The Prestige TV Podcast - ‘True Detective: Night Country’ Episode 3 Deep Dive

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

Jo and Rob return to break down the third episode of ‘True Detective: Night Country.’ They discuss the vast use of teal and what it might symbolize, why the flashback sequences are so effective, and Danvers’s (at times misguided) maternal instincts. Along the way, they talk about Hank’s ongoing suspiciousness and Navarro opening up for the first time. Later, they highlight some of the show’s most significant unanswered questions. Hosts: Joanna Robinson and Rob Mahoney Producer: Kai Grady Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, guys, it's your boy Johnny Bananas, and I'll be covering all the treachery, deceit, backstabbing, and murder from Season 2 of the Traders U.S. on my podcast, Death Taxes, and Bananas. I'll be joined all season by my fellow castmates to swap stories, provide all the behind-the-scenes antics, and sorted details from filming. So Sally 4th, and join me for Season 2 of the Traders every Saturday on the Ringer Reality TV podcast feed. This episode is brought to by Whole Foods Market.

Spring is here, so celebrate it with fresh, juicy, seasonal produce and some very tasty, limited time flavors. New Whole Foods, Market Peach, Apricot, Rose, Italian soda. Perfect for a picnic or brunch, as is their trending mango, Yuzu chantilly cake. But if you're on the go, new 365 strawberry pretzels make a great sweet snack. That sounds delicious. Get savings with yellow sale sign storewide. and everyday low prices on 365 brand items.

Enjoy the fresh flavors of spring, save at Whole Foods Market. This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart? Well, that's Tova's reality. An elderly widow working at an aquarium. Tova forms an unlikely friendship with the cramudgeonly, Marcellus, whose remarkable intelligence leads her to a life-changing discovery. Watch remarkably bright creatures with your remarkable moms this Mother's Day weekend, only on Netflix May 8th.

What's your explanation for her tongue popping up six years after she dies? And what about the men on the ice? Why'd they go out there? Oh, I'll give me that. Voodoo, ET Cosmic, Chumpa Lumpa bullshit. Are you trying to say Chupacabra? Whatever, the magic. It's no magic.

right? There's a real explanation for this. All right. I'm listening. We're just not asking the right questions. Back to the Prestige TV podcast feed. I'm Joanna Robinson. Joining me today in the fishing hut, don't call it a shed. It is Rob Mahoney. Hi, Rob, how are you doing?

Very cozy. Got a space heater in here. Got great natural teal lighting, which we have a lot of teal to impact this week. But honestly, I like the vibe that Kavik is trying to cultivate in there. The hut not shed is a reference to our season of Fargo. So if you want to go back and listen to that, just know that we once called the fishing hut is shed and people were not happy about it. So now we know, we always knew, but now we really know. But we are the premier ice fishing podcast. So we have to get our details right.

Somebody has to do it. And it is us. We are here, fishing for clues and all kinds of things. quick spoiler warning, I suppose. Just as per usual, watch up through episode three. That's where we are. We have not watched ahead. We are here for theories and questions and

clues, but no concrete spoilers. We don't do that here. And maybe a straight season one reference here or there. Sure. So if that kind of thing bothers you, be wary, be aware of that. Very light, light dusting of season one so far on season four. So I want to start with a little bit of

overview. There's just a couple big topic things we want to hit before we get into some of the more nitty-gritty of the episode. First of all, timeline. We haven't really been tracking this, even though there have been little chirones on the bottom of episodes to tell us when and where we are. So we're December 22nd, day five is where we are in the timeline. And we spill into the 23rd toward the back half of the episode, too. Right. And there's a little daylight in this episode. When Navarro and Danvers are driving, talking about Chupacabra, as you heard at the top of this episode. Chimpa Lumpas, really. Yeah, really.

There's some, there's like, you know, the sky is light outside. So we're headed out of the, it's seven days of dark, I think, is what we were promised. So if we're on day five, we're racing towards the sunrise in the next few days. And then we're going to, we're going to hit what we're calling Teal Watch 2024. So on last week's episode, one of our listeners wrote in about the color teal and how it had been popping up here and there and made a good case for that. And none of us had watched episode three at that point. And then I watched it and I texted the guys, Kai and Rob, I was like, teal galore. And then Rob was like, you're not kidding when he watched it.

And then Kai watched it. He was like, oh, my God. So I'm going to hit some pops of teal. Will you let me know if I'm missing anything? I'm sure I am. We start in hot, birthing center. The birthing center,

where we meet Annie Kay, et cetera, teal on the walls. And it's like this same color teal. So like either this is a thematic color, intentional choice, or they got like a great deal

at Sherwin Williams on a batch of teal and they used it on every single location. We support both outcomes for the record. Absolutely. The precinct, our listener mentioned this last week, the precinct has a lot of teal on the walls.

Yep. The Wheeler home where we meet William Wheeler in the flashback, like, the brightest of teal's. It is glowing teal. It's like absolutely. There, as you mentioned, there's a little bit of like ambient teal light on the bottom of Kavik's fishing hut coming off the ice. The outside too, the outside of Kavik's fishing hut, teal and red schemed. Excellent. The hair is more blue than teal, but like kind of phased to teal.

Julia's hair is definitely more like turquoisey teal. I got a bunch of people pointing this out to me, but I'll just pull this line from one of our listeners, Sean, who wrote, Danvers' eyes were super blue in the hockey rink. Does instant mac and cheese contain arachis spice? Like, she's got sort of this like fremen blue, like glowing. And I went back and watched it and it's like, it's very noticeable. It's just like a color balance thing. And then our listener, Haley wrote in to say, teal is the official color of sexual assault awareness month. I'm not sure if it's relevant, but it seemed worth pointing out. So any, what other, moments of teal did I miss, Rob? A couple, you know, a smattering, I would say, smaller things. Yeah. We see Annie Kay in some of her photos wearing teal shirts as they're kind of sifting through

the evidence. We see a woman at the wake for the stillborn child wearing a teal bandana in her hair. A lot of the protesters are wearing teal jackets when they go to kind of the, when Leah and her friend go to that little convention. The walls of Leah's bedroom are teal. Darwin's room is teal. That's right. I keep coming back to what do we think this represents.

Yeah. Because yeah, there's a lot of thematic stuff happening around these scenes, but it's so all over the place. It's hard to find the unifying theory of teal and true detective. No easy answers for you. Any guesses for you? Well, I think this episode, you know, there's a lot about water. There's a lot about death and the way those things are links, life and death with water. You know, we see this birthing scene at the beginning in a natural water tub. Then we get Danvers kind of pouring out the gray water from the sea.

sink later. There's all of this kind of interlocking imagery with water. And just kind of looking up kind of color theory in general as it relates to teal, one thing that I thought was interesting, but surely does not apply, is that the ancient Egyptians apparently believe that teal represented both faith and truth, which if that's not true detective, what is? Yeah. Man of Science, Man of Faith. I love that. My best guess is it's more of a less of a like, when you see teal, it means this. more of like what we get in the reflection off the ice in Kavik's Fishing Hut, which is just sort of like

this is meant to evoke the deep core of the ice, the permafrost, the whatever. This is what it looks like when you drill down into the ice, you see this teal in among the white and clear of the ice. So, you know, we're all in the ice one way or another.

Are we not? We're all corpsicles in our own way. In that way, maybe it's the thin kind of boundary between whatever the world beyond is that they're communicating with these ghosts and all these visions and these people who keep coming up, like the idea of everything below the ice

being a certain kind of existence and all of us above it. And that's kind of where the boundary is most porous, maybe. Oh, I love that. All right, Fingy Watch, 2024 is another thing we're going to do. Okay. We had a couple emails about this,

but I'm going to shout out Pete because he attached a photo from the show to back up his evidence. Pete wrote, I reckon that these prints from the shoes found by the corpusicle that Pete shows to Liz in the ice rink in episode two. And I'll just have to describe it to you. It is a hand missing two fingies. He says, belong to the woman from the crab factory missing the last two fingers on the right hand,

who was getting beaten by her man at the start of episode one. So is the character Blair. Rob has pointed Blair out the last two episodes, in fact. She's a redhead woman. She's played by an actress Catherine Wilder, who is Jean Wilder's daughter. Insane. Casting spoilers, who knows? Let's do a quick recap on this like Sedna, goddess of the sea and underworld theory that we floated in episode one.

