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

Episode Date: January 16, 2024

Joanna Robinson and Rob Mahoney reunite to break down the premiere of ‘True Detective: Night Country.’ They open by unpacking the lasting cultural impact of the first season 10 years later and how the fourth season of the beloved HBO drama differs this time around. Next, they discuss the eerie Alaskan setting, the many strained relationships between the characters, and the supernatural elements of the story so far. Later, they close by investigating a series of significant clues and early theories from the episode. Hosts: Joanna Robinson and Rob Mahoney Producer: Kai Grady Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did Don Draper really buy the world of Coke? Did Tony Soprano really die? Or just order more onion rings? Were those guys really in hell the whole time, or was that just the audience? The finales of our favorite shows can make us argue, make us cry, and make us crazy. From Spotify and the Ringer, I'm Andy Greenwald, and this is Stick the Landing, a new podcast where we'll be telling the story of modern TV backwards, one fade out at a time. Each episode, a guest and I will choose a celebrated series from history,

from the 70s to the streaming era and beyond and do a deep dive on its very last episode. Was it all a dream? Did it turn into a nightmare? And most importantly, what can we learn about tomorrow's new shows from the way yesterday's ended? TV is a journey.

I hope you'll enjoy this podcast about the destination. Starting January 17th, find Stick the Landing on Wednesdays on the prestige TV feed, on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. The Prestige TV podcast feed with that very chipper quote from Trooper Navarro that we're alone and God to. Rob Mahoney and I are here to talk to you about True Detective, colon, night country, season premiere.

Hey, Rob, how are you doing? I'm doing great. Is that the psychosphere I smell, Joe? I don't know, but listen, are the yarn and cork boards that we ordered from Spotify.com are not here yet. So I have just spread the notes for today's episode out in a spiral around me. and I hope that you can follow along with me. It's the most intelligible way to collate evidence and understand everything that you have in front of you.

Yeah, a chunky spiral. Love that. Okay, listen, hello. We're here to talk to you about True Detective. We're so excited to just continue on our snowy murdery journey through Fargo into the fictional town of Ennis Alaska for True Detective. We are coming to you. You may have noted it is a Tuesday.

we are our loose plan this season until someone tells us otherwise is we're going to be dropping these episodes on Tuesday and what that allows us to do is listen to what

Chris and Andy have to say on the watch which is always a fun thing to do read emails from you all and TBD on that email address we'll get back to you on that before the end of the episode

scour the Reddit boards for theories also are set so this is going to be sort of a two days later process theories second bite of the apple sort of take on True Detective Night Country.

Diving deep, one might say? Wow, the deep dive. Yeah, we might wind up going just like a little longer on these episodes, depending on how much theory fodder there is than we did on like our Fargo episodes, let's say. So for now if you want, you can reach us at, and people already have,

at either Hobbes and Dragons into email.com, which is the email address for the other podcast I do, House of Ar, or John Ham's nipple rings at Gable.com, which was the email address that we were doing for Fargo. Yes. Before, I'm hoping before we end this discussion today, Rob will have come up with another really brilliant. Actually, I think I came up with John Ham's nipple rings,

but Rob will 100% you. Rob will inspire me to come up with another, or Rob himself will come up, or our producer, Kai Grady, will come up with whatever we want to do for Night Country. Or if we fail to, please email you. email John Ham's Nipple Rings at gmail.com with what you think our new email should be. There you go. All right.

So overview before we get into the episode, each episode is just labeled part, part one, part two, part two. Yeah, so it's part one. Written and directed as all six episodes of the season will be by Issa Lopez. And we want to start by just talking really briefly, take us on a tour. This is the 10-year anniversary of True Detective Season 1 that we are celebrating that. show came out in 2014. I was recapping it for Vanity Fair. It's like one of the first things I did when I started work at VF.

And we just want to talk about the cultural impact of that season and sort of what the show is carrying it, caring with it. Because here's a couple things that I attribute to True Detective Season 1. It's really the birth of the serious era of what I call the Reddit detectives. It's, it became this theory. show. I'm not really sure that Nick Pizzolato, the show's creator, would want it to be a theory show.

