer.

Let me say about that guy. Yeah. You simply cannot, as a single dude living in the mining barracks, be the guy with the K-pop girl group poster on your wall. You simply cannot be that guy. Would you rather have K-pop Girl posts during a while or the number of Imagine Dragons posters that Lowe has had in Fargo? Definitely, K-Pob.

Well, I think the K-P girl group thing, it just suggests something if you're this guy in a way that is not comfortable for anybody involved. It's not great. It's not great. Yeah, there's so much detecting going on this episode. And I think, you know, Chris Andy pointed this out. I think it's worth repeating this idea of, like, ask the right question. Yes.

Something that Danvers is teaching Pete to do. I'm calling him Pete like we're familiar. Peter, Peter's what his dad. His dad calls him Pete, but I'm not his dad. She's teaching him, and she is already taught Navarro that, this idea of, like, master and apprentice, this is the detecting technique. And we have already been taught that by Rust Cole in season one, who that's how the first episode ends with him telling the other cops who are interrogating him, then start asking

the right fucking questions. Love it. What do we learn from what Liz and Pete? Okay, this is something I wrote down that was really suspicious to me. Not suspicious, but I always pay attention to like pronoun. Anyway, Pete and Liz are calling the killer he. And I don't know if that's just sort of like, let's just default and call the murderer he. But I was just like, I don't know.

Okay. Pay attention to pronouns. They were scared and running. The guys on the ice. Someone folded their clothing. Someone drew a spiral on them. so there's a killer, there's someone else on the ice with them, be that Clark or someone else.

And to underscore, this is something I didn't mention, but to underscore that sort of Mulder and Scully, Danvers and Navarro relationship, is that Navarro just knew that that tongue had to be Annie's. Yes. And Danvers had to wait for the lab results before she'd be like, okay, it's definitely Annie's tongue. And that's sort of it to be.

me, right? It's like, we see this tongue on the floor, we have this cold case where the woman was missing a tongue is probably that tongue. That's a reasonable conclusion to draw that Navarro did. And Danvers is like, I got to see the facts and figures for I believe, you know? I think Navarro is more intuitive

in a lot of ways, right? She puts together the trailer thing pretty quickly. Everything that Danvers figures out is, I got to lay out every photo of the crime scene. I got to look at every piece of evidence and try to connect them. And to the point where, you know, we get a of another callback to her diminishing the idea of like a spirit animal, like being casually

racist again with Navarro and that comes up again. Those kinds of callouts to me are not just Liz Danvers being low-key racist or high-key racist, but her dismissing that kind of spiritual, her exposing her cynicism and her logical framework, right? It's like the only things I can prove are the things that are right in front of me. So the idea of any intuition, any guidance, whether you consider supernatural or not, is kind of beyond her scope. I'm really glad I watched contact this week. It's just like, it's exactly this.

It's exactly this. All right. Anything else? Rahmahoni. I think we have to at least acknowledge the beauty and terror of the corpuscle. Just when Lund, I believe, is the guy who's in the hospital,

when he screamed, I screamed. Oh, my good Lord. This is what I'll say about thrills and chills. in this episode of True Detective, because the thrill in the bad way was when Lund starts screaming, horrifying. But good way.

It's like a good scare. The chill was the murder trailer. I was like, get me out of here. I don't know what this smells like. Not good. I would say not good. Lit by flashlight, too. They really know how to play the hits.

Yeah. Yeah, thrills and chills. Anything else? I will say, Claire McNier had a great story on The Ringer.com about the making of the corpsicle. You should definitely go read. And specifically, one of the details that jumped out to me

in terms of the care and attention paid in the show, all of the bodies and limbs that you see are casts made from the actual actors' faces and limbs. Just incredible level of exposure and detail in a way that, I mean, it makes it creepy as hell. The eyes burned out. Specifically, the frost-bitten, blackened fingertips and toes, they really make my stomach churn.

I'm saying, what kind of tips? Frost bit blackened? Fingy-tip. Sorry, finky tips. My mistake. My mistake. Not anatomically correct on my part. I apologize, Dr. Joe.

That was a classic Claire McNair article. Great, great piece. Really good. Theringer.com. What a great website. One last hypothetical for you. Sure. Would you rather?

In the spirit of our previous, would you rather? Try to unspool a very complicated, maybe seven victim murder that would be tied into another missing person slash murder case that has gone unsolved and is therefore like impossible to untangle or untangle the mound of Christmas lights that Liz Danvers has excavated from her closet. It should be noted on December 21st. Of all the character details,

Denver is putting up her Christmas tree on December 21st feels telling. But would you rather be responsible for the case or untangling those Christmas lights? Because I know very clearly where I stand on this issue. Oh, are you like, are Christmas lights your nemesis? Really all tangles, to be honest.

Okay, so you're talking to me now, and I see that you have wired headphones on. Yes. Something that a friend of mine said years and years and years ago to me when he was pulled out a set of, like, you know, Apple wired headphones from his bag, and they were all tangled up, and he was trying to untangle them, and he just sort of like fumbled them out on his hand. He's like, Christmas lights every time. That's what I think of.

Every time I untangle my headphones, because I hate AirPods. I can't use them, so I use wired headphones. Every time I untangle them, I'm just like Christmas lights every time. Yeah, I would take the I'd take the Christmas lights. Mostly because untangling this murder requires Do I have to babysit the corpuscle as it melts?

If Danvers assigns it. It depends on how diligent you are and obedient you are as an employee. Am I allowed to watch TikTok while I do it? Clearly. Just dance talks. Yeah, right, great. All right, I think that does it

for season four, episode two, of true detective. What a joy. What a treat. Sorry this episode is delayed. It was my fault. But thanks to Rob Mahoney and Kai Grady for their patience

and 12 you for your patience and Kai just being the best always all the time. And Rob will see you for the mid-season episode next week. We might even have a corpuscle to thaw out.

Slowly but surely at 38 degrees drop by drop. I can't wait. All right. What does that smell like? What is the truth? trailer smell like and what does the Corsesville smell like? These are pressing questions I have

for all of you. We'll see you next week. What is that email address again? Rob Mahoney. That is Yellow King Spongebob at gmail.com. And it brings me great pleasure to say that. I mean, I can't believe it wasn't already taken, but here we are. Yellow King SpongeBob at Gmail.com. Send us your thoughts, your theories.

And we'll see you next week. Bye!