Because in episode one, this is something Rob and I firmly believe in is that when you're watching True Detective and a child makes a drawing, you pay attention to the child's drawing. So in episode one, Holden, who's Pete's, sorry, Darwin, who is Pete's, I got the hipster. names confused. Darwin, who is Pete's kid, drew a creepy woman with some, like, missing fingers, right? And his mom says it's just a local legend, don't worry about it. That I guess laundromat, grandma

told him about it. Told him about it. Sadna got to the sea in the underworld. In one tradition, she's in a kayak with her family when a storm started. Her parents thought she was to blame for the storm and threw her into the sea. She clung to the kayak, but her father cut her fingers off. First the tips, then the second knuckle, then the last

knuckle, her disembodied fingers turned into sea creatures and then said to gain control over the animals. If humans angered her, she could stop the animals from coming to their hunting sites, thus causing famine. And we talked about the suicidal caribou and the lack of crab at the crab factory,

etc. I'm sorry, I'm just stuck on the lack of crab at the crab factory. What a tragedy. They run out of crab at the crab fact. On the sea creature front, in the final shot of the cell phone video that Annie took, that we've seen this episode. The last frame is what looks like the skeleton of a creature sort of in a spiral shape

in the ice. That's my interpretation of that image. So I was just like some kind of critter see her otherwise. Is that the thing that she found when she says in that video in this episode, I found it? Is she talking about this critter in the ice? And then we should note that we have not seen Blair without this other character B, B is this old woman who, older woman who

worked at Solal Station, like clean Salal Station. I don't know, just to go back to B, B is the woman who knocks out Blair's abusive husband or partner or whatever, which is why Navarro is at the crab factory in episode one. And she says, I told you he's just too wasted. And Navarro says, did you hit this man, ma'am? And then B says, asshole hit Blair, then I hit the asshole with the metal bucket. And then she asked her what's her name is.

We'll come back to that. And she says, did you or did you not hit this man with a metal bucket, ma'am? And she says, damn right, I hit him with a metal bucket. You're putting me away for that on. So, like, I don't know. This idea of, like, we're going to talk a lot this episode about women and community and protection and true justice versus letter of the law justice, which is just something this episode is really interested in. So I have my eyes on Blair, on B, on a lot of what's going on at the crab factor, I suppose. What do you think, Rob?

Well, the camera has its eye on Blair. Yeah. How often she popped up in the first two episodes. And really, the fact that she popped up again at all felt notable and flagable. And then also the way the camera kind of lingers on that handprint as we see it, really one of our only shreds of physical evidence from the crime scene so far. Yeah.

There definitely was a call out to something about it. And the fact that a couple of fingers are either not capturable from the handprint or perhaps missing, it's conspicuous. A lot of signs pointing to Blair are blue queen. Also, just shout out to our listener, Julian, who sent an email with no body,

just a subject line in all caps, that said laundromat grandma folded the clothes. It's just like one of my favorite emails we've ever received. It's the best theory we have so far. Yeah. Laundromat grandma folded the clothes. Okay. Star-shaped wounds.

And this comes down to murder weapon, right? We got a couple emails pointing out the fact that in Silence of the Lambs during an autopsy, during the autopsy, one of the victims they point out, they're star-shaped contact entrance wounds over the sternum. So are the star-shaped wounds just a Clarice, Sounds of the Lambs reference? If so, it won't be the last one we talk about today. Certainly not.

But we got this on a more practical front. We got this email from our listener, Larry, about star-shaped tools. And he says, I scoured Google for what tools could leave a star-shaped wound like the ones on Annie. I was hoping to find an obscure mining, ice fishing, or knitting tool. Nope. The only thing I found was that could be used

to stab someone with screwdrivers for torque screw. which have star-shaped patterns. Torque screws are heavy-duty, used in vehicles, bicycles, computers, and by electricians. Both the scientists and the mine have vehicles that they presumably do maintenance on themselves. They have tools like these screwdriverers.

The science station has a garage with shelves of crap on them. I assume toolboxes are there. People at Salaal Station, the mine, electrician, or someone who is very DIY around the house could have access to one of these. So almost everyone is on the hook there. But using a screwdriver speaks to someone grabbing what is at hand spur of the moment.

And I kind of agree with that. Like if it's just a hand tool that's nearby, you know what I mean? That's not something you like plan to murder someone with. And like the way, if we presume that Annie dies at the end of that video, you know, she is like stumbled upon. She is, it's not like a premeditated, seemingly premeditated murder. I don't know. What do you think about that? Well, especially the 32 wounds too.

Yeah. I mean, it could be something ritualistic. It could be something specific. But it also cries like crime of passion and moment and opportunity, right? Like an outburst, an outrage that led to exactly what it is, whatever it is that happened to Annie Kay. But I think we're circling around this idea of like what she found when she says she found it. And as you said, it could be a creature. It could be something mystical.

It could be evidence to use against the mind. It could be a lot of different things. but the fact that she's being kind of, we're being channeled in this direction with her to wonder what it is she found, what it is that found her, and how it is that she got stabbed 32 times with a star-shaped whatever.

I have so many, we're going to run through all the questions I feel like we need answers for at the end of this episode. But last but not least on the watch-watch situation. This is Watch Watch Watch-Watch 24, which is we are constantly getting emails from people being like,

have you watched X, it has something to do with Night Country. So I'm just going to start, you know. Just listen them off? Get a reading list going? Summing these up. So we've had so many emails

about the TV show Fortitude, which has a lot of DNA in common with the show. And in that show, the permafrost melted and released a biological catastrophe, which is a very popular theory about the season of true detected, that something in the water

is causing like mass hallucinations or something like that. So fortitude, a lot of emails about fortitude. So maybe if you're, If you're, has some downtime this week between episodes, I want to watch that. That's an option for you. Also on John Hawks is a bastard watch, we've got Winter's Bone. A lot of people are like, remember Winter's Bone.

I was like, oh, yeah, I do remember Winter's Bone. So there we go. Any other watch recommendations? What is that email again, Ramahoney? That's Yellow King SpongeBob at gmail.com. All right, without any further ado, let's get into sort of like digging into the episode. So let's start with Annie, the Annie Kay flashback. Yes.

Which starts the episode, a lot of teal, a lot of women, a lot of things going on. Rob Mahoney, what stood out to you? What is this feeling important to you? Well, first of all, I think we get our first kind of official confirmation of the timeline here, in that this flashback takes place seven years ago. When we're more with our present timeline, there's a calendar on the wall of Kavik's ice fishing hut. What did we agree with the terminology about? Situation

for 2023. So I think we can confidently say this is in the range of 2016 when this happens. I was struck by a lot of things in the scene. I mean, one, getting to spend time with a real live, actually alive Annie,

was nice after just seeing her in photos, hearing her story, getting these shreds of who she was. Seeing the person is such an important thing. And you can tell it's an important thing for Navarro too. Like the way she responds to her in this moment, the fact that she's showing up

to arrest her for trespassing and gets kind of like looped in on this whole dula delivery situation. I found it to be really effective and a really effective entry into that character and also a great entry point into some of the ideas of the episode. As we said, some of the symbolism, some of the color stuff, but also

some of the community, the indigenous community, the throat singing that's happening in this scene, the like intersecting concern around when the baby who is born is not, immediately breathing in a way that conveys that there's something that's been happening here. There's something. There's a trend. There is a through line in this community that people are

worried about, even seven years ago. And so I think we're seated with a lot of ideas, even before we get the ball rolling. I love that. Something that Issa Lopez said in the official pod, I'm going to paraphrase, that like in the first two episodes, we spent a lot of time the white side of Ennis, inside the Lull station, inside the police station, et cetera, versus in this episode we're taken much deeper into the native side of Venice. You know, we're inside this birthing center. We go out into the outskirts when we're looking for Oliver, all of this stuff. And then also, Issa pointed out that there is a push to eradicate birthing centers in Alaska

and that there are people standing for the rights of Native women to have their babies in a traditional way versus trying to force them to have babies in the hospital. And I think it's maybe notable that the episode, the episode begins with life, with birth in this home setting, and ends with death in a hospital. So, you know, that's... I think the most important, and I completely agree with you,

I think the most important part of this is meeting Annie when she's alive, vital, in her element, in control of a situation. You know what I mean? There is this history of, you know, great detective stories that I love, presenting you a female victim that you never get to see alive or never get to understand exactly who they are. This is a lot of conversation around Twin Peaks, a show that I love.

But when we meet Laura Palmer, the victim of Twin Peaks, she's dead wrapped in plastic. Wept in plastic becomes this whole, like, trope conversation for like young women who are the victims in these stores who we never meet. Disposability kind of. Right. Or interchangeability or whatever it is. And that's why in Twin Peaks, Fire Walk with me, which is like the much malign movie that

that David Lynch made set in this universe is something that has a lot of values to me because Laura Palmer's alive in that and we get to like meet her and know her and stuff like that. And so I think meeting Annie Kay here alive. seeing Navarro sort of become dazzled by her. And so then we understand why Navarro takes her death so personally for many reasons, but also like she met her and she saw how what a strong member of the community she was and was so, like, entranced by her. I think it's interesting that Issa Lopez wants us to see Annie as like a human here, yes,

but also as a metaphor in the official podcast, she says Annie is Ennis. It's better self. She brings life into. this world. So when we think about that, then when we think about Annie's metaphor in addition to being like a fully fleshed out human being, we have to then think about like what is a creator like Issa Lopez want to say about, you know, the state of white encroachment in native spaces or whatever it is when we are, when we look at the death of Annie. Who would be more most interesting to be the person or force or whatever to have killed Annie to serve that metaphor.

Any thoughts on that, Rob? Well, let's wind it back a little bit first because I think if Annie is the metaphor, and thinking of her as someone who is not just bringing life into the world, but bringing life into the world in a defiant way that is true to her heritage, I think it's something that's embodied in a lot of the production of this show. And one of the things about this episode that really stuck with me was every time we get to this kind of communal singing, these moments around the birth and the death in particular of children, like the whole episode kind of grinds to a halt for a minute. I think in a very good way, in a very

powerful and moving way. We have so many moving parts. We have so many characters to think about and remember and suspect that we have these moments to spend with this community where it's literally just people singing in celebration or in grief. And specifically, this tradition of Anupac and Anuette throat singing, which, you know, having just done research on it, I'm very moved by the idea that it's done in pairs, that it's primarily done by women, and that the fact that it's like, it's an effort to find a shared rhythm, but it's also almost, in some cases, a competition, a contest between the two people, which also feels very true to where we are this season, true detective, and the story we're trying to tell. But as far as how that intersects with these oppressive forces, that's where

I think we get to an interesting figure in this scene in particular, Tanya Tagak, who contributed to the score of this show. And a lot of her music is a blend of this kind of indigenous throat singing with spoken word, with experimental arrangements. And one, I think, particularly relevant song, and one of her most striking songs, this song called Tung, which is a specific response to force assimilation, right? The way that cultures can be robbed of their language and their culture,

and specifically quoted in the song, They tried to take our tongues. Like, they're trying to take our language from us. And the fact that we are spending all the time in this space of the indigenous cultures and the white people of Venice and the way that they bump against each other, the way they intersect, the way Danvers is trying to limit her daughter's exposure to her own culture. It feels all extremely pointed. And it feels pointed in a way that it's, you know, the tongues of it all. And the language and the culture is pointing me back to this idea of not only why it's, you know, the tongues. Annie dead and who killed her, but like, why was it that her tongue showed up at Solal Station?

Like, what is the thematic significance of that as much as anything? Because I think that's one of the Danvers, quote unquote, right questions registered trademark that we haven't really entertained yet. It's like, why the tongue? I loved all of that. I love that you did research on Tanya Tagak, something that, you know, if Tagak sounds familiar to you, it's the last name of all of her character in this episode. And also Tanya was tweeting about the fact that Kavik is.

is the name of one of her kids, and so the character's named after one of her kids as well. So, like, Issa Lopez was very much working together with Tanya, incorporating, like, her name, her kids' names into the story. So she's, like, a very important figure. Well, and to clarify, I think she's literally playing one of the doulas in this scene. Yes, yeah. She's in that scene.

And I think the music, the way that the throat singing is used in this episode, to your point, at the protest, and then at the wake, essentially for the stillbirth is absolutely, arresting. Speaking of, sorry, terrible, grown-worthy transition.

Navarro doesn't want to arrest Annie, right? I didn't mean to do that. But, like, she walks in, when she walks in, and Annie's like,

she's helping. I love that moment. Yeah. That, like, she's like, I'm here to arrest you. She's like, just a minute. And then she says,

she's helping. And, like, Navarro hops in, you know, and starts to help, feels part of the community, a community that she again and again, and we'll talk about a little bit later,

like, feels, you know, distance from. and on the outside of, she's welcomed on the inside of it. But, you know, then she puts her wrists out at the end of the scene and it's like, okay, you can arrest me now.

And Navarro just like so does not want to arrest her. And this idea of true justice versus the letter of the law, which comes up a lot in true detective, is, I think, something to keep our eye on in both this episode in the larger season. We'll come back to it again with like the Wheeler stuff, but just sort of like,

you know, what is what does true justice mean versus following the letter of the law? We talked about this also with Fargo, right? Like when we had a character like Whit Far, played by Warren Morris, whereas like, okay, you're following the letter of the law, but like true justice is getting lost in the mix there. Well, not just Fargo. Fargo justified. Like, clearly this is one of the themes of our time. What is justice? Who gets to enforce it?

Along what lines? If you've done a lot of murder shows, you and I, Rob. All of them have been murder shows. poker face. Unfortunately true. Love and death. Wow. Give us, like, we should do a non-murter show.

Anyway, let's talk about mothers and daughters, right? You mentioned Leah. Leah's desire to connect to her indigenous roots. I like this idea that it's horrible when Danvers, how Danvers reacts to her drawing, the tattooing on her face. But I really like this idea of when she looks at Leah with that marking on her face. she sees Annie Kay, right? Because Annie has that marking on her face, right?

So to see Leah do that, for Leah to embrace her indigenous heritage is for Leah to put herself in a more vulnerable position and this sparks a protectiveness and a fearfulness in Danvers. Rather than her just being a racist asshole, it is tied to this other thing as well.

And not only that, but to show up at the anti-mining protests, right? The line between Leah and Annie is getting thinner and thinner. Right. And I like this idea I was thinking a lot about the fact that, like, I mean, I'm only connected to Mary Vestown, but I'm sure there are other examples.

This idea of like in both Mary Vestown and the show, we've got, you know, an older female detective with a teenage daughter. And there's always friction between, often friction between mothers and teenage daughters. But this idea of like, as a detective who's seen a thing or two, to watch a kid of yours trans, like leave childhood behind and become a young woman and therefore enter into a a very vulnerable demographic that you've likely seen, you know, in Marrivede's town. It's a, you know, it's a young girl who gets almost always a young girl who gets murdered at these stories, right?

So it's like a young woman who gets murdered. And here, you know, Annie Kay is on her mind. So to watch Leah, as you say, the line between Leah and Andy Kaye become thinner and thinner and thinner puts these women, these guardians thinking about these girls that they've raised into this like, yeah, fear response. And it leads to awful breakdown in communication and awful missing each other and awful, you know, just not showing your love and healthy

and a way that can be received. But it comes from that love slash fair space. And Danvers, who has lost so many people. Yes. Thinking about losing Leah is like very much on our mind. Anyway, what else you want to say about this? I think we still are learning about Danvers' relationship. with this kind of culture and what exactly the background is

that led her into this mind space. Because I agree, there's a protective maternal response happening there, especially as it relates to, you know, like the tattoos that Leah is kind of trying on from her tribe. And it's specifically markings that are indicating, like, womanhood and assent into womanhood. I agree that there's something happening there as far as your daughter growing up,

getting out into the world in a way that you see as being dangerous. And she's doing everything she can to shield Leah from that in some ways, even if it includes like literally dragging her to the sink and wiping away the markings of her culture. Yeah. So there's a lot of, you're right, missed, misconnections, missed signals, bad communication style, bad, bad parenting, if we're being totally frank about what's happening here. Horrible, yeah. And Leah is just searching for herself everywhere. She's searching for a place that she can belong.

She's searching for her community. I love that. I think it's interesting that once again, similar to like, this is what happens to sandwich meat. mayonnaise when it's left out or this is what happens to laundry when you don't finish it right away in the first episode. Some of the clues that she's chasing in that, you know, when they lay out the Clark's terrifying trailer, oh, scariness full of photographs and, like, chasing the clues, it's Ariana Grande, right?

It's like knowing when an Ariana Grande album comes out. It's knowing how... Encyclopedic knowledge of the release dates. It's knowing how quickly hair dyes fades. You know what I mean? Like this is like this is female coated. It's like mother coded. Just as it was in the first episode.

Point of order. Blue hair dye actually fades kind of quick. She's like, it took a long time. The blue hair dye faded. I'm like, no. Colored hair dye fades pretty quickly, actually. Speaking of colored hair dye, though, I want to talk about Liz. When they go find Suez in the hairdresser, right?

Yeah. Caught blue-handed, really. Two things about that scene. First of all, if your hairdresser ever pauses midfoil to answer questions, and you've got bleach on your head, which that lady had, like, absolutely not. Is her head just on fire? What is that? Absolutely not.

She's going to have like a bald stripe down on top of her head. I was like, I mean, the comedy of cutting to her when Liz is with a kid was great, but I was like, she still has those foils on her head. Are you kidding me? I thought this episode had maybe like three or four of the funniest moments of this season so far. Some really dark stuff and some really piercing funny stuff, including that cutaway.

What are your other two candidates? Peter asking who Mrs. Robinson was. Got me pretty good. Yeah. And then the Chumpalupa. The Chupilumpa was a nice drop too, especially, you know, we've been in the heat of sifting through all this evidence. Things were as serious as they could be.

Let's just throw a Chumpa Lumpa in there and just see what happens. I thought you were going to say we were in the heat of Wonka Fever. Do you feel personally, attacked as a Wonka defender? No, I feel personally thrilled. Did you see that they're going to put out like a special vinyl of the Wonka soundtrack? Can you name one song on that soundtrack?

This is a movie musical to those who haven't seen it. You would think the music might be important. I have seen it. Couldn't I tell you a single song that appears in that movie. Well, he does sing imagination. Okay, that doesn't count. Reheated old versions of songs. Do not count.

Okay. Speaking of re-hated old versions of things, Denver's on the, like, thinking about Liz as a mom, and we're getting these, like, we're getting these versions of Liz as a bad mom, which I'm not, I'm not defending what she did, you know, scrubbing the marker off of Leah's face, etc. Absolutely not.

But when we get the, like, flashback of her with Holden, her child in last week's episode, or when we see her with the little girl in this episode, right? Or even with Darwin previously, too. Yeah, like, so she has this, like, maternal instinct. It's just like how she's much better with small kids than she is with, you know, this, with Leah who is asserting her independence and inserting her role as an adult. Our listener Matt asked, did Danvers make that mac and cheese with brackish gray water?

I feel like I needed a few more minutes in that kitchen. Rob, any thoughts about, I feel like that water can't be coming to every house. No, it seems like in most cases affecting particular elements of the community more than others. And because, like, I assume this is a house that's probably closer to the middle of town. This is, you know, where Peter and Kayla live. Right. Or no, no, this is sorry.

I guess it's Susan's house. I guess we don't... Susan's house, but it seemed like it was closer to the center of town. It must be. Yeah. But either way, she was also kind of doing the the tuby gelatinous

mac and cheese. So it may not require a lot of water or... Look, you need salt. You need water to boil the pasta. Well, yes. You can't just put the... You can boil the... gray out of the pasta, can't you?

You can't just goop some hard shells. What are you talking about? No, I was thinking about mixing the sauce, but you're right. You actually have to boil those freaking noodles. And you can't be doing that with contaminated water that may or may not be killing people. Like, you need a hell of a Britta to filter. That looks like that water, which we see when Danvers goes to the house for the wake, that water looks like the water at the end of like, if you've been painting and the water

that's left that you've been like dunking all of your paint brushes in. That's exactly what that looked like. Speaking of that wake for the stillbirth, like, Liz, again, on the sort of like maternal front, I mean, you'd like to think that any person would be horrified and taken aback by this. But when Leah flings that at her, like, they've lost their baby, like, does that not matter to you, etc.? And that that Danvers actually shows up is another interesting sort of wrinkle into that character. She's not just a standoffish dick. Like there is like softness to her as well.

So her standing, walking in, feeling deeply unwelcome as she was in that space. But her wanting to go anywhere. I don't know. What do you make of her wanting to go anyway? Well, it seemed like there were at least some kind of glances of understanding of knowing with the other women in the room. Most of them aren't really identified. So we don't know exactly who they are. But Danvers is unwelcome.

She is putting herself out there. but she's putting herself out there in a way that certainly conveys that maternal importance, that universality of experience, the things that transcend even whatever boundaries we try to draw within our communities. And so the fact that everyone who's in that room is able to come together to share in their grief of that moment, I found to be a really powerful thing. Again, these scenes with this throat singing were the standout of the episode for me. And some of that is the sound design of like literally how this sounds and what it captures. what it invokes. And here, in this case, it's about bringing these people together in grief.

In the protest, it's almost like an alienating thing for Leah, where she's almost like disoriented by it in a way. She's looking around the room disconnected from what's happening. In the same way that Danvers is here. Like, Danvers, you know, it's really interesting with Danvers and Navarro because Navarro, I think, is capable of quiet and stillness in a way that Danvers constitutionally does not seem to be. And so part of the reason she goes to the bathroom as much as anything else is just like to freak out for a second to like get out of the public eye for a second and try to wash her hands in what turned out to be gray water. But there is something to that for Danvers where she's she isn't comfortable in these spaces. She's in there to pay her respects, but she's also not there to spend time per se.

You know, as a person, as a woman who has lost her child, Danvers knows what it means to grieve the loss of a child and maybe hoping. that she can connect to that way and then walking in and feeling that hostility because what she stands for, you know, when Leah goes to the protest and she's like, she's greeted by someone who says, oh, are you the daughter of the chief of police? And Leah has to be like, oh yeah, but I'm not, I don't feel

that, you know, so like, Danvers then stands in for protector of the mine, you know, in the eye of this community. I wasn't sure about that line, but that was the most like NPC ass line in this show, which was aren't you the daughter of the chief of police?

I don't know. I have a few other candidates in this episode. That was one of them. Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? Zepbound terseptide may be able to help. Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity. Or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10. 12.5 or 15 milligram injection. Zephound contains terseptide and should not be used with other terseptide containing products or any GLP1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens or reuse needles. Don't take

if allergic to it, or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer, or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop Zepbound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia if you're nursing, pregnant, plan to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepound with a sulfonelioria or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-9-9-9 or visit zepbounds.lily.com.

Pete and Hank. Okay. Another heartwarming tale of parent and child. Let's talk about, let's talk about Hank and taught up all the ways in which he is actively trying to fuck this investigation. All right? You know, calling in the good old boys is... Yep. The real Patriots. Yeah. He knew about Clark and Danny and he didn't say anything about it. Suspicious. And then when Navarro says about Clark, we want him alive. And Hank says, do we?

An officer of the law. Do we? Just out in the open. A bunch of people around. Do we? Do we want this guy alive? So, yeah. Any other suspicious behavior from Hank in this episode?

There was so much. Yeah. I think in particular, what I'm kind of stuck on is the idea of him inviting all his boys to come aid in the search, not only to muddy things up, but to distracting the fact that he's just like off the grid for a lot of this episode. Unreachable by radio.

Completely disappears. And the more people who are searching, the easier it is to disappear until he just kind of pops up at the hockey rink. And when he does, he's bringing the skates for a little Darwin. Yeah. At least purportedly. But really, he's like, hey, what's the Amber's up to? You know, what's she got going on?

So you think the skates are just pure bullshit? I think the skates are kind of real. I think there's a part of him that wants to be a real grandfather, but in this case, it seemed like an excuse to get there and ask some questions about what's going on. Oh, that's so sad. I was like, oh, look, Hank is making a true bid for intimacy with the skates, but you make a compelling point. Good old, we want him alive, do we? Sure. But that sort of idea of making a bid for intimacy, which we talked about a lot with like Havoc and Navarro, you know, and Danvers to

Leah in a certain degree, like when she asked Leah to like decorate the Christmas tree with her or whatever, yeah. There are these like moments where people are trying to connect with each other. Why do you think Danvers is so hesitant to call him out? Because on the one hand, she does call him out. She knocks a hot beverage in his face. It looked a little too light to be coffee. Like, it looked like either tea or maybe a warming cider, but, like, it did not look like coffee to me unless he takes his coffee very watery. But do your job.

You know, Navarro was like, do your job. That's all he gets when Hank is being the most unprofessional asshole there is. What's your theory as to why Danvers isn't calling him out more or punishing him more? I'm mystified by that whole scene and in a lot of this stuff I think we see Hank's ego coming out a little bit like Danvers is giving him orders

telling him what to do trying to actually run her department and you can see him bristling in some of these scenes and you can see a snarl in that performance it's a little different from what was there before but after he gives the Mrs. Robinson dig the look on Danvers

face is a bit perplexing to me like there is a woundedness there where that exchange got to her in a way I wouldn't have necessarily expected. That I'm going to be honest, the way that Hank and Navarro talked about Danvers in this episode

made me... It makes her whole relationship with Peter feel a little less wholesome than it did before. I know. She got it from both Hank and Navarro, right? Navarro's like, better run faster to Pete, etc.

My interpretation, and maybe I'm just like trying to see things in too wholesome a way, is that Liz is like, no, I actually am trying to mentor this kid and like, how dare you turn it into this other thing? Like, we know she's on the make, like, constantly. But they all seem to be like age-appropriate other people's husbands,

like not like a child, you know, a very young man. See, I thought so, too, except with her reaction to this dig. If it was just age-appropriate, if it was just, you know, colleagues, random people around town, science teachers. there's something specific about the way she responds to it that honestly, given the way that sex has been used on this show as a display of power,

made me look at Danvers wielding her own power over Peter very differently here. Like she's ordering Peter around constantly. Oh, constantly. To the point that it's starting to disrupt things for him with Kayla at home. I mean, it was disruptive to his home life with Kayla from episode one, right? She's like, that's Denver's messaging. She, you.

She says, jump, you say how high. And we don't know what time of morning it was when Danvers texted him after he comes in, tries not to wake Kayla, does wake Kayla up, Kayla's studying. She has a test at 7 in the morning at night? You don't know? Probably in the morning. I assume it's 7. She was sleeping. 7 in the morning.

It is a nursing school so you could see it being a night school kind of shift in situation. But she was like, I'm up. I might as well stay up. So that says early morning to me. Yeah. But how early did he creep back into bed? Is that like a 5 a. It feels like 5 a.m.

So this feels like a 5.30 a.m. text, something like that. Yeah. And I'm just like, that's, I have a new section this week at the end of the episode that's going to be HR violations from Danvers. She's not compliant, Joe. I don't know. Spoiler alert. I don't think texting at 5.30 a.m. is quite an HR violation, but it is borderline.

It's not great. But the contrast in here between the officers, too, is something worth flagging. Like, caring about the wrong things. it seems looks like Hank. Seems to be maybe in bed with the mine, clearly did enough wrong to get demoted or fired from his job, but not caring about things at all

looks like the goofballs at the crime scene who are taking selfies with the corpsicle. Caring about it and trying to do the job as best you can looks like this. And it's like a complete erosion of a normal life. I don't know what the balanced

true detective lifestyle looks like and it may just not be feasible with the level of diligence and specificity that's required to actually get neck deep into these cases. Do you think that the Alaska Police Department, similar to Spotify, do they have a wellness week? Like, do they take a week off for wellness?

Like, we allegedly do, but we don't really. They probably should in the midst of an extended darkness winter. Yeah. You mentioned Danvers ordering Peter Round, but Pete, feeling threatened my Navarro, I thought was interesting, right? So Navarro the original apprentice comes back in. She's calling him freshman. She's sort of like hazing him a little bit.

But first of all, Liz telling him to crack at his phone and him being like, excuse me. But also he does it. But he does it. He figures it out. I mean, P is so resourceful. He's like, we can't get a doctor, but I have a cousin who's a vet. So will that work? Is that resourceful?

The investigation, like, reaching. I have a friend who's a vet levels of desperation. It's not great. It's not great for the overall situation. But Navarro was saying it's called Muckluck Telegraph, not for white boys. It's like, you know, something he puts Pete on the back foot.

And then Pete, like, he's very sweet, but he has the moment with Kailoris, like, I don't want to be a sweet idiot. Yeah. And then he says, I don't tell you, you can't be a doctor.

I'm not a doctor, you idiot. I'm in nursing school. Incredible. Very, very tough. But yeah, Pete, Pete, who like, is so,

eager to please Danvers and be like a, you know, a golden retriever puppy for her, you know? The golden retriever bonafies are confirmed and confirmed and confirmed in this episode. And then for Navarro to sweep in and just like with her completely different energy. And for Danvers, she and Danvers have this like established rhythm and rapport. You know, that's just a, I think that's an interesting element that they didn't, again, to your point last week about things that they sort of hit us over the. head with versus things that are sort of subtly sifted in. I think this, like, Pete feeling threatened my Navarro was, like, a very subtle touch in the

episode that I really liked. Well, especially after last week, we get the whole, you know, extended sequence with him in Danvers asking the right question, ask the question, ask the next question, ask the next question. And when Danvers tries that in this episode with Navarro, she says, fuck your games. I'm not doing that. Let's talk about unreliable narrators and the whole Wheeler thing, which we raised last week and comes, you know, comes home to Roos this week. We are once again drawn into some pretty obvious exposition when Pete asks Danvers,

David's like, okay, here's, here's a bedtime, one bedtime story for you, right? Here we go. But it comes with a fun twist, right? Because she's telling us about William Wheeler, killed an 18-year-old girl. We walk into the teal-tastic room that he's sitting in. and she's telling us he killed himself it was a suicide

he was dead when they got there and then he's whistling what is he whistling twist and shout very creepily and a very like the thing that Rob hates which is the slow role

of a song over a movie trailer Oh my gosh We also later in this episode did a literal moody, breathy, ghosty cover of Twist and Shout as Navarro is walking out on the ice Okay we get two other moments

of Twist and Shout because we get that and I actually think I listened to it a couple times I think that's Jody Foster singing. Is it? Like as a mom would sing to her kid sort of thing is sort of how it sounded to me. But before that, via the closed captions, when Danvers is putting like a turkey away in the fridge,

she hears it from the fridge. Why is the fridge singing Twist and Shout? It's the smart fridge. This is 2023, Joe. Technology exists. I am glad, though, in this scene with Wheeler, we get the creepiest rendition of Twist and Shout. and an acknowledgement of an important truth, which is that twist and shout is not just catchy,

but like hive mind level earworms so powerful, it could in fact be evil catchy. I love that. So here again, we get that theme of like justice versus letter of the law, right? Like when Danvers is telling the story, even before we get to the, did they start up kill a dude together, question mark?

Earlier in that William Wheeler's victims were sort of in and out of the hospital, etc. She says, we knew how that was going to end, but there was nothing we could do. So, and then last week, just a reminder of the Wheeler thing coming up in last week's episode, last week, Navarro says, listen to the Wheeler thing. And then Danvers says, shut up, no. And then Navarro says, no, we did exactly what we needed to do. And then Danvers says, no, we're not doing that, right? So we did exactly what we needed to? So what do you feel like happened in that teal room? Rob, Mahoney, Detective Mahoney. think we are primed to think based on their characters that Navarro killed him.

Based on her, you know, it's laid out very early. She's the one who has the thing about women getting hurt. Danvers seems to have a very particular opinion of that and an opinion of Navarro. And certainly Navarro is the one who suffered some kind of professional consequences, if nothing else, or couldn't deal with it in a way where she felt she needed to put some distance between her and Danvers or her in the situation. I would say it's kind of pointing that way, but all of our conversations today about Danvers and identification with mothers and with daughters.

You could see her looking at this specifically, 18-year-old girl. That's a detail that Danvers lays out herself and freaking out in that moment a little bit and losing it in that moment in a way where she kind of forgets who she is. No matter what, whether is Navarro pulling the trigger or not, it feels like Danvers covered it up, right?

Because Navarro getting busted down to the troopers just feels like a, this is how we're going to cover this up, right? You and I are not going to interact on a daily basis. I will cover this for you, but I can't trust you anymore because you did this thing in the Wheeler case. Really fascinating piece of information, though, is like, Danvers feeds Pete this whole story. We see the flashback, but Pete obviously is not watching the flashback with us. But when Pete is talking to Hank later, he says, do you know what happened there?

She won't tell me. He says that after Liz spun her little yarn for him. So, like, Pete didn't buy the story, which he's not a sweet little idiot. He could crack phones and, you know, call vets and stuff like that. I don't know. Pete's on the case. What do you think about that? Did he not buy it, or was he kind of fishing for how Hank would describe it, too?

Not necessarily for the disbelief of the story, but, like, what will Hank tell me? How will he paint this image of Danvers? And maybe he's kind of investigating both sides at once. But I did think this whole sequence, this extended flashback sequence with the Wheeler case, in an episode with not a lot of season one, Easter eggs felt like the biggest kind of season one callback to the big op in the middle of season one

that unfolds in kind of similar fashion of a telling of a certain story above board, and then there's the reality of the violence underneath it and who was killed how and why and whether it was legal or not. And the fact that we shouldn't, like, reinforcing the idea that maybe we shouldn't trust everything our detectives say, just because they're at the center of the frame all the time. I mean, and this is a constant thing in season one that the big op, as you mentioned, but also

just throughout Rust, we would cut to Rust and Marty telling the story of something, and then we would watch a flashback and something different was going on. And so that is, yeah, another hallmark. And that's, to be honest with you, I don't mind the spiral at all. The spiral, I think, is interesting in a sort of a, you know, symbolic kind of way. but the Tuttle connection last week and the Cole connection

I much prefer this kind of connection where it's like unreliable narrators, tricky memories like formal stuff formal stuff, yeah, absolutely. I'm not with like, I'm not on Nick Pizzolado's team

because I don't know if you saw that Nick Pizzolato is like out there rolling his eyes that someone says it's happening. Like be quiet, Nick Pizzolato. We also have your season's two and three. Let's relax. Okay, quit pro quo.

Clarice, quid pro quo Evangeline, let's talk about Navarro and Cavic in the fishing hut, don't call it a shed. Again, some not very subtle exposition drawn out of the character, right? Similar to Pete being like Danvers, sit down and tell me what happened with the Wheeler.

Cowick's like, tell me about your mom. But again, this is a bid for intimacy from Kavik, which is something that we've been watching him try to do all season. So in that way, it was of a piece. Bad dad, he drank.

hit their mom. So again, he hit them. So like, triggering for the Wheeler incident, triggering for Annie Kay, all the sort of stuff like that. Julia's mental health is tied to what happened with Vangeline's mom. One day she ran out and never came back. She was killed. Fucker was never found.

But I think even more importantly than the mom stuff in this episode, though we can talk about whether or not we think that'll, I don't think it plays into a larger conspiracy, but we can talk about that. Basically with only three episodes left, I'm skeptical. of that. But Evangeli's connection to her indigenous side, right? So she says that her mom never told her, her native name, right? This came up in episode one at the crab factory interrogation with that woman B, right? She says, what's your name, hun? Who's your Aka? And then it comes up again when they encounter Oliver, where he asks, Evangeline, what's your name? And he says, no, who are you? And they

says, oh, you forgot, didn't you? Right? So this idea of Evangeline's disconnection to her mother's side of the family, to her roots. How do you see that playing out? Why does that feel important here at this point in the story? Well, I think we're kind of informing the themes of the

episode. We're tying into a lot of what's happening with Leah. And you can see kind of a straight line between growing up, not knowing who you are, not knowing your name, forgetting where you've come from, to where Leah is now and kind of strutely. and scrapping and grabbing for those kinds of things. We don't really know Navarro's journey with all that. If she's ever really had those kinds of moments,

clearly it hits her a certain way, especially when she and Danvers are kind of communing in the car after the fact. And it's like you wouldn't understand what that's like to not remember your name, to not remember where you've come from, to not have that kind of identifying factor. So I hope we get some more of Navarro

and packing some of that for herself. Because so far it's just been kind of thread, And maybe that's a thread too much in a show that's already pretty layered and pretty heavy and there's a lot to unspool. But those are character beats from her I really appreciate.

And this is something that, you know, I think it was Andy said a little snarkily on the watch, which I don't mind. Just basically this idea of like when we watch these detective stories, they're trying to solve the case, but really they're trying to solve the case

of who they are, right? Classic Greenwald moment. But like, I think that, yeah, so what are they looking for? And so is it, Liz is looking for a way to connect to her daughter. A healthy way to feel whole again

from this trauma she experienced in losing her son and her husband. I don't know. And then for Navarro, it's that connection to her native self. That side of it. Well, the fact that she's come back here

speaks to some effort of that. Because I will say, just speaking for the Julia part of this. Yeah, yeah, I want to ask you. If you have a sibling was going through a very tough time, seeing things, hearing things emotionally and mentally distressed. I wouldn't think the first place you would take them is into an endless night at the edge of the world. Yeah. In a maybe haunted town. Maybe not the first bet. She's like, here you are by the old shipwreck where I know you love to wander.

The fact that that was her spot was kind of incredible. I love the, you know someone because you know where they'll go when they're in trouble trope. But the fact that it was just a random old shipwreck. I found delightful and kind of funny. I got to be honest. I'm trying to think if I know anyone well enough to know where they would go in a crisis. I have like one or two people.

But I think I could maybe figure out where my sister would go. Well, this is the one person Navarro knows well enough to locate her in that moment. Do you think you could find your brother if your brother were missing? He would probably just be like in a movie theater

in a five movie consecutive run. So I think it'd just be a matter of narrowing down the theaters. I think that's doable. Okay. This is the other question I want to ask you, which is how spooky is too spooky for true detective, right? Let's talk about some ghost stuff that we get in this episode. First and foremost, ghost oranges. First of all, the oranges, apparently, according to Finn Bennett, who plays Pete, he's like, pay attention to the oranges. I don't like, in this post-godfather world, I don't know what to tell you about oranges, but I just sort of like, again, we got this in Fargo. We just got it. We just got it in Fargo, and I was just sort of like, oh, God, like. But our listener Carter wrote in about the oranges, I thought it was really interesting. Quote, looking into it, scurvy is a perennial problem in Alaska's history, especially to outsiders like gold miners. Here, the orange marks outsiders unable to resist the environment like the natives.

Hank's hillbillies, the miners, etc. This beautiful, vibrant orange, last sun-kissed 1,000 miles away, so foreign and precious, just slips out of a hillbilly's bag, forgotten and uncared for. decadent, how disrespectful to the tundra, it stinks of foreign interlopers, dangerous, ignorant tourists, destined to learn fatal lessons in the dark. Carter, this email. Love it. I know. What do you make of Carter's interpretation of the orange here? I'm glad he or she clarified. Just because my thought with the orange was, look, this is a sub-freezing search. I'm just thinking chapped lips and citric acid are not going well together. Yeah. That was my primary concern. How are you going to peel the orange? You're not taking your gloves off to peel that

orange on the tundra, right? Why would you? That would be insane. I guess you could bite it open. I've seen people bite open. I have a thing with orange peal so I could never, but I guess people could do that. You could eat the peel. I've eaten the peel before. You remember the thing where like when you were young, you ate a food and then maybe you got sick

and then you never want to eat that food again? Yeah, food trauma. That's my relationship with orange peels. It was like a brand muffin with orange peel in it. Never again. Never again in my life. Okay. Let's get a ghost rules refresher.

Yes. You are Rose in last week's episode, right? Rose says the thing about the dead is that some of them come and visit because they miss you. Some come because they need to 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. Okay. So Navarro sees, I would say, two ghosts in this episode.

Via flashback. Chris Ryan and I were debating this over text. I think that's clearly Liz's kid. It seems to be. Right. Holden, the Polar Bear stuffy and then he says, you know,

tell my mommy and then indistinct whispering, right? So the closed captioning says. Chris texted me because he was like, what does he say there? Because we were watching the screener without captioning on it, right? So he's like, tell my mommy what. And we both like set our theories

back and forth, but that's why we do this on Tuesday. We wait for the closed captioning, Rob. We leave the hard work to Chris and Andy. We just get scoop up whatever the subtitles offer us. So my mommy indistinct whispering. So Liz's kid, would that fall under the category of some come because they need to tell you something that you need to hear? I would think so.

Okay. Versus Lunt, who is maybe not a ghost, but I'm going to call him a ghost anyway. I think that falls under some of them just want to take you with them. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Very, you know, when you invoke your best throat. roady evil exorcist voice.

That seems to be what you're going for. It's funny. Everyone went with Exorcist. For some reason, I think it's just because of the Swedish accent. I went with Pennywise. Like, it felt very Bill Scarscar and Pennywise to me. Hello, Georgie. I was just like horrified.

No, either way, horrifying. But this does feel, you know, you watched season one of True Detective recently. I think, I think no matter what Intra Detective, the first three seasons, supernatural-esque things happen, but they always had some kind of plausible explanation. I think that's true. Yellow King SpongeBob at gmail.com, if you disagree with me.

This feels like we're taking it a step further into, it's not just, and I have a good email about this that I'm going to read in a second, but I'm just curious for you, like, is this pushing the boundary of horror of supernatural in the true detective world? How do you feel about it?

It is pushing the boundary a little bit, and I think maybe it's changing the, terms because season one, I agree. Most things that happen are pretty plausible. Like, Rust sees a lot of stuff in True Detective season one. But it's because of trauma and drugs and complete psychological burnout, right? There's like an explanation for why he would be seeing it. I wonder in this case, if we're looking at in the spirit of all this talk about community

and this town, if there's more of like a communal effect of a shared trauma, a disconnect from reality from being here at the edge of the world, the fact that they are kind of slowly being poisoned by whatever is happening with the mine or the water. There's a lot happening collectively that makes me wonder if people are still kind of seeing visions along the same semi-plausible lines. Mass hallucination sort of thing. Kind of. Or something to that effect just because we hadn't really had a lot of confirmation that Navarro

specifically had been seeing a lot of things out in the world. We knew she had had some visions and some PTSD memories. And certainly that kind of flashback to her mother. But in terms of her experiencing voices and certainly experiencing something like this where Lund is not only incapacitated and sedated, but fully blind, and he leans up and looks directly at her and points at her

and says some very disturbing things to her. We have entered a new realm. So upsetting. Yeah, the theory of mass hallucination via pollution from the mine is one of the more popular ones floating around a true detective land. I personally would find that fairly unsatisfactory. as like an answer. I don't mind plausible explanations

for supernatural things, but like mass hallucination is so nebulous. I don't know. Our listener Mel pointed out something really interesting about the camera's perspective when these things happen. They wrote, when Rose sees

Travis for the second time in episode one, she's washing dishes and sees him outside. She goes outside to him, but instead of following her out there, we, through the camera, stay inside, peering out, and we still can see Travis too. If she was just hallucinating him, I feel like we wouldn't have still been able to see him once the camera was no longer from her POV.

When thought out Lund, or what's left of him, does his best Linda Blair impression, we see him sit up behind Navarro, again, outside of her POV. So even though, because she's not facing him. So even though no one else is around or can see it, I'm interpreting that as something that actually happened to her and not something that she is imagining. So yeah, we see Lund to sit up in bed when Navarro has her back to him. Yeah.

So does that, do those camera choices of we're outside the perspective of the character who's having the moment, does that lend any credence to this is actually happening? I don't think it necessarily confirms it. I would be wary on those lines just because cameras can be experiential to. And so it doesn't necessarily have to be in the eye line, in the direct perspective. It can be more like what that character is feeling in that moment. And there are ways in which even Navarro is looking the other way, the fact that someone creaks up in their hospital bed.

So upsetting. Don't like it. But it's something that she is something that she could hear enough to turn around, right? It's something that she's there to experience in a way that she's not looking at it, but I don't take that to mean it's literally happening. I think it's interesting to think about because Issa Lopez is very, very intentional with her camera. She talked about this in episode one when she talked about

the way the camera was roaming around Salal Station as this almost like external malevolent evil sort of this presence going through the station, something to think about. Okay, I want to zoom back to twist and shout in the fridge because I wrote this in the notes and I forgot to ask you, if your fridge were to sing you

a song, Rome, what would you want your fridge to sing? Something non-judgmental. I would hope something... Honestly, twist and shout separated from the show is not a bad choice. Something beetlesy and playful is not a bad choice. I could go for the opening riff of Octopus's Garden, to be honest, the little ditty that opens it. I think that could be nice. I more on something melodic than something I'm going to have to think a lot about every time I open it.

Okay. I told you that my alarm clock on my phone is she came in through the bathroom window by the Beatles, right? I mean, it's a great choice. It starts, the opening riff, I'm just going to say this. I think I did tell you this. And I think on air, so people have already heard. heard this. But I'm just saying, if you haven't recently listened to the opening of she came through the bathroom window, because that is just that'll wake you up. Okay. HR violations of the week.

I'm just going to ask you to choose of the two. Yep. Isn't Denver throwing a hot beverage in Hank's face, despite what he just said? Is it throwing, she's a superior, throwing the beverage in his face, or is it literally laughing at Navarro's expression of faith?

Like, laughing out loud when your subordinate expresses their personal religious faith. I think you have your answer right there. Number two? Yeah, strong number two. On that conversation when they have about faith, Navarro says, do you just want to disappear, just walk out, never stop?

Any thoughts about that, Rob? It's certainly the best explanation we have for what happened to the scientists so far. We still have zero understanding of why they just walked out into the cold, other than to say that they were scared of something. And that is the one critical contribution we get from vet. Cousinvents. It's this idea that they did not die from freezing because that would look dramatically different for all animals.

I did like his contribution as far as kind of smoothing out the difference between human and animal at this stage and the story and what everyone is going through. What is happening to human beings is increasingly like what has been happening to the wildlife around this community. So I did like the way that that all kind of evened out, and we're starting to see some of the similarities of human beings as part of that larger environmental structure.

And he makes the direct connection to Caribou. I think Caribou die of plane fright running terrified, which is how the season opened, of course. We got an email from a listener who comes from, like, Michigan, Minnesota, so I'm to consider this like a carryover from Fargo. Melissa asks, would that mass of bodies really thawed in 48 hours? takes three days to defrost a 15-pound turkey in the fridge. And also, as an almost lifelong northern Michigan and Minnesota,

I can't believe a vet would have to tell Danvers how someone dies from hypothermia. I've known that since I was a kid. It's not uncommon around here to hear news stories about someone who passes out in the snow on the way home from a party and frees to death. As an Alaska police officer, Danvers would have seen this more times than she can count. So I think that's fair. I think there's some moments of that in the show of people telling each other things they should probably know.

And usually that's for the service of the audience. In this case, it does maybe wonder about the suspects and why certain people are appearing to not know things. Like one of my friends Derek flagged the fact that Bryce, the geologist, didn't know what had happened at Sol Station, had no idea of the violence there yet, even as most of the rest of the community seemed to. And here we have the same thing with Oliver Tagak, where the other nomads, as soon as they say Solis Station, they see.

seem to understand why the police are there. But Oliver has no knowledge of what happened. And I don't know if that's just so we can get his reaction, where he kicks them out of the apartment. We get this very emotional response from him. But it seemed worth noting. So let's get to our, on that front, let's get to our roundup of questions that need answering.

And you mentioned, like, all the threads is a very thready season so far. And Chris and Andy, I think very fairly, we're asking, like, are there too many balls in the air? Are we asking to look at too many things? Like, where am I supposed to look? Too many misdirections, maybe. Too many, like, throw so many questions in the pot that we can't just focus on what happened to the men

or what happened to Andy. We've got all these other things that we're trying to answer. So here's some questions. Who killed the men? You don't know. What about the men on the ice? Why did they go out there, right? What does it mean we woke her?

What does that mean? Who is she? Who was awoken? Who was awoken? Who did the awakening? Who did the awakening and why did they awaken? And where is she post-awakening? Yeah.

Who killed Annie? What did Annie find in the ice? What about her tongue? The Wheeler thing? What happened to Navarro's mom? Why was Annie insistent on going to Salal? Susan says, quote, she was like obsessed with coming, right? Yeah.

That made me think that she had some other purpose there. That it wasn't just Clark. She was like trying to dig into it. what they were studying there, something like that? Digging into what they were studying, or the fact that I'm going to be honest, the idea of her tattooing the spiral on her back because she had dreamt it a bunch of times,

and then as soon as she tattooed it, she stopped having the dreams. Like, something about that idea really creeps me out, like the idea of an image occupying your brain until you make it a part of you. Yeah. And so whether she was there for something tangible and scientific to use against the mind

or something relating to some potential darkness that is looming out there, She clearly had some other interest. Clark took an interest in her. One other question we don't know is, like, why did she want to keep their relationship a secret so much? That was my next question. Excellent, perfect.

Why didn't anyone anyone to know about Clark? What's going on with the water? Whose husband hasn't, Danvers fucked? What's Hank hiding? What happened to Liz's husband and kid? Any other questions I'm missing? Yeah, I think we could also ask, what else is going on with the mining interest,

the nature of that endeavor overall. Like, what are they mining for? What have they uncovered? What result has it had on the town, even beyond potential water contamination? And who the hell is mining lady Kate? And what's her whole deal? What's going on with the crabs of the crab factory?

Why are there no crabs at the crab factory? And why is Blair, why are Blair's fingerprints? Fingy prints. Fingy prints at the scene of the crime. How is Blair? connected. Was laundromat grandma there folding the clothes? Clearly. One last contribution from our listener, which is a book corner from Dave. We mentioned a couple

episodes ago that Blood Meridian, the Karmik McCarthy book, gets like a lingering shot at Solal Station. It's one of the books sort of like left open, having, you know, was like in the act of being read when the miners abandoned the station. Dave writes, Carter McCarthy's Blood Meridian largely centers around a gang of men in 1849 to 1850, traveling around the USA, Mexico area, massacring indigenous American people, or coming across scenes where the people they're hunting have massacred other groups of people. It's a very violent story that is at times a pretty challenging read, but it's still kind of great. Here are Dave put together some bullet points on similarities. Both night country and blood meridian involve violence towards and strained relations

with an indigenous population. Both are set in an area that is in each story's time considered some sense wild or uncharted in both settings are on a border slash edge or unknown in some sense Alaska border versus Mexican border, right? This isn't an Alaska border town, but Alaska being so, I guess, like the border between the U.S. and the great icy yonder, I suppose. Both involve ritualistic violence and characters finding the remains of people displayed in grotesque, but also quite specific ways. Both involve a blurred boundary between gritty realism and the supernatural. Both stories are very much set in reality with sprinkling of spooky supernatural

shit. And last but not least, ghost-like characters are god-like characters. There is a main character in Blood Meridian that without any detail, explained, comes across the supernatural or devil-like. He often appears out of nowhere and limited backstories about him almost imply he's been alive for too long to be human. So yeah, Blood Meridian, that's like a fun, you know, watch fortitude, watch Winter's Bone, read Blood Meridian by Corvarty.

Yeah, watch the thing. Watch the thorns of the lambs. Watch signs of the lambs. Watch your fingies around the crab machine. Anything else that you want to say before we go, Rob? Anything we miss? One ominous quote from Kavik that jarred its way into my brain. As he's having, you know, this quid pro quo with Navarro trying to learn a little bit about

her. Alaska girls always come back. Dude, I'm not sure if he's talking in a roundabout way about potential ghosts coming back. ancient creatures buried under the ice coming back. All I know is Alaska girls always come back. Wow. A lesser beach boys hit. Yeah.

Not a lot of surfing to be done up there, it turns out. I wonder if there is surfing, like, in the warm months. Can you surf in Alaska? I really hope or not. You should not. It's certainly not in the gray water. Don't do that. Yeah, don't surf with the gray water.

Okay. That's it for episode three. I think of true detective. I really think we did it. Keep your eye out for more teal. Issa Lopez's tease that episode four is like the dark night of the soul for the season.

So if you thought corpsicles and tongues Was this not the dark night of the soul? We've been night for days on end. And Lord being like, hello, Evangeline. Like, if you thought that wasn't dark enough, we're, I guess, going to get darker in episode four.

So please do send your thoughts, theories, prayers, chupilupas to Yellow King SpongeBob at Gimel.com and yeah, Kavik is you were suspicious with Kavik, but he is like...

He's something. He's something. He's around. He's here when he has like no real reason to be here this week. You know what I mean? But he's here anyway. Interesting. Thanks to Detective Mahoney for always being on the case of me.

Thanks to Kai Grady for his great production work on this episode. We'll see you. you next week for the dark episode of Night Country, episode four. Bye.