I'm absolutely sure that Andy Greenwald does not want it to be a theory show. Of that, we can be certain. But nonetheless, people had so much fun with this as a theory show. And it's not the first theory show, obviously, like, Twin Peaks and Lost already existed. But it's the first theory show that

really align with like Reddit going hot and heavy and doing what it does. best. And so this is just like a real explosion of the Reddit detective era that, you know, we, we followed into things like Westworld or Mr. Robot, etc., etc. Well, and this is where I think you and I experienced TV a little different joke, is you do seem like you're a little bit more mystery box inclined. I will say, I'm generally more here for the vibes. But with the show like this, you have to indulge some theory. You have to

indulge. Like you want to be kind of following along with the clues of the case and what it's tipping off. I think where those things meet is why True Detective was such a phenomenon in the first place, right? It's the crossover appeal of people who are just in the prestige TV camp of like, oh, Matthew McConaughey's on television, I want to watch this. And then it's like the deeper and deeper you go. All the versions of that are fulfilling viewing experiences. And they're deeply felt and watched and like, you know, sieved through.

Like there's so much to unearth with these seasons, regardless of how you're watching them. And I think I've learned a lot. I've learned so much. about what the most enjoyable way to get into theories of a theory show is, because True Detective is a good example of this where people went all the way off the deep end, and then the answer wound up being a bit more conventional than I think a lot of people expected from it.

And then there came with that, perhaps in some cases, disappointment. I feel like one should never be disappointed if one's theory doesn't pan out because it's a reality you created in your head. So, like, that's your fault, honestly. if what winds up happening isn't that interesting that's its own thing but like one should never fault the show for not delivering the thing that

you cooked up in your head being right is just not that important like better to be interesting than right yeah exactly and then the other thing that Mallory and I like to talk about is this idea of hold a theory loosely like enjoy a theory but hold it loosely I think we learn that lesson a bit

this is coming out before our Fargo finale episode, but like, when we asked Noah Hawley about the Wizard of Oz and Fargo and how they were related this season, that was a really good example of like a theory being kind of like, oh, but at the same time, does that take the enjoyment that we had talking about it out of it? No, you know? So like, enjoy yourself. Don't let it swallow everything else. I think that's the thing that Andy worries about when he talks about theorizing is I think

he worries that people will just only focus on that. and not the vibes. And so it's good that Rob is here to keep me, you know, on the vibe journey along with Trudective Night Country. Well, yeah, Rob Mahoney, Vibes Commander. That's what's on the business card. Blur of, you already mentioned this, this idea, this excitement that Matthew McConaughey's here and Woody Harrelson.

The blur of film and TV actors, like, this was a huge, huge moment for that. It was already kind of happening with, like, you would have film actors would do, like, a mini-series, like a literary adaptation or something like that. A John Adams, you know, something like that. Yes, exactly. Your Mildred Pierce's. But like, but you didn't have something like this. And this is such a big deal.

And the conventional wisdom is when McConaughey won his Oscar for Dallas Biers Club, which he did, it was really also kind of for true detective. You know, he and Woody Harrelson presented at the Oscars that year. Like, it was just, it was a whole thing. And, like, I just, he's obviously incredible in Dallas Byers Club, but, like, the phenomena that was True Detective was Russ Cole really pushed the McConaissance into the stratosphere and opened the door for major film actors to be in, you know, what have you going forward. This is also, Fargo also premiered around this time. And Fargo season one and True Detective season one really cracked the door open for the, the, limited series boom in television.

Yes. Limited series, all the rage in the UK, but hadn't really like had its day yet in the U.S. And then these two examples were so successful that, you know, they're just everywhere nowadays. And one thing I think we saw from the seasons of True Detective, but also all those anthology shows that followed it.

Yeah. Is that they're, you know, all movie stars are not created equal. There are levels to these things. And which is why I'm particularly thrilled that we get to ride along with Jody Foster this season. You know, an absolute icon who has been super selective in her acting roles, basically over the last 20 years or so. So to get her in the driver's seat, along with a lot of new talent, along with some character actors we love, that feels like just the right balance for this kind of season. And we're going to talk about the brand of True Detective in a second, but like that is something of the True Detective brand can attract that maybe Issa Lopez makes something called Night Call.

country could not attract necessarily, perhaps. Carrie Fukenaga's career and the idea of the series director really came from True Detective Season 1. Carrie Fukenaga directs all the episodes in season 1. He has this very famous one or one shot that happens towards the end of season 1 episode 4. Lordy, that episode. Oh, my God.

Which is an... I rewatched it. It's astounding. But at the same time, so many people... have been trying to capture the reaction to that one-shot sequence that we see them so often now. But it was really, like, it stopped traffic that week that it came on. And all anyone wanted to talk about was the one shot at the end of season one episode four of True Detective. Well, there's a lot of that with True Detective where you can see so many other shows.

And even other films to pulling ideas from True Detective, you know, explorations and executions from True Detective. and almost none of them do it as well as that first season did. And watching that episode in particular, episode four of season one, was a real, like, they don't make TV like they used to moment. Because people do try to do the oners. They do try to do some creative editing and creative staging to make those things happen. But you're not shooting that shit on the volume. I'll tell you that.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's very, it's handheld. It's so chaotic. It is so, like, Cinema Verite, like that whole sequence versus the CGI digitally seamed oners that we see in a steady cam sort of situation and other things.

Memes, this is a very memey show and it didn't invent memes, but it certainly It perfected them. And it had a lot to do with like people seeing memes of older Matthew McConaughey and True Detective season one,

Russ Cole with the ponytail and the lone star cans, stuff like that, like really attracted more and more people to the show itself. So that was like, I remember that year for Valentine's Day, one of my assignments for VF was I had to come up with like TV character Valentine's. I don't know, some bit. I was really new at Vanity Fair.

And so like, Russ Cole was the most enjoyable to write Valentine's for. It was pretty delightful. I want to give Marty as flowers too, though. I know Rust is like the meme, the meme king really of true detective, but the one that's been especially hitting for me lately, and maybe I'm just noticing it more is the Marty line about like, I just want you to stop saying odd shit. Very applicable, universal, really,

in terms of what you could apply it to online. Marty's really having a time on TikTok right now. The exasperated Marty quotes are really, like those audio clips are really having their moment on TikTok right now. You mentioned things that were inspired by a true detective, like stuff like Mind Hunter, the outsider, big little lies, sharp objects, like a whole bunch of stuff.

Mind Hunter, I think, very specifically. I don't think we get if we don't get True Detective. But of course, True Detective is also inspired by a lot of Scandinavian murder shows, a lot of UK murder shows, the killing top of the lake. Those are already out when True Detective came out. But, like, it really kicked open that era of, like, prestige murder show in the U.S. versus, like, foreign imports. Well, and just to Time is a Flat Surve.

this thing right out of the gate. One thing that Issa Lopez mentioned in her conversation with Chris was that seven was a big inspiration for her in terms of like the cop dynamic, the detective dynamic, so that you have seven informing night country but true detective informing mind hunter.

Like there is a cross-pollination with the Finchiverse, clearly. The last thing I wanted to ask you before getting into Issa Lopez herself is this idea because Issa is now taking over the reins. Nick Pizzolato creates season one of True Detective, which most, not everyone, but a lot of people consider like a perfect season of television. And then tries, and I would say fails to varying degree to recapture that lighting in a bottle was season two and three of True Detective.

But nonetheless, HBO is like, this is a brand that we can do something with. So they hand the reins over to Isa Lopez and we'll talk about that in a minute. But in terms of like, okay, if True Detective is a brand, an IP, the HBO feels like sort of Cloverfield-esque, it can slap. on the front of something and make it a true detective story. What makes True Detective, true detective? Now, Rob, with love and respect

to you and your binging abilities, you are relatively new to the world of True Detective. Oh, very much so, yeah. You just got into, I'm really excited that you're here. I'm the, you know, the Finn in this case. You're just like showing me how to use the computer

database where I'm new here, but I'm a fast learner. Finn's everyone's favorite. So, you know, they, go. I'm curious what you, what does true detective meet to you? Like, what is the true detective brand? This is something that Chris and Andy talked about a little bit, but then, like, I think got distracted from

and I'm very curious, like, what, how you would boil down a true detective story. I think it, you know, obviously need the hard-boiled detective story at the middle. There's some crime they're trying to solve, but I think what makes true detective, true detective, and really effective is that it kind of freed

itself in that first season from the burden of explanation. There are some things that have to have answers, and there are some things that don't. And you don't have to close every loop. You don't have to dot every I. You don't have to X everything out. Everything doesn't need to be explicable. And so that that nice gray area between mystical and literal is such a great place to play. It makes it attractive to so many different kinds of viewers. You know, the idea like with Carcoza, for example, like, is there a cosmic force that drives people to do horrible things? Or is that just a way for our brains to wrangle and

comprehend the evil that men do. And that idea itself is evocative, but if you're hardwired on either side of that conversation, it's evocative. So I think the idea that you can take a criminal case, round it out into a conspiracy, broaden it at its scope where it seems like there's always something at the edge of the frame that could connect to it. That's what true detective is to me. It's not we're solving one kidnapping. We're solving the mysteries of the universe. I love that description. I think that's really good. I think the thing that really sort of rang the bell for me than what you said is that idea of broadened into conspiracy. Because usually we were talking about like systems as much as we were talking about like a bad person, right?

And then the nature of evil as it inhabits systems as well as people. Memory and time, a gimmick that this season abandons, but the other three seasons have is your actors are playing younger and older versions of themselves. We don't, I mean, I actually don't know if it's completely abandoned in the season of true detective, but it's certainly not present in this first. But what we do have in this first episode is a case in the past and a case in the present. Yes. So we're not like, we're not doing the like interview in a room, sort of gimmick that happens in the other three seasons, but of the older detective reflecting back on the case. But we do have history. So memory, time.

that's a key the passenger time the way in which this role as guardian of a community like the sacrifices a person is to make to take on the role of guardian to hold back the forces of evil

what does that do to a person Russ Cole is our best example of someone who's just like eaten up from the inside of all with all like the demons and the ghosts that he is trying to hold at bay and that you think of that moment when they're coming out of the hospital

and there's just like the cost of all of this on on Russ Cole of being you know as they put it in that season like the bad men who keep the other bad men from the door and and what that means for like your home life and all of that which we'll talk about a lot I wrote down in our nose for today I wrote down all the like relationships and after every single one I was like father strained steps daughter strained sister strained like there's not a single unstrained relationship in this show which is something that we can talk about. Well, that's one way in which we're playing with time, because as you mentioned, we're not seeing the two cases play out simultaneously. We're jumping in, and in particular, the relationship between Danvers and Navarro, they've already had their falling out.

And we're going to put the pieces together over the course of the season as to why it became strained and how it became strained. There's certainly some tipping in that direction already. But I like that that we're solving the fundamental mysteries of these two cases, but also like the mysteries of every interpersonal dynamic in this city of Venice. Last one at least I would say, and this might sound surface level,

what is true? I think is a really key question that we're always asking ourselves. What is the truth worth telling? What are their secrets worth keeping? That's a true detective classic. Okay. So this is Issa Lopez's take on that.

And as she has said in talking to Chris Ryan on the watch in a number of interviews, that this is sort of her dark reflection. of season one of True Detective, which is very masculine. That was actually an interesting experience I have had over the last decade of covering television is like, when True Detective Season 1 came out, I was so True Detective Pilled. I was so into that show. And then the great and brilliant Emily Nussbaum wrote a piece of New Yorker about like her critiques of the show and how hypermasculine it was. And I was like so out on Emily's critique of the season.

And then seeing the subsequent seasons that Nick Pizzolato helmed, I was like, oh, actually, I think Emily has a point. Well, it's funny you mention that because I actually, I listened to a 2014 podcast. It was an episode of the film cast, actually, with an appearance from a podcaster you may have heard of named Joanna Robinson talking about literally this exact topic. Oh, no. That specific Emily Nussbaum criticism. And on this podcast, you dared to dream of a day in which a season of true detective might be led by two women.

So I just want to say, you did it, Joe. You did it. We made it. We did it, Joe. Wow. I will never listen to that podcast. I shuddered to think what I said about. You were great.

Stop. Emily's great piece. And I think I've just changed in my, like, I've just changed in my, like, attitudes towards television and, like, whatever, but as we all should over a decade of doing this. But it is really interesting. Here we are with like a female fronted, a true detective. That was like the, you know, humid, sticky south. We are in the cold and frosty north. All this sort of like, it's interesting to think about this season as a flip reverse of season one. And I think that's something we'll come back to. Issa Lopez had to, as she told Chris, she had developed this story, the bare bones of the story, Night Country.

And then basically, HBO comes calling and is like, we're taking pitches for True Detective, do you have anything? So True Detective, Colin Knight Country is just sort of, again, slapping Cloverfield over the front of another project. But I think then she goes back through and gives it a True Detective wash. Yes. Which I think is very evident from the start. I think there's something to that, too. in terms of the way the true detectivey

Easter eggs are deployed. And none greater than kind of the spiral imagery that pops up throughout this first episode literally tattooed onto people's bodies in the layout of evidence. As we talked about,

you can see it like on filing cabinets. It's all over the place. I think why that works for me with true detective in ways that it doesn't with other properties that might be similarly like baked into

an existing franchise or IP is that here it feeds into like the recursion is part of the mythology. It's part of what we're talking about, the conspiracy, the far-reaching nature of it, the philosophical influence of these dark forces. And so the idea that these things just keep happening and keep popping up and they may or may not be connected, depending on how you look at them, that's not just like a nod to the

real ones. That's something that's kind of core to the text of what true detective is. I think that's a really good point. And I think it could go poorly. There is a version of, because again, there's like the meme-fied version of what true detective is. And then there is like the experience of actually watching a season of True Detective. So the spiral and the spiral imagery has cropped up in multiple seasons. So to your point, it's not just an illusion of season one, but is this idea of like Carcosa and evil and has just been always like lurking in the margins of everything. So, but there are ways in which someone could have done this and done a more a memeified version of it. And we'll talk a bit about like the Matthew McConae, Russ Cole theories are already popping.

They're flying. So we'll talk about those a little later. But yeah, that's another way one could connect if one wanted to. Issa Lopez has made a number of films. Tigers Are Not Afraid from 2017 is the most easily accessible. I streamed it off AMC over the weekend. It is a tough watch, I will say. It's about kids in Mexico caught up in the drug world, Tunisquherta, of Wakanda Forever

fame is in it. It's horror and sort of magical realism at the same time. There are sort of this imaginary tiger motif, et cetera. So I can see some of the fingerprints. If you watch that, I think you can see some of the fingerprints on what we get here, starting with the caribou and going forward. Yes. I don't think it's required viewing, but I think the horror element is something that we should keep an eye on,

especially as Isab has said that, like, Alien, The Thing, the Overlook Hotel, have all inspired this season of television, along with the Dietlav Pass, like real world Russian phenomena that happened that she says has never been solved to my satisfaction is what she says so like maybe she's looking to solve it inside her own show.

Anything you want to say about those inspoes? Yeah, let's talk about the day I love past incident. Because that was something I wasn't super familiar with and the more I've been digging into it, the more I can understand her fascination of specifically like, you know, this incident in the 50s and the Ural Mountains

where nine hikers just kind of vanished. And when they sent a search team to look for them, they found a tent. And inside the tent, there was food and maps and gear and clothes and shoes and a hole in the tent that had been cut open from the inside. And so they eventually found the bodies of all nine hikers as they searched, took I think months, if not years. But they were in really bizarre states. A few of them were just like frozen out there with no clothes on. Others had wounds and broken bones. Two of the bodies were missing eyes. One of them critically, referentially here, was missing her tongue. And no one,

really knows what happened. All the explanations are like, oh, there must have been a glacier. I think there's a lot of explanations as to how human beings would die out in the cold, but not as to why they would get out of the tent without anything that belonged to them. And so we see some of that same energy and Solal Station here at the beginning, the tongue, obviously, but there's no other signs of violence. All the artifacts of an interrupted life, you know, you got phones left behind, you've got a sandwich still on the counter. We get the briefest sense of like how these people we're living until all of them just kind of completely vanish for most of this episode. It's really interesting because, like, you know, these barring flashbacks, like, we spend

two minutes with these guys, like kind of Matt, maybe three, I don't know, not much time at all to give us a sense of, like, you know, we've got laundry, we've got the treadmill, we've got, we're making sandwich TikToks, we're watching Ferris Bueller, like, all those sort of stuff like that, like to get a sense of who these guys are. which is, you know, more than Laura Palmer gets in Twit Peaks when she washes up on shore. So, like, it's interesting. I thought it was pretty efficient, honestly. Especially one of the specific things Issa called out was, like, referring to this base as kind of like the Nostromo and Alien.

Yes. And there is that lived-in quality. And, you know, Alien, there's obviously a lot more time spent in the Nistromo for you to get a sense of what that space is like and how the characters interact in it. And, you know, it's very famous for slow playing the reveal of the alien in that movie versus here. we only get this bite-sized item of how these people are living. But in terms of set deck, in terms of the activities those people are doing, the way everything looks and feels and is shaped, it feels like a real place. And look, I'm a sucker for a research base, especially in Arctic research base.

Come on. Okay. Listen. If you did not listen to our fire girl coverage, what you need to know is Rob Mahoney's the kind of guy who's going to count all the Imagine Dragons posters on the wall of someone's like a garage. So, Romani, what set deck

elements do you want to call out in Salal Station? I spent a lot of time looking at the DVD case. I'm not going to lie to you. Okay. Talk to me about it. Maybe a disturbing amount of time. And this is where a lifetime of being an appreciator of physical media has really paid off. Because I saw a fuzzy black spine

with some pink text and some white text and I was like, boom, that is death to smoochie. I am 100 percent sure. Wow. We got a lot of interesting callouts in terms of what's on the shelf. Some of them are more visible. There's the thing VHS right behind Jody Foster. The influences are right on its sleeve.

Totally makes sense. There is an aliens DVD in there. There's some interesting kind of dating artifacts happening as we're trying to figure out like when does this show take place? When are we? I know that's a subject of a lot of the theories that are flying out right now. For what it's worth in terms of what's on the shelf, Get Out is on the shelf. arrival is on the shelf.

And maybe most critically, Jody Foster picks up a PlayStation 5 controller, which means we're at least post-2020. Yeah, we're making sandwich TikToks. So, like, yeah. It's at least got to be that.

Yeah. But also, like, there's lots of fun, little random artifacts on that shelf. Veronica Mars, another great detective show, pops up on that shelf. Love it.

A Jody Foster classic, a very long engagement on that shelf. Wow. Wow. Sorry. I hadn't thought about that movie. in a long time.

There's some that it's hard to know, like, is this intentional or is this a movie? Because you got your, you know, your kangaroo jacks on the shelf, for example. You got your Babylon fives.

I don't know that those mean anything, but I can't lie that when I saw Matchstick Men on that shelf, it kind of jumped out to me, a movie about like con artist, con and con artist, and the lies that we create to cover the things we do.

I thought that was interesting. But also, one of particular note for you and I, Joe, Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship of the Ring, the theatrical edition. Oh, no. true version of Lord of the Rings

on the shelf. Rob, we agree on so many things and then this is like where we significantly depart ways. I reluctantly concede that they actually had both editions. They had the extended two, so anyone can live in Solal Station, it turns out. But just a fellowship,

not of two towers and return of the king? As far as I could tell based on the spines, they had theatrical fellowship, they had extended fellowship, and they had extended return of the king. So extended two towers has disappeared somewhere or perhaps was never in the station to begin. That's the real mystery we need to solve.

Yeah. What's happening at Helms Deep? We got to know. All right. Thank you for your excellent work. Incredible, incredible content from you as always. Snoring, gasping during sleep, feeling fatigued, ask your doctor about Zepbound, terseptite.

The first and only FDA-approved prescription medicine for moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and adults with obesity. Zepbound is a prescription medicine. used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea, OSA, and obesity to improve their OSA. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15 milligram injection. Zetbound contains terseptitide 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 pins 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 Zepbound with a sulfonal urea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsened kidney problems.

Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-9 or visit Zepbound.lily.com. So inspired by Alien the Thing, no copy of The Shining that you found on the DVD cell? No thought I saw. Yeah, but look, there's a lot of DVDs up there. It could be anywhere. The thing that this show reminds me of, and I was kind of surprised at, Chris and Andy didn't talk about it, but Mayor of Easttown. Like, Jody in this role, in this like very, we're going to talk about Liz Danvers in a second,

but like it's very gruff sort of woman. It reminds me a lot of Kate Winslet playing mayor. I think the sort of cold weather community, all that sort of stuff. Mayor was a bit different in that like we're so, we were so used to seeing Kate Winsett play like the English Rose that to see her play this like. gruff East Coast American woman was like the real shocker but I think

Jody is giving me a similar energy where it's just sort of like and I loved the conversation that East Side with Chris about like Jody Foster's like let's make her a real asshole like I want to play a real asshole I was like that's fascinating to me because like they're a moment like I

didn't come away from this episode thinking wow Liz Danvers what an asshole but like time will tell but I thought that was a really interesting, you know, Eason went back and sort of rewrote the character to be even edgier, I suppose, to meet what it was that

Judi Foster wanted to do. Well, and a characterization that honestly is usually reserved for men and male detectives in these kinds of roles to be that sort of asshole, to be like low-key racist in this episode, and clearly like very tightly coiled in the way that Danvers is, where she is one twist and shout cycle

away from just exploding on somebody. So I love that energy of what she's bring. And I love the mayor call out. There is a lot of similarity there in terms of the insular worlds around these cases, the kind of like small town energy, even within a bigger context. I really expect more of Chris and Andy. I wonder if it was like the presence of Lone Star and the lack of Yingling in there that like really threw them off the case. Two more things I want to shout out. And they're both hockey based. I'm shocked. I'm shocked. Beartown, which is, was turned into a TV show, but is I really enjoyed as a novel.

Beartown, incredible novel, but that is like a small, snowy community, sort of centered around like a hockey team. Ostensibly, yeah. Ostensibly. And then Mystery Alaska, one of my favorite movies of all time. Genuinely, one of my favorite movies of all time, but that's the Russell Crow. But in terms of like what it is to live in Alaska town where it snows all the time and it's dark all the time. And that's the last thing I want to talk about before we get into sort of our character break. down, which is this idea of like night country, right?

So this is a Christmas show. We're starting December 17th. Last sunset of the year is how we start. And I don't know if this is true when you were, you and I didn't go to intro days in Sweden at the same time. But when I was there, the sun didn't set until like really late at night. And it was very disorienting. And then it got and then the sun came up really early in the morning. So there was barely any night.

But it really fucks with you the off-kilter rhythms of the sun cycles in the northern hemisphere. What was your experience when you went to Sweden? You went a different time of year. Yeah, similarly disoriented, though. And that's where, like, this is such a great setting for this kind of story. For one, the kind of frozen tundra is so inhospitable. And so, like, such a beautiful scene, too. in a way that I kind of like that we get one last glimpse of it at the beginning

before the caribou majestically run off the cliff. We see the sun go down and it's like, oh, you're just never going to see these mountain ranges, these scenes again. You are stuck in this darkness now in a way that I think lots of people are rightly calling out 30 days of night, the vampire movie that's set in this kind of circumstance. Oh, yeah. More like fun than great, but a worthy kind of, like a great pitch, right? A concept, yeah.

Incredible concept. And so the idea of putting all these people and this small town vibe, this small town energy, like Bairtown is another great call where that feeling of like everyone knows each other and is kind of sick of each other's bullshit already and also we're going to make it night day after day after day after day

and just see how people start to unravel. It's so disorienting to watch this show. I actually, the first time I watched this episode, I think I was background watching because I knew I was going to watch it like many times before we um so i was background watching it and then i watched it on sort of like the big screen in the house and then i did this that and the other thing but the first time i watched it i wasn't paying attention to the fact that we were in it was all night all the time i wasn't paying attention

to that and then and then when it clicked for me so i just thought all this stuff was happening late at night and that's just sort of the feeling anyway once you know you never know what time of day we're in at all everything feels clandestine everything feels like it's happening later than it ought to because of we're always in night. And presumably, that's going to be true for the rest of the season. I don't know, but presumably that's the set we're in. The quote that opens this episode, for we do not know what beasts the night dreams

when it's hours grow long for even God to be awake. Great tool lyrics, you know, really, really well done. It is from The King in Yellow. Or that. By R.W. Chambers, which was the book that we were all obsessed with when watching True Detective Season 1 when the Yellow King

shows up in True Detective's season one and Carcosa and all that sort of stuff comes from the King and Yellow

R.W. Chambers mystery stories. When I realized the king and yellow I was like oh my God, we're back.

We're all the way back. We're so back. Carcosa, this realm that exists outside of time and space, this idea of an elemental evil that possesses people

and drive them mad. We do see Clark. We're going to talk about him a little later where we see Clark sort of like shaking and shuddering before he says she's awake, right? One of the guys in the station and that, I mean, it looks possessy

to me, if anything. Well, bit. So, here we are. We're in Night Country. What we're going to do in this first episode, I