The Prestige TV Podcast - ‘True Detective: Night Country’ Episode 4 Deep Dive

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

Jo and Rob return to break down the fourth episode of ‘True Detective: Night Country.’ They discuss a roundup of the show’s recurring themes, including its continued use of teal, deepening connection to Sedna the sea goddess, and significant expansion of supernatural horror compared to seasons past. Along the way, they talk about some of this season’s inconsistent storytelling and why the shortened six-episode season has been somewhat damaging to the overall narrative. Later, they theorize about the ambiguous role Rose Aguineau plays in Navarro’s life. Hosts: Joanna Robinson and Rob Mahoney Producer: Kai Grady Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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There's no hell. There's no ghosts. Fucking beyond. There's nobody out there just waiting for us, watching us. There's nothing except us. We're here, Navarro. Okay? Alone.

The dead are gone. Fucking gone. I'm back to the Prestige TV podcast feed. I'm Joanna Robinson. Join me today is Rob Mahoney and Rob. I got some bad news. What is it? Hit me.

There's still no crab at the crab factory. There never will be again. If we've learned anything from this season, humanity and nature are completely disconnected. Our crab needs are not being met. Well, I mean, what will I be without a crab cake? You know what I mean? Like you've got to have your crab cakes or I don't know.

Anyway, hello. How are you doing? I'm doing well. I mean, I could do with more crab cakes. I could do with more honestly in a very Christmas-centered episode, not as much seafood as I was expecting. Like, no one can put a fish on the table. Nobody can put some crab on the table at any of these things, any of these Christmas feasts. Hmm.

Yeah, it's not really turkey country, is it? And yet, Danvers just dumped an entire turkey in a trash. There's people who are like living off canned foods and Liz just dumped an entire butterball. into the trash. A pack of Oreos cost $20. And she throws a whole turkey into the trash. We need to get into the turkey part a little later. I have

a lot of thoughts about Denver's overall cooking strategy and Christmas Day planning, or Christmas Eve planning, I should say. I'm a little dismayed by what happened there, to say the least. Okay. We're here to talk about episode four of two detective. I don't want to wait for this take. I want to hear it right now. Is

your worry that She waited until too late in the day to start the turkey. And my follow-up question to you is, we don't know what time of day do we that she dumped that turkey in the church. We don't know the exact time. And believe me, I scrubbed looking for clocks, looking for any indicator because it is pitch black outside, as it often is this season.

But she's rolling in and she has a completely raw turkey, completely unbrined raw turkey, which is insanity, absolute insanity. And she's pleading to Leah. oh, just hang around. I'm going to cook. Lady, that bird is not going to be ready for five hours minimum.

You haven't even spatchcocked that thing? What are you doing, Liz Danvers? Why are you like this? And why are you trying to get your daughter to just sit on her hands for five hours while you roast the turkey? I feel like, that was not the biggest turkey I've ever seen. I feel like, and it's not stuffed.

It's not stuffed. Stuffing always slows it down. I think she could get that bird out in four hours. Three and a half. really trying. That oven is not preheated. Nothing is seasoned. Nothing is treated. No sides have been made and I know she can do that while it's in the oven. It's just a disaster zone.

Absolutely. You're totally ignoring that there were definitely decorative sprigs of rosemary on that, on that turkey before it went in the trash. Anyway, there's no crab at the craft factory. There's no turkey on the dinner table at the Danvers household. It is the saddest Christmas Eve you ever did see here at Ennis Alaska. I was almost going to, we're going to go today in chronological order through the episode because I couldn't figure out like a really clean way to section these things in any other way.

But I almost was going to section off by character and ask you to rank it from like worst Christmas Eve to best. But it's like Navarro, Navarro's is definitely the worst. And so it's not even really a competition. But Navarro was invited to a. a great Christmas and got to partake in a great Christmas before all the tragedies started unfolding. Oh, well, yeah, we know who's having the best Christmas and it's to be able to shop. There's zero question.

All right, before we get into details of what's on the table across all of Ennis, couple little details to get through. Number one, and I already sent this to you and Kai over the weekend, but we should let our listeners know that there was a New York Times crossword puzzle question. that it was about like, you know, thing featured on the open ice. I forget actually what the clue was. This is a really bad podcast bit. Anyway, the answer was Ice Hut.

It was like a hut, not a shed. Well, it was like fixture on an ice lake or something like that, I think was the clue. Yeah, but then ice was in the answer, so it can't have anyway. Point for me. Frozen Lake, maybe. Frozen Lake, there you go. Our listener, Michael sent us in to be like, do you think Will Shorts listens to your podcast? And I was like, I wish Will Shorts listen.

to this one. Get at us, please, if that's the case. The other, the other thing that I just noticed this week,

which is a little negligent of me, is, Rob, did you notice at the end of every opening credits, it's a different

image at the end every week. I did not clock that, actually. Yeah, so, like, the first week it was Swall Station.

Last week, it was the Ice Hut. This week, it's the dredge, the place they wind up at the end. Sure. like ghosty, you know, metal stairs and, you know, all that sort of stuff.

So that's just a fun, I don't know how they're picking the locations. Maybe they're just like, what's this spooky ukiest location of the week? But that's just a fun thing to track that I haven't been tracking so far. And we only have two more episodes to go. So perfect timing. Well, it's a good time to flag it. Now we can reverse engineer what the previous episodes might have meant. And we can certainly keep an eye on the last two as we as they pop.

up. A quick corrections department. I don't know that I've told you this yet. Maybe I have or haven't. What have we done? Oh, it's just me. A couple listeners wrote in to say that the actress playing

Blair, she of three fingers only on one hand, was Gene Wilder's daughter, Catherine Wilder. Gene Wilder just of a daughter named Catherine Wilder, this is not the same person. No relation. No relation. Same name, no relation. As usual, we regret the error.

apologies to the entire Wilder family. Yes. Antigilda. All right. So, and also you might be surprised you're hearing this on a Monday. Shock and awe.

We are now a Monday podcast. How about that? What do you know? What do you know? Do you remember that I introduced a segment last week called Watch Watch, which is just like what people have decided we should be watching? Yes. I have three new candidates for you.

Okay. One is a movie that you and I were talking about, the other day for a different reason, but Wind River, starring Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olson, and the goat, Graham Green,

which is another, like, dead girls, native population, a great film, wonderful film. I was listening to the official podcast and the DP of this episode mentioned Sicario as sort of like a visual palette.

You just gave me like a hedge... What are your Sicario feelings? Oh, just a fucking bang. of all bangers of a movie. Absolutely. You and I have been talking about some other recent perfect film,

Sicario. Absolutely perfect movie. Pitch perfect, well executed, procedurally brilliant, and a great example of this kind of genre, how you can find character

in something that seems otherwise quite cold. You're a dene guy, then. Huge, huge dene head. Okay. Bring on the sandworms.

I'm ready to ride. And the last one at least, there's an episode of the X-Filed called Ice, which is a very direct homage to the thing. So it makes sense that it would remind people of this. But Mulder and Scully go into a science station in the freezing cold, and there's a thing that's inhabiting people. Okay.

Teal Watch 2024. What do you, Rob Mahoney, want to add to Teal Watch 2024? This is a really interesting episode for Teal Watch, I think, because there's obviously a lot of Julia happening. and a lot of that is naturally teal coated because of her hair. And in particular, teal-haired Julia backdropped by the teal police station after she's brought in at the beginning of this episode.

It has me noticing the teal in a different way and making me think about it in a different way, which is the people who are usually most enveloped by teal I'm noticing are usually inupiac women and usually in this story, the most vulnerable characters in the story that's kind of unfolding in front of us. And so I'm getting really nervous

when I'm also seeing so much teal around Leah and I'm also seeing so much teal around Kayla the antenna are going up. The hackles are raised. I'm very concerned about many of our characters but geez, this was another teal-heavy episode. Leah's room is teal-tastic. Teal walls and teal lights.

Yeah, those like the string lights are teal-colored walls and then there also seems to be like a mural on one of her walls that looks like a sort of a native woman perhaps C goddess question mark we'd talk about that in a second two things

we got a bunch of emails about the fact that on the color wheel the opposite of teal or turquoise if you prefer is orange and we know

we're watching oranges on this show so orange and turquoise orange and teal somebody think about and then we got a bunch of emails about like shouldn't we be

calling it turquoise watch instead of teal watch because as like let's say our listener Ramada points out Native American tribes in southeastern the United States believe that the color blue protected evil spirits for this reason.

They frequently painted the doors to their homes blue. As a stone of protection, Native Americans often use turquoise blue stone. And in the flashback, in this week's episode, in the flashback where Danvers is playing with Holden, and they're doing this sort of like one-eye peek-a-boo, she's wearing a turquoise ring. So, you know, something to think about, I'm going to keep it to your watch because I just am enjoying, we're not going to let that go. but if you, listener at home, want to say turquoise,

then I support you in that. Absolutely. We fully support it. But either way, it's getting ominous at this stage. I think this episode in particular lends itself to a lot of Leah and Annie comparison. I think we see Danvers

kind of increasingly fretting over how close Leah is getting to the kind of person Annie was before she disappeared. And so all of that wrestled in all of this teal. Again, I'm a little anxious about it. And I think there's room, too, to go back and,

to previous episodes and look at the teal. I was flashing through some episode one scenes just to get a refresher on a couple things and a bunch of teal popped out. Some of the uniforms at the crab factory, there's no crab, but there is teal. There was a ton of teal around the crime scene where Annie was found, shipping containers, jackets.

Yeah. So all of those things, look, I'm really nervous for a majority of our characters at this point, but in particular, Leah, I would be surprised if Leah does not go missing or is not imperiled at some point by whatever the malevolent forces here.

It seems like so many of our plot threads are pointing in that direction. Leah is a good person to be worried about. I got really worried about little Pete, Pete Pryor in this episode. I thought he was a goner on Christmas Eve. I was very, very concerned. True Detective Season 1,

connective tissue watch. You're all in the night country now. sounding a lot like you're all in Carcosa now, obviously. I think that's the only real connection I found this week. Anything else jump out to you? Rob? There's some echoes, but nothing too explicit. I will say, I want to talk more about Hank because it's just a very, very sad Hank episode,

but him at home on Christmas watching Elf with his sad little dinner, it reminded me of Marty in season one, like going into his little TV dinner alone in his own sad little existence, just a man completely isolated by his own making. That was kind of a parallel for me, but not an explicit drawn line. I feel like eating your microwave dinner or whatever watching Elf is one level of sad, but having to individually pick the rose petals off your bed

before you can go to sleep. Oh, my gosh. Mornfully, collecting every pedal. I'm sleeping on the couch. I am not touching those pedals. No. This is the one I'm most excited for Rob Fingeywatch, 2024. I know you listened to the official pot this week,

so you will have heard that our podcast hosts on the official HBO podcast, who we presume knows a thing or two about what's going to come up on the show, took us on a little mythology journey through Senda the Sea Goddess. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Senda, did you, like, I, like, I, like, I pressed pause and

ran to like my notes and started taking notes as soon as she started talking about this. She was talking about mythology in general. It was like a pretty like natural transition to that, but it was a very like explicit. I'm going to sit down folks and tell you the story of Sedna of the Sea goddess, which we have mentioned a couple times in over the course of just four podcast episodes. But to remind you, this is a deity who was, according to legend originally, a young woman, defied her father, drowned and murdered by her own father. He cut the fingers off of her hand so that she was cleaning the side of the boat,

cut the fingers off her hand. According to myth and legend, the thingies then flourished into various sea critters, seals, whales, and wallers. This is a new detail that I learned from the podcast that I hadn't talked about before, this idea that shamans used to send spirits to the bottom of the sea to brush her hair. And once this was done, the animals she watched were available for harvest, essentially. And then this is another detail I didn't know

that Native women to this day get lines tattooed on their fingers in honor of Sedna, the sea goddess. Rob. Hmm. A lot of, hmm. Hi, feeling. And a lot of ants,

I think we got our answers to why there isn't any crab at the crab factory, not enough placating of ancient sea goddesses. She got to, her hair's not going to brush itself, okay?

Come on. So, having heard that, having just freshly heard that, when I rewatch this episode and we're inside Leah's room, I was like, is that freaking Sedna on her wall? Could be. You know, could be anything, but that's what sprang out to me. Well, we know that it is on Darwin's paper.

And the laundromat grandma had been telling him the tale of Sedna, and there always says heavily implied, that's the case based on the finge-less drawing that he's cooked up there. You know who seemed like she had a good Christmas? Lundromat grandma. Just kneading dough, just working it out. Bacon with the girls. Love it.

Laughing, having a great time. I am bummed. We never got to see the final spread at Kayla's house. Peter's been out and about doing his jobs. We never got to see the goods. I bet it was delicious, but also awkward because Kayla was super pissed. And then Starshape Wounds.

We got a round-up of suggestions after we talked about particular screwdrivers last week. I think that's what we were talking about. Yeah. Something. Are these the kind of suggestions that are going to make me,

nervous about our listeners, like their expert level knowledge of what can create a star shaped wound in human flesh? Probably. I mean, I think anytime you get an email that's like subject line murder weapon. Oh, I have just the thing for you. You can gulp a little. All right, Mark pointed out that the logo

in episode one for the Silver Sky Mine is a six-pointed star. So obviously we don't, well, I don't think there was like a logo pen that someone used to stab or whatever, but it might just be symbolic that whatever killed her is related to the mine, and it's the same as the logo for the mine.

Okay. Corey suggests a wailing harpoon. Has no real... Wheeling harpoons, here's where I confess, I don't know much about whaling harpoons, but I feel like that's a four-pointed situation. Seems like it would be. Right? But let me tell you, murder by whale

harpoon is metal as hell, Joe. That is... How many? 32. 32, 32 stabs with the whale harpoon. Tough. Last and not least, we got a lot of suggestions for this one. This is where you want to get worried.

Mel wrote in to say, since Annie Kay was kicked and stomped after she was killed, could her star-shaped wounds be due to someone kicking her while wearing crampons? The spikes that you put on your shoes so you don't fall down in the ice and snow. And I looked at some crampons online, and there are plenty that do seem star-shaped. Definitely. This is a pretty popular one, I think.

What do you think about the crampon theory as a murder weapon? Based on the crime scene photos that we've seen, they don't look as orderly as a crampon or the spikes that would be on the bottom of a boot. It looks a little more random in terms of the orientation of the wounds. Now, maybe there's ways in which the foot could be aligned to make that appear so. But just based on the photos we've seen, I don't think it's a shoe or a crampon. I feel like if it had been a shoe or a crampon, they, like, they would have figured, it would have looked like a foot, you know, like bootprints sort of thing, and they would have figured that out.

They'd be like, oh. Clearly, she has been. Okay. We had a lot of emails with this. I'm not going to point in any particular one out, but there was a lot of questions about the horror level in this episode. And I thought I would just, like, pull it out up top here and talk about it. This is even more, I would say, horror jumps scary than the previous episode. You and I finished episode three, and Issa Lopez's promising episode four was dark, and you and I

are both like, what? But didn't we just get that? We got a lot of ghosts like screeching and a lot of spooky shit happening this episode. Here's this really wild to me about this. Like, first of all, I would not recommend this show to like our beloved pal Mallory Rubin who does not do horror. I would not say go ahead and watch Night Country. But I would say you could probably get through season one of True Detective. I think there is a mark of difference between the level of horror here and the thrills and chills of any other season of True Detective. What is surprising to me, I thought that was intentional, and it is to start a degree, but what's surprising to me is that Issa Lopez in the official podcast this week was talking about

how it is the hallmark of a true detective that you can't, it's sort of an inkblot test, I think is the phrase she used, that you can't really tell if there's something. something supernatural going on, or if it's just, you know, the night is long and dark or another thing, you know, like, whoa, that it's up to our interpretation, whether or not something actual supernatural is going on. That is not the show that I am watching. How do you feel, Rob? Yeah, I think there's been stages of this season where that's been the case.

But we're at the level where we're in Navarro's perspective seeing pretty literal ghosts. And so I would say sometimes at the expense of the storytelling. I thought the ghosts are great for tension, but they're diffusing story and mystery in a way that I don't really like. For example, with the Wheeler flashback, I think there's a couple things about this. There's a lot about this episode that I really like, a lot of scene setting things,

a lot of character beats that I really like. There's some things about it that really frustrated me. And one of them was the feeling that the makers of this show didn't think they could fully trust us with certain things. And some of it was trusting us with that level of ambiguity. Like the Wheeler flashback we get includes Navarro seeing a ghost of who I assume is the victim, the 18-year-old victim of that crime. I think the clothing matches, yeah, yeah.

And so there's no ambiguity there. There's no inkblot test. I understand there's like a Danvers versus Navarro perspective on whether ghosts exist and the dead are really communing with us. But we are seeing a fairly factual representation of that scene, at least from Navarro's perspective. And she saw something. And if we could do that all over again, I would almost. flip the perspective and show it to us from Danvers' point of view, where you see Navarro staring into space,

staring into the void of where a ghost would be, and we have to fill in for ourselves what she's seeing. And if you do that, too, then it makes it more impactful later in the episode when she does see the ghost, when we do see it from her perspective, when she turns and see her sister's ghost in the dredges. Like that, I think that would hit harder

if you held back a little more earlier. I think that's a great point. I love that point. I think also when you have something like the one I'd polar bear, which now both Navarro and Danvers have seen well driving. What do you make of that? You know, Issa Lopez in the podcast was talking about, I don't know, encouragement of nature.

It felt very vague to me. This idea of, I don't know. I have no clear. symbolism there, though I think Issa does somehow in her head, but maybe we need to wait till the end to see how it all fits together. By the way, we keep getting emails about this. I swear to God, we mentioned this in the first episode, but like we know that the stuffed bear that belonged to Holden has one eye. Yeah, it's missing an eye. Yes. I feel like we said that in episode one, but if we didn't, I promise you, we're saying it now. So yes. Yeah. The stuffed polar bear

that got tossed out the front door this week, that was in Navarro's sort of dream vision of Baby Holden, that is in some of Danvers flashbacks, has one eye, as does the bear that has stopped two cars now. Yes. I don't know. What's your interpretation of it? Yeah, if it was just the Danvers stuff in this episode,

where she is wrestling with the literal stuffed bear, where she's engaging in some behavior that's destructive and unlike her and in some cases, relates very specifically to her past drama in terms of drinking and driving. Yeah. I can understand

why seeing the bear in that context, whether it's real or imagined, would be kind of like a spiritual gut check. This is like an alignment, a reminder of what has happened and what's important

and that you shouldn't be in this place where you are right now. But if that's the case, that doesn't align at all with where Navarro encountered the polar bear in episode one, which was shortly after she had, she heard,

she's awake. She's driving through town, but isn't impaired in any way, isn't going through any kind of direct trauma, although she obviously has the lingering trauma of her mom and everything that's going on with her sister and all that, but it's not pointed in a direct way in that moment. And so she just kind of happens upon the bear. And I'm open to the idea that Navarro is encountering these elements of Danvers life. You know, she's imagining her son. She's seeing the bear. You know, maybe she is in touch with something that's kind of drafting off of Danvers in a way. But that's not really a full explanation of why that character would see this exact one-eyed bear in that moment and how we're supposed to draw the line between those things. Right. And there's no explanation for that other than there's something supernatural going on. Yes. And I did notice in going back to episode one, there are some polar bear photos in the first batch of Solal Station evidence that Danvers has spiraled out on her floor. So maybe there is a larger significance

and Peter obviously theorized earlier that maybe it was a polar bear that had scared the scientists in the first place. So there's something happening here, something in the air as it relates to whether it's nature more generally or polar bear specifically or this polar bear most specifically.

We just don't know what any of it is yet. The other thing I want to say on the supernatural front, I agree with you. There's a lot that I liked in this episode and then there's some things that I'm like, the other sort of like moment I had was in the official podcast, Issa Lopez, saying we were very careful to not conflate the supernatural with mental health.

And she was like, we even had a character, Rose, as we mentioned, like, say the very line, don't confuse these two things in episode two. I don't think that they were very careful in separating those things at all. Like, you can have Rose say that line. But everything else about the story is conflating this idea of like visions and ghosts and all this sort of things with Julia's seemingly, you know, clinical diagnosis of mental illness. And that is a little, strikes me as a little irresponsible. I don't know. What do you think? Irresponsible. And to be totally frank, everything that happened with Julie in this episode,

I found very frustrating, in part because it was, I think, where we feared we might be going with this story, which is Julia, like, expediently going to her death in a way that doesn't that character in any capacity, doesn't feel fulfilling, doesn't feel like an arc, doesn't even track from a time perspective, like how we go from her in the lobby with Evangeline telling her, I can do this, to immediately walking to her death, like basically a scene later, doesn't track. And this is one of those cases where there were a lot of things in this episode, I felt like, were the casualty of a six-episode season, because ideally, Julie is at the lighthouse for like three episodes. And we're getting to see more of her process.

and more of her getting increasingly tormented by these visions of her mother under her bed and it's like, how are we extricating mental illness from the spirit world if she's literally seeing her dead mother under her bed and that's leading to her ultimate death? Like those things are so entangled in her story in a way that I found to be aggravating, frustrating.

Like, I think there's so many things in this episode that are just like so on the nose or that in their execution undercut the power of what they could have been And Julia's death is at the top of the list for me. Like the way in which they depicted her walking into the darkness, a lot of the needle drops in the show have not gotten to me. This one got to me.

This Billy Eilish, everybody dies needle drop, which you guessed it is about everybody dying. Why did we do that? I really agree with you. I really, really think that there's a way that this works if we're in a 10 episode season. Yes.

But that was like my main note as well, where I'm just sort of like, I don't feel like we know who Julia is as a person. We've seen her have these episodes. And I have seen and I believe Evangeline's affection for her and protectiveness. Like I understand what she means to Evangeline. That scene in the lobby is maybe the warmest true detective scene we've ever had.

And I found that to be so powerful. And then to have it pulled out from under us with no explanation and no real reason, that felt like dirty story. for like short-cutted storytelling. I also thought that was some of the best acting you've seen from Kelly Reese in that lobby exchange. And I understand sort of what it means, like another young woman. They couldn't save.

I do like that the episode starts with Danvers, like, stepping out of the car and trying to help Julia. Like, that was really good because it tells us something about her relationship to Evangeline. Like, she knows who Julia is. She's much more tender with Julia than she might be with some of the other people that she deals with. Like, I really liked that interaction. I just, I think I, I think we really need more time with Julia to then feel her loss.

Totally. It just all felt very abrupt and very, like, two-dimensional. I'm like, this is a woman with mental illness and. Well, to your point about what do we even know about this character, what we know is literally, she's Evangeline sister, she's schizophrenic, she's bipolar, she has borderline personality of disorder, and at some point in her life, she liked the Spice Girls. That's it. That's all we really know about Julia.

And so honestly, to get the emotion out of this character that they were able to do, I think is impressive given how little information we actually had about her. And a lot of that, I think, is a reflection through Navarro and through that relationship. I'm predisposed to sibling stuff, but that hit me pretty hard in terms of their connection. I just wish we got to a place that was more satisfying than the narrative crunch of six episodes allowed us to get to here. Okay. Got a little bit off my plan, but I really like the way that we did it. So I'm not mad about it.

But the last thing I'm going to say before we started to go chronological three episode is, I listened to Justin pointed this out. And when I rewatched the episode, I laughed out loud. He said, did you see the no overnight parking sign? I would find the enforcement of said decree difficult during these eight days of night. How do you enforce no overnight parking in Ennis in these dark days? Snoring, gasping during sleep, feeling fatigued, ask your doctor about zebbound, terse appetite.

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We start with Danvers. It is 325 in the morning. and the white noise machine is not doing it. It's not helping it through the night. So she does what anyone does to self-soothe in the wee small hours. She watches a video of a woman who's about to die. She watches the ADK video. A wee little snuff film on your phone.

Yeah, it's fine. This is fine. So what do you, I mean, what do you do when you wake up at 3 in the morning and you're back to sleep, Rob? Is it death videos for you as well? That's exactly what you should do. Put a very bright screen, right? right in front of your face and play exclusively death clips.

Yeah, just screaming if you can. Okay. She hears the screaming, we should say, outside, like, the video has stopped, and she's still hearing Annie's screaming, which is scary. And then we already mentioned that she sort of tries to keep Julia safe.

This idea, she says, keep you school to you safe. Julia. Oh, sorry, I thought you were talking about, yeah, the bundling up. That seemed like a very reflexive thing. I've been watching this video of Annie all night, and now I need to go, like, bundle up my daughter.

Just, like, pull the hair back from her. It was, yeah, this, like, tenderness that she can't express in waking hours that she can only do. Yeah, it was very sweet and very sad. And then, yeah, and then she goes and she sees Julia wandering around. And then we, we go to Pete, who is just sadly watching from afar as the Anchorage folks, like, you know, take the corpusical away. Take his cool crime scene away from him. His toy. Yeah, what is he going to do?

Yeah, what is he's going to do? And the answer to that is he's doing a lot of boots on ground detective work. Pete is pulling up a lot of info, but he very carefully does not say it in front of cop daddy Connolly. Chris Freckleston is back. Pete's like, we're not going to talk about this in front of the captain, right? No. No. Okay.

Then we have this great scene with Navarro and Chris Freckleson. What in the office, before we have another charming assignation at the motel, what about this interaction in our office? I mean, I think a lot of small things. There's obviously a lot of exposition dumping here again in terms of why he's there, what function he's serving, laying the kind of stakes of what's unfolding in this community. But one thing that I got stuck on, and this is, forgive me, we're jumping all across the timeline now. But this is a character in Connolly who knows Danvers in a very different way,

knows who she was before she came to Ennis. Obviously, this is very intimate relationship with her. And he does something really curious, which is Danvers, as we find out over the course of this episode, does not really drink at all, or at least doesn't drink very much. And when Connolly's in her office, he sees a dead plant and he picks up a water bottle. And before he waters, he kind of sniffs the water bottle to make sure it's actually water in it. And That made me kind of question something I've just been taking as fact for a lot of this season, which is I've been assuming that the drunk driving that's at the core of Danvers' past was somebody else's doing that led to Jake and Holden's death.

I'm now starting to wonder if it's her own driving and her own relationship with alcohol that could have led to that. Just based on the fact that, again, this is someone who knows her differently than everyone else in Ennis, and that was his first thought was to check, are you drinking? This is someone who later he calls out for being increasingly irritable and hard to work with. And everything he's laying out in terms of what happened after the tragedy of her past involving her husband and her son. Based on all that information, his thought is I'm going to make sure this person isn't drinking on the job. And that made me look at Danvers and look at her history a little bit differently.

It's so interesting. I also noted that. I thought it was a really interesting move outside of the alcohol check. The move to water someone's dead plant is also just like a really, like, wordlessly. Yeah. Not even like give her shit for it. Just like pick up the thermos, you know, and checking for alcohol or checking for coffee or tea or perhaps. But like, checking for alcohol.

We did have someone right in thinking that the cup that Danvers flipped into Hank's face had booze in it rather than like hot coffee or tea or something like that. It was such a, like, it's an intimate move, sort of similar to Danvers talking about Navarro moving where she keeps her cans of the kitchen. Yeah, it just sort of like speaks to an intimacy. While also there's like this implicit judgment of like, I can care for things and you can't. I don't know. It's just like maybe I'm just triggered as someone who doesn't water all their inner plants as much as they should. And if someone came into my house and just suddenly started to water my plants, my best friend will do it. She'll come in and she'll be like, can I water it?

your plans and I'm like, yes, but she at least says something, you know? But doing it without asking is very, it's very like, you're a mess messaging. Yeah, yes. And that's really what Connolly's doing throughout this episode is reminding her all the ways in which she is and has been a mess. And this is where it feels like

absolute gas-ledding to me. Because like, is she a mess? Yes. Is she hard to work with? Yes. Blah blah. I am so deeply suspicious of our cop daddy here because he gives her all the reasons he's like, I'm coming here because you got protests,

you got all this stuff, like you don't have your shit on control. Yeah, I'm here to help you. You need my help. You got to get your shit under control, all this sort of stuff like that. She brings up the mayoral campaign, you know,

thing that's now looming over him. Okay. But the other crucial bit of information in that scene is she says, did you get the Annie Kay video that I sent you? And he says, yes. Don't keep that on a need to know basis.

Don't tell anyone. Yeah. So he's like, like Hank, he's suspiciously around the Annie case. But also my question is, did he get the Annie video? And that's what brought him to town. Like, because his excuse for coming to town

is all this other shit. But did he come to town because he got this Andy Kay video and he's like, uh, I got to be right there to get my eye on this. What do you, what's your sputty sense telling you about?

It does seem pretty directly pointed in that way. I hadn't put together that exact causality, but you're right. It makes it extra suspicious that these are the grounds in which he's showing up. There is a lot to manage, and certainly if you're a politically minded, law enforcement official, I can understand wanting to keep things under wraps. If there's any mine relationship as well, there could be pressure coming from that direction. Like, let's not make this any bigger than it already is. I get all that, but he is acting so suspiciously individually around the idea of taking the case

off of Danvers and Navarro's hands the entire time. And to show up at this particular moment after a critical break like that that is confirming visual evidence of where Annie died, that's almost too much to ignore. We will return to him and elf

and his teeth whitening system a little later on. Too much elf. Find another Christmas movie. Pick literally what other Christmas movie. I am on record as not being like superly pro elf. It's not good.

Thank you, Rob. I know people are going to be upset about this, but Elf, guys, you're better than that. I promise you're better than that whether you know it or not. I bet, and this is not a knock against him because I think it's kind of generational. I bet you, Kai, are you near your mic? Oh, no. You're going to put Kai on blast like this? No.

Kai, do you love Elf? I don't love Elf. Okay. But I think it's decent. I think it's a fun movie. That's fine. I definitely wouldn't say it's like my favorite Christmas movie of all time, but I, I don't dislike it.

Everyone has their traditions and they come from different places. You know, I'm sympathetic to that fact. You know, like, if Elf was your family thing and you want to remember the good times, go for it. But if you're just watching a Christmas movie every year on the grounds of being a Christmas movie, there are 12 better choices, I assure you.

The nightmare before Christmas, Rob, hell yes. See? Kind knows. I'm also, I'm a big Muppet Christmas Carol guy myself, too. Like, we have a lot of even family-friendly options to choose from. I mean, the point is cop daddy Connolly is too old to be like elf is my jam like that's my movie right he should be watching die hard or something like that all right thank you guys for your generational input um all right so peter and Danvers um after um connelly's gone he's like let me tell you what i found here's another issue i have with this episode or i would i would love for this to have a little more air in this the fact that we learn about odis at the beginning of the episode and we

find him kind of coincidentally by the end of the episode because they're looking for Clark. They're not really looking for her. She's like kind of looking for both, but like they think they've seen Clark and that's who they expect to find. And it's like the guy that they just found out about at the top of the episode. And then it gets mentioned again coincidentally by her ex-boyfriend, the teacher in the middle of the episode. And then we find him by the end of the episode.

It all just feels like a little, again, a little bit more air in between those revelations would be phenomenal. If you're going to do that, and again, this is a character who is literally introduced in this episode and name check several times throughout the episode, when we see him at the end in all of his store brand Willem Defoe glory, you don't need to flash to the folder photo of him before Danvers says Otis Heiss? If you're saying the name, you don't need the flashback. Please, I ask the makers of this show and all shows, please trust us to remember a character who is literally introduced in this. My guy Otis has burnt cornea's ruptured ear drums, self-inflicted bites. Not great. And he's been, you know, abusing substances ever since this accident, whatever it was, happened.

Anything you want to say on the Burke Cornea's front, Rob? Well, as we're going through his rap sheet and all of his list of injuries, one thing that stuck out to me was they were talking about how he was admitted to San Diego. with those injuries. And there's not a lot of documentation of how all that happened. Like what accident led to all these injuries? It's pretty unclear even to the officials and on the official record. But St. Joe's, you know, in addition to obviously being in the presence of a St. Joe, but it came up earlier in the season.

Yeah. In the first episode, when Danvers and Pryor are first seeing the tongue for the first time. And they're talking about the fishing line marks on the tongue. And one thing that Danvers reminds Peter of is this other case involving another Anupiac woman who they found near St. Joseph of the Arctic, which I assume is the same St. Joe's we're talking about. Right. And the timeline doesn't line up where it's like Otis Heiss.

We know for a fact that he would have been in that area at that time, but we know that he's been off the grid. And we know that his presence in this region and in this area is coinciding with not just these cases and Clark and his knowledge of this cave tunnel system that I'm sure we're going to get into in the coming weeks. but also this other kind of case with a woman who was frozen out in the elements that it seems like they didn't have a lot of satisfactory answers for either. That's a fascinating connection. That's a lot of yarn on the wall for us to be tracking multiple tongues.

Burke-Cornier as far as I can see. We're going to have to get new colors at this point. The teal yarn in particular is very expensive. So we might have to shift to an aquamarine or a slightly different but related shade. Poor Pete has to put out an APB on Christmas Eve. And it is, I think, crucial. I don't really fully grok what is going on with Liz and Pete. I don't fully understand it.

Later, she says, that's my boy about him. Like, there's, there's, there's, I don't like it. I don't think, I don't think it's, like, I don't think it's sexual. It could be wrong. I don't think it's sexual, but it's just, like, it's so different from the way that she treats Navarro, where she's, like, go home. It's Christmas Eve. or like, how is your sister doing?

And there's just like none of that for Pete, you know? Like, no quarter for Pete at all. Okay, we've been saying things we don't like. Here's something I absolutely love and could not love more. And Rob is a fellow tall person. Maybe you appreciated this. When she carried the coffee mate on the top shelf and has to like wordlessly like elbow a tall like cop that's sitting near her

so that he can reach the coffee made down for her. I thought that was a great moment. More psychags, please. If we're going to be taking a long walk into the darkness, at least give us these moments of levity. Jenny Foster is a tiny woman. Do not put things on high shelves in her precinct. Okay, we see Hank waiting with a buddy.

It is a very sad. Did you feel for Hank in this moment? You know, I did. Bad dads deserve love too. It's tough to see him here. It's tough to see him collecting the flower petals, you know, mournfully looking at the bottle of rosé in his fridge. It's just a tough.

That looks like some really shitty rosé, too. Like the shittiest. It didn't look great. But yeah, like his whole situation and the fact that he can't even successfully invite himself over to Peter's Christmas dinner because Peter then has to abandon it. It's just brutal. He's like, what is it, is it Jim Beam he's drinking? I can't remember what he's drinking back.

Yes. This old girl. Yeah, she still got her life left in her. Oh, Hank. I felt bad for him, except I think he's probably a murderer of some kind or at least an accomplice, but like... Yeah, I think maybe just not a good cop

and a little bit of a dirty cop would be my guess, but not the worst. But when he, like, saw the stewardess and he's like, oh, I mean, tough stuff, tough stuff. Okay. On the list of people were having bad Christmases, I would put the woman who's married to the teacher that Liz had a relationship with,

who has to let Liz into her house on Christmas Eve. Is there anyone in this town you haven't fucked? It's a good question. It's a reasonable question. Navarro just, like, thrust the Annie video in his face. She's just like, there's been a murder and just like, like, jams it in his face. We should talk about evidence security in general, I think, because coming out of when they first got the Annie Kay video and they were standing in the middle

of a hospital, playing it at. volume in the hallway? This is a crime scene. Why are you playing this video? No, no cell phone volume etiquette either. Absolutely not. We don't play these things full volume, even half volume.

Not in civilized society. That being said, then later, Liz is watching it over and over again in her house and she's got headphones on, and I'm like, who is that for? Who are the headphones for? And you're alone, you are very alone in your house, It's just you and the harkabot-vato list.

That's just for close listening. She's looking for every little detail she can get the white noise machine. You can't run that while you're also watching the video and listening to the audio. So she's got to do what she can. Here's my main takeaway from Adam, the, you know, much put upon teacher X of Liz as he's telling us about cave systems, stuff like that. Wait, isn't his name Bryce? Oh, I heard Adam at one point and wrote it down. It could be Bryce.

Maybe it's Adam Bryce. It is Adam Bryce. So it's both. Okay. Here's the thing that I noticed. I wrote in my notes, Chekhov's fissures everywhere. He's like, there's fissures everywhere.

You could fall through the ice so easily. And I'm like, huh, I wonder if someone's going to fall through some ice in episode five or six. That's what I would say. But he's like, there's fissures everywhere. People fall through all the time. We do have, there is in the opening. Because there's like a lot to mine in the images in the opening credits. There's like an orange peel in the water and like all the sort of stuff like that.

But there's like a person under the ice like in the water. And there's been some, I've seen some chatter on Reddit, et cetera, that like lining up clothing and stuff like that, that they think that's Jodi Foster's character. Oh, interesting. That at some point, Danvers is going to go under the water. See, I was wondering the, well, I was going to say the opposite, but I was wondering a different theory, which is that Navarro, because it kind of looks like in some of those images

that you see some tattooing that looks a little bit like Navarro's tattoos, but as in many of these scenes, it's very hard to tell what is just like a bit of shadow versus a line of a tattoo. I think they've been very clever on parceling out those sorts of visuals in a way, I really appreciate so much

of the mood setting around the show in general and even in this episode, like a lot of the little things that they do to make these scenes feel charged or spooky or tense I think are really effective. And the fact that we're having to parcel through the images and the opening credits, I think speaks to a really good breadcrumbing that's happening

here. There's just some things that require us to take a hop, skip, and a jump between certain breadcrumbs. Speaking of putting bread on the table, let's go to Rose's house for Christmas Eve. What can't this woman do? I don't know. And a killer dress looking great.

Crushing it. Absolutely crushing every aspect of this evening in her home. Chris Ryan was texting me about this scene today though because he was like, he was like Fiona Shaw Yellow Queen question mark is something that Chris Ryan sent to me because he was like, that scene was so weird. He was like that I don't know why it's here. And we also got some emails from listeners who were like, was that a dream sequence? Like what was going on? It did feel very like Mad Hatter's Tea Party sort of, you know, vibe. But my takeaway, because what we, the main thing we learned has like,

nothing you do with any of the cases. And it's sort of like, why is Rose there at the edge of everything? What life did she leave behind and why did she leave it? And so she talks about basically leaving her life being a professor behind to, you know, go out and live out here because this is what sparks joy for her.

Crescents, weed, gutting wolves. lush chocolate cakes, charcutory spreads, the works. Oh my gosh. That cake would be really good. Very good. Just like well,

well powdered. You know what I mean? Powdered sugar on it looks great. Something that I don't know that we have a ton of evidence for in the text of the show, but the way that Kelly Reese has talked about it on a couple of these official podcast episodes

is this idea of like, Navarro is barely holding on to this life she's living here. That the only thing keeping your hair is Julia essentially, and I hope that comic is well, because my guy has some risen this episode, but um... Okay, we got to dig into that. But the...

Come on, the SpongeBob toothpaste? I'm not disputing anything. I just want to hear your take on it. That's all. Okay. But with Julia, with her main tether being Julia gone, and we see it, I mean, at the end of the episode, she goes berserk. all this sort of stuff like that.

What is keeping her in this town, in this job, in this life? She's talked about going out on the ice. You ever just wanted to walk out onto the ice and stuff like that? So is Rose there as like a sort of example of like, you two can leave your entire life behind and it's okay? Or like what is your interpretation of this scene here? I think there's the micro and the macro parts of it.

The macro, I agree, is pretty fuzzy as far as what Rose is meant to represent in this story. She doesn't have ties to many characters outside of Navarro. It's really just that relationship in a way where I don't really understand why she's there on Christmas Eve. I know Navarro's been through a lot. I would guess that under normal circumstances, she was playing to spend her Christmas Eve with Julia, and that that is no longer possible because Julia is at the lighthouse. But we don't really get like a phone call to Rose being like, oh, I had this horrible day and Rose invites her over. We don't get any sense of why she's actually going to Rose.

his house. And that's, it's happened a couple times this season where there's not really a clear explanation as to why a character's going from point A to point B, but they are. And sometimes you could tell those are kind of taped over with ADR, like a dispatch line of like, oh, you should go check out this place. And so Danvers goes and checks out that place. But there's not a lot of momentum sometimes directing these characters to the places that they go in a way that it can make it feel dreamlike. It can make it feel a little ethereal. And especially to watch. in unexpectedly to this room of excess, given everything else that's happening.

Everything else is exorbitantly expensive at the grocery store. Everyone else is like scraping together a Christmas dinner. And here is Rose, cooking up this whole spread. I guess for herself, not anticipating that Navarro is coming,

but inviting her or Navarro shows up for whatever reason. And they can enjoy it together, which is great. But it's a scene and a slip into a different kind of universe. That's for sure. It's that idea

like dream like wandering from location and location, I think is absolutely exacerbated by the 24 hour darkness because putting together all the places that these characters go, you're like you know, similar to Santa going at everyone's house

on Christmas. I'm like, how'd to do that all in one night? And then I remember, no, it's a whole day and a night. So I suppose you could do all these things in a whole day and a night. But it just feels, it ends up feeling like time is just expanding and contracting all around. us and we don't really,

okay, never mind. It's a flat circle, I guess. But sometimes that can be really effective, the disorientation of that. I'm not usually a, how long did it take

the ships to sail to Westeros kind of person? Like, the logistics of this are not terribly important to me. But that was one other way in which Julia's death felt weird. It's like, she disappears,

she walks into the darkness, and the Coast Guard finds her, like, immediately. And identifies her? And identifies her. And she's beyond safe. Like there's no like, oh, she's been hospitalized, she's in a coma, she was freezing out in the elements. It's just like, oh, your sister is dead.

And as far as I remember, it wasn't even just the same day, but basically like, she gets the call from Danvers. She and Peter go to check out Oliver Tagok's cabin together. And by the time they get back, Julia is not just gone, but already dead and found. Again, a case where it's like, a lot of this stuff should have been parceled out over multiple episodes. It's like if she goes missing and later is found dead, that registers in a much different way than, oh, by the way, your sister is dead. Yeah.

Anything else you want to say about the rose sequence other than the incredible line, all of Santa Zelles drowned in global warming, darling? Or what is it they're on? Are they on crack? Are they on meth? Yeah. A big meth problem in Santa's workshop,

I would imagine, really interfering with the means of production You mentioned the idea of Leah and Annie being more and more conflated. We get this vandalization of the mining building. I really like this scene because not just because of like Kate and Liz's whole history and Liz being actually defensive of Leah, but Leah feeling like Liz is on the side of the mine. But like when Kate's like, I'm going to press charges and Liz goes, no. I just love Johnny Foster's delivery of that.

She's a teenager herself. She's like, no, you don't get to fuck up my kids. It was just really funny. It was interesting that Kate wants to press charges basically until Danvers says, please. And it's, I think, you know, I'm sure Kate in the mind have gotten quid pro quos with all kinds of people in this community for various reasons.

It's pretty clear that Danvers is not one of them. But Kate certainly clocks this moment. It's like she's kind of registering it the mental calendar that, okay, this is the day I did Liz Danvers of favor. And Kate seems like the kind of person who's always like keeping tallies. She's got a ledger. Yeah. We mentioned the turkey.

We've just had everything we need to say about the turkey, I feel like, about watching the video again and again, about the SpongeBob Tooth Face. I do want to call out Johnny Foster's drunk scrolling acting. I thought she did really good. Like, I have lost my motor skills, but I'm trying to be really precise as I scrub through these videos, like movement work. I thought it was incredibly good. Good drunk acting in general.

A famously difficult thing to do. But I really bought her conversations with Connolly, like just her whole like body language shifting toward him toward basically everybody. I thought she just did an incredible job with those sequences. And showing us, again, a very different side of Danvers, one that's so shocking to Navarro and Peters. They're just cracking up at the idea of Danvers being drunk.

What do you make of this idea, like light flashing out lights flickering generator connection situation. Yeah, it's pretty curious, especially because we know that the timeline in the Annie K video is not the same light flickering out that we get at Solal Station. Years separated, very different events. So there's something contributing to it that could be similar and cyclical. And we've talked a lot this season about kind of things affecting specifically the indigenous people in this community in a way that's been building over time.

affecting the natural world, it's affecting the animals, it's affecting the Anupiac people. There's a trend line that's going up and up and up, and maybe those things are happening more often than they used to. But I think this is probably a good time to kind of take stock of what we know and what we've learned from the Annie Cave video in general, right? Because we know she's been killed in some kind of ice cave that is probably part of the Brooks range that was mapped specifically by Otis Heist.

That's kind of where we've been led to believe, what we've been led to believe so far. we know that the power was affected by the same flickering kind of outage in those caves and that that indicates that there was a generator in those caves to begin with, which is odd. We don't quite know why.

And we know that it's not the same flicker as the one in Annie's video as in the Salal video, but similar enough kind of effects in terms of the camera and the visual quality and similar enough reasons to think that they could be related. And we know that Annie's body

while she was attacked in those caves was moved and found elsewhere which is indicative of some kind of messaging being sent with her body and there's also language throughout the season so far as to the fact that she may have been kicked or stomped on or hit after the fact

even her dead body was desecrated in some way that kind of feels like a weird like no shit like surely they've already figured out that she wasn't killed where she was left right? You would think? But I guess Liz wasn't there yet

and everything seemed to have been under Hank's supervision, so perhaps no efforts were made to figure anything out in the first place. Some files got lost. Yeah, great. Yeah, the generator at the Solal Station keeps coming up. And I've seen some theories that people think that, like, in terms of finding Clark, like, if Clark is still there somehow, like if he's still lurking somehow in the corners of Solal Station,

and that the generator will somehow be connected, like, you know, generator use will indicate that Clark is still there or something like that. I don't know because, you know, the idea that Clark is still there comes from the fact that when good old Funnian's tries to drop off a delivery at the beginning of the season, he sees a flash of something.

And a lot of people are like, got to be Clark still in the station. But you would think that, like, where is he hiding in the station? Yeah. And now we have to at least raise the question of is it Otis instead? Even if we saw someone flashing by in a pink parka in any of these scenes and any of these episodes and any of these flashbacks, now there's some question as to whether that's even Clark in the first place.

On the what did we learn from the video, I do want to, I have one last email this week to read. I don't know if I'm going to read the whole thing. It's from a UCLA professor. And honestly, anytime a professor emails one of my podcasts, I'm like, sure, professor, thank you for emailing. We support academia here on the prestige TV podcast. guest. Michael's professor at UCLA, he wrote in, I thought it'd comment on Adam Bryce's idea of the bones on the ice gave. First of all, pretty impressive identification down to the genus from a cell phone frame grab, especially for a high school geology teacher. He must have spent

some time as a grad student in a vertebrate paleontology research group. But second, maybe he was not a great student because monodontitis is not the name of any known living or fossil species. The family includes narwhals, cool, and belugas, as the only living species. Nothing called monodonot. No, I'm not going to do it again.

Though living narwhal are classified with a fossil genus into a group called monodontids. So maybe Bryce noticed a key anatomical feature of this group in the ice. A final point.

There is a fossil species called something else, but is only known for warmer climates around Virginia and North Carolina. Anyway, Norwal, which always makes me think of Elf because Elf is the movie where I learned that Narwhals are real. Fun fact about me. I did not know they were real until I saw Elf.

But I don't know. What do you make of, I mean, this could just be like sloppy science. That happens all the time in shows. But this idea that like, I mean, because we know, I think what Bryce says in that scene, I think he uses the word prehistoric, right? It's some sort of like ancient creature. An ancient creature Another Fargo Crossover event

If the slal guys are trying to extract prehistoric DNA Dano DNA From this icebound critter I mean is that From the frozen amber Yeah exactly

Why is a fly when you can use a critter I don't know Thank you for Professor I'm so sorry for fumbling the Latin. Clearly they did in the show too. I honestly bumped up against the same thing, which I was trying to Google what it is that Bryce says in this episode. It was getting a lot of this isn't a real word results. I'm guessing it was just sloppy pronunciation as often happens with not just Latin, but a lot of other languages when actors go cross-language in shows and

movies like this. So I'm attributing it more to that than any kind of plausible plot explanation for that being the case. But the fact that it is prehistoric, or at least is pointing to something prehistoric. That's a theme we've been coming back to time and time again. The idea of digging up something ancient, of encountering something that either has answers to all that ails humanity or could plague humanity

in its current form and wrestling with whatever the consequences of that may be. And is that, I mean, not literally, but like, is that Sedna? Like, is that the sea creature, you know, in the ice there? One of her fingee's

turned into a whale. There you go. Into a narwhal, perhaps. Okay. You had your needle drop beef. Here's my needle drop beef. When Kayla and Leah and laundromat grandma are

rolling out some dough, we get Massey Stars into dust plays. For fans of the O.C. Anyway, Massey Stars into dust and Mazzie Stars fade into you. Yes. I need those to moratorium on both

those tracks. Tremendous songs. Yeah. But they must be protected at all cost. They're banned from film and television. They've been stretched to the breaking point. We're done. Give Mazzy a rest. I was just like, I can't

believe we're doing it to dust. It's, it's anyway, that's my needle drop beef this week. I think there's actually more, unfortunately. The needle drop beefs, they don't stop. Some of it I think is related to the kind of shortcuts in the story

telling that are taking place. But when we get the specific song drop as Navarro is getting her ass kicked because she hurts so bad she wants to get her ass kicked. I can't, we've never seen that on screen before, Joe. We've never seen a character in pain seeking out a fight, seeking out pain in that moment. Okay, Rob, I am going to push back on this. Please.

And say, I don't think it's something we usually see women do in film and television. I take the point. Here's my overall feeling on this is that. The execution felt tropey, to say the least. Totally. And the fact that it's cross-gendered is a fair point, I take it. Turning those scenes and scenes like Julia's death basically into a music video. Yeah.

Why are we doing that? And like, queuing up the line so that it's like, in this darkness, please light my way as Danvers is driving into the darkness. I'm just kind of groaning a little bit at some of the directness of both the dialogue in this episode of various points and the music drops as well. I agree with that. I think, I don't know. I'm trying to think, I'm trying to process how I feel about, like, Danvers as someone who, like, fucks around, which, again, is, like, something that, like, you know, your male leads might, you know, your Don Draper's or whatever, you know, like, whatever. She's got two modes, investigating and getting after it.

And, like, it's remarkable because it's a female character doing that, right? Whereas, like, if it were a male character, we'd be. be like, okay. And similar to Navarro, you know, seeking out an ass beating. And please, you know, Yellow King SpongeBobba, Gmail.com, if you can think of other examples of female characters doing this, but I couldn't think of any. And there's also the fact that, like, yes, Navarro is going, knowing she's going to be outmatched, knowing that she'll probably get her ass kicked, she does all of that.

But the same time, since we've, like, seen her in episode, like, we know how Jack she is, Oh, totally. We're like, she can, to a certain degree, hold her own in this fight until she becomes overwhelmed by the numbers. Honestly, if it's just been two guys, I think she probably could have taken them. The three and the presence of like,

was that a frozen hubcap or whatever she gets smacked with? There's some heavy machinery involved that is tilting the scales. But she's formidable. There's no doubt about that. But I mean, your larger point also stands. Before she gets her ass beat, Navarro and Pete go out to,

the camp. Tzac is gone, his place is deserted. They find spiral insignia all over the place. Spiral stone, the site of the spiral stone

sets the dogs off. Again, this is where I was so sure Pete was going to die. I am just like, I'm very worried about him all the time. Later, after the ass beating,

Navarro goes to see a cabic, right? And he tends to her wounds after he decides not to shoot her. He tends to her wounds. He resets her shoulder, her hand, her arm,

something. I think it's her finger, a dislocated finger, I think. A fingee. Okay. He fakes a proposal and resets her hand, which incredibly well played. I loved it, honestly. I thought this is great. He's like, I'm not alone.

You're not alone. You can spend Christmas Eve with me. I got family. They just went to Disneyland. Like, well, I'm not a weird loner. Like, I make pancakes at night and I'm really cool. I have homebrew. I got cool dogs coming out.

Like, are you not, you're not feeling this guy at all? You think, are you suspicious of him? Because the final question is, what happened to the spiral stone? Yeah. Rob Mahoney. What happened to it? I think both things can be true. I think part of the reason

I am suspicious of him is because he is very charismatic and he is very disarming in a way that may make you overlook other concerning things about his circumstances like the fact that key pieces of evidence

just happened to disappear when you show up at his house. And I think the charitable read on it is that Navarro just left it there. They have the exchange about it. Kavik is asking her. And if you were reading into that with cynicism, you might say

Kavik is kind of taking her temperature as far as what she knows, where she got this, like what this means, because he's involved in whatever it is he's involved in. And then, you know, giving him the benefit of the doubt, he's just earnestly asking and then puts it aside as he's genuinely tending to her wounds.

And so maybe it just ended up getting left on the counter. Regardless of what happened, it's in his possession. And either he meant for that to be the case, or I'm left wondering, too, given the circumstances in which it was found, does him having it mark him in some way? Like, does it mark him as being vulnerable by the nature of him having it? I don't know.

Or does it protect him? Could be. It's meant to be like a warding off of things. I think we are meant to be suspicious of him. I think he's being placed out there as someone to be suspicious of. I think you should always be suspicious of the like charming love interest in any sort of detective murder mystery story. I just, I can't believe. I can't believe that guy, that guy went out and bought sponge.

How did he find SpongeBob toothpaste and wrapped it? Yep. And left it for her. It seemed to have left like a little light up Christmas tree too. Come on. SpongeBob toothpaste. I can't imagine it's cheap to import. Right.

If you know the import prices of SpongeBob toothpaste, please email us. Yellow King Spongebob at gmail.com. That had to be more than the Oreos. That's all I have to say. This was yet another scene where it's like I love so much of the interpersonal stuff between them. I love the way Cavic Disarms her. I love the way he tends to her in a moment where she's clearly vulnerable. When she's like screaming into his chest, those are cathartic moments you need when things like this happen in a show.

And I think we've talked around the idea of Julia's death being kind of like a motivating factor, something that is pushing Navarro over the edge as much as anything, which I don't love for Julia's character. But it's going to push Navarro to some interesting places and we're going to unpack everything that that means. I just wish you could do it in a way that's not, you know, episode three, as we talked about was all about community, all about the bring of people together. This one is a lot about isolation. and we know that because they tell us over and over and over about how alone everybody is.

And at the point where Navarro is just literally listing characters in the community who are alone, I get it. You know, like, I get it. I have no beef with this scene. And there are... Overall, I really like this episode. This episode does contain, I think, the worst case of clunky exposition.

and it happens when young Peter slips into bed with his angry wife Kayla. Oh my God, Joe. And he says, I ruined your life and you didn't want to have the baby. And that's it. That's the scene. And I'm like, what are we doing here? Who did this and why? Again, I understand that so much of this episode is kind of confronting the ideas

and the problems that characters have been sitting on all seasons. Everything is burbling up in this episode. This wasn't burbling. There's like putting a name to conflict and then there's introducing one whole cloth in episode four and there was not even a hint of any of this dynamic in previous episodes. Yeah.

So why are we engaging with it? Darwin's out here catching strays for the first time. He seems like a great little kid too. We have no indication. Like Kayla is like, there are things that Kila said in previous interactions like you weren't a cop when I married you

like this is what I thought my life was going to be like all this sort of stuff like that like that's one of there I can understand like to your point it's like as if we had let we were starting along this sort of bread crummy strewn path and then just like a massive baguette

like wallups us in the face like no more time for crumbs we only have two more episodes to go so Peter has to say something no human has ever said in their life, which is, I ruined your life and you didn't want to have the baby. That's it.

That one was exasperating, to say the least. I was gobsmacked. That being said, I will counterbalance that with the vision. We just need to pause for a second and talk about Connolly with the tooth whitening system on watching Elf, him like hastily trying to put it away.

Danvers tasting it on his mouth when she tries to kiss him. They're like peroxide or whatever that he's using. And then her saying, are you working on your Hollywood smile? Like, all of that is top tier. I feel very lucky to watch Christopher Ecclton and Joey Foster do that inside of an episode of television. This is where the casting is perfect, too, because Eccleston, like, his smile is such a big part of his affect that I couldn't have asked for anyone better to be trying

to brighten up their smile a little bit. for a political campaign. Anything else in their exchange? She says you're a better, you already touched on some of this, but he says you're a better cop than I was, but also you're a fucking mess because of what happened with Jake and Holden.

It got worse, terrible with people. And she's like, saying I'm too emotional. And he's like, no, you're just a dick and everyone hates you. Just an asshole. That's all. Chris's Day Dawn's.

Liz is a dream. Liz somehow made it home after the encounter with cop daddy, Connolly, and the encounter with the polar bear. Didn't make it to her bed, but at least made it to her couch, made it home. And Navarro comes over and finds the polar bear.

That's when the polar bear gets checked out in the snow. And then they have this exchange that you heard at the top of the episode about like, there's no heaven, there's no hell, there's no ghost, no fucking beyond. Does this work for you?

Or did this feel of a piece of what you're saying before about like, you felt like the, we're driving home the concept of like, we're all alone, everyone's alone. Like, how did you feel about this exchange? This is one of those, again, where it's like, if you didn't have the previous one of Navarro

talking so much about everyone being alone, then when you really hammer it here, I think it would land differently. I think it would land with much more impact, right? The idea of like, the dead are gone, gone. And we are just alone in this. I've really liked the way they've handled it

throughout the season. Like Navarro's exchange early on about the idea we're all alone and God is too. I thought that, that's like the true. detective kind of philosophy that I really appreciate. And so much of these conversations between Navar and Danvers, this is kind of the lifeblood of what true detective is, right? It's like cops in the station, in a car, kind of philosophizing, trying to wrap each other's brains around

what the other person might be thinking or going through. And some of that stuff has been really spot on, including in this episode, I thought there are exchanges about praying and whether it's like a good thing when you're praying a lot. And digging into Danvers' backstory. And digging into Danvers' and kind of taking a dig at her in a gallows humor kind of way about the situation with her mother growing up. All of that I really liked, and this is the flip side of it,

where, again, it just feels, it feels like we're being hammered and bludgeoned a little bit more than I would like. Anything you want to say about the tragedies that we haven't already said about meeting Otis out there, there's a giant spiral in the wall

that seems like it's made out of blood, which is not great. Just hand-hamsmeared. Not wonderful. I don't, I can't think, of a single fluid that made that thing that I feel comfortable with. So, like, not great. Navarro, I think Navarro, I will say I like this idea of,

I don't love the conflation of mental illness with the supernatural, but I like this idea of Navarro feeling like, of Angelin feeling like the women in her family are cursed, and it, like, took her mom, and it took her sister. And now, again, I don't love conflating that with supernatural. That being said, I was just doing this, like, a fundraiser thing over the weekend and had to do with Alzheimer's. And there's Alzheimer's in my family on like both sides of the family.

And like when that's true in your family, you think about it all the time of this like ticking time mom in your jeans. And you're like when or if this is coming for me. Didn't come from my parents. But like came from my grandparents. Is it coming for me? Like all this sort of stuff like that. You know, these are things that happen when like mental illness runs into your family or all these sort of things. And it's just like it's literalized in these ghosties and.

the blood dripping from the ear and all the sort of stuff like that. But it's a very human anxiety to have when people in your family have died. And you don't know if that thing is coming for you as well. And that I liked a lot, Navarro being sort of literally haunted of this other fear. Well, it's emerging of ideas, too, of those kinds of very human concerns that a lot of people can identify with, given their family's medical histories, or just their family history. Like, there are just some families who feel as though they're cursed

in a variety of ways and that it's an inherited thing and that it follows you. And then you're blending that almost with these very horror movie mechanisms, right? Something like The Ring or something like it follows where it's like it's coming down the chain, right?

Like, it's gone from mother to Julia, now to Evangeline. Like, now she is the only one left and she is the one being called. That's an idea that I really liked that the show is wrestling with and introducing. And that's where the blurring

of spirituality and the actual gets interesting, of what is what is Navarro this a very fact-based detective in a lot of ways? In some ways more of an instinct-based detective, but a police officer, someone who believes in evidence, believes in what she can prove, and yet she's so swayed in this moment

by this idea, and judging by the fact that her ears are literally bleeding, I think it's fair for her to assume and believe in those things. Two episodes left. The finale is kind of supersized is something that I found out looking at the HBO website that the finale is a little longer,

but we'll only have two more episodes to go. Something that they said in the official podcast is that this episode was like a real detour into personal demons, like sort of away from, even though we got some info about the case, the ice caves, Otis, like all the sort of stuff like that. But this is like a real personal demon episode and maybe we're going to get back to like straight detecting next week

are you anxious about the time we have left? Do you feel confident? How are you feeling? I'm starting to feel anxious. I'm starting to feel anxious about the sheer number of characters and threads that we have. We still know almost nothing about the mine.

We still know very little about the actual research that was being done at Solal. And I know some of that is we've gone a little bit more down the path of investigating Annie's murder as a sideway in to the Solal murders or the Solal deaths. And that's okay, and that makes sense, given all the way that the evidence is manifested and presented.

I'm just, I'm looking at the runtime left, and there's a lot of ground we have to cover, and there's a lot of personal ground we still have to cover, too. We still don't know so much about Danvers and about her history and about her relationship with Leah. There's so many balls in the air that for even two plus hours with a jumbo-sized finale, I wonder if they can get to everything that they would need to,

to even tie up a requisite number of loose ends here. Why not eight episodes? Question mark is, I think, where we stand. I think that does it for episode four. We'll be back next week with episode five. Rob, anything else you want to say before we go? Only that Liz Danvers in the White Noise Machine, also a great band name.

We've just been churning them out over the course of these podcasts. But Liz Danvers in the White Noise Machine, I could really get behind. I'm more of a like, because she's just like static white noise. Yes. I'm more of like, I will listen. into an ocean wave

or like, or rain, like sort of rain pattering on leaves. I like that one too. This is because you're in touch with the natural world

in a way that Liz Danvers just isn't. Our producer Kai just alerted us to the fact that official word from HBO is that episode five will air early

Friday at 6 p.m. Pacific to get out of the way of what is it, what is that football game that's happening on Sunday, Rob? I couldn't tell you.

It's some kind of event. Okay. I heard Taylor's going to be there. So it's going to air early. I don't think. our episode will drop early. It'll still drop on Monday. But, you know, if you want to make sure you don't get spoiled on anything or whatever, keep your eyes peeled on Friday. Well, and all the more time for you to watch the episode and email us about your theories and your

ideas of what's going on. At Yelot King SpongeBob at gmail.com. Thanks to Rob Mahoney for being the best. Thanks to Kaya Grady for being the best. And here's a few things to remember. Work on your Hollywood smile. Always bashcock your turkey. Always. It's a no brainer. Don't bother looking for crab. There's no crab factory. We'll see you next week. Bye. 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 their crumudgeonly Marcellus, whose remarkable intelligence leads her to a life-changing discovery. Remarkably bright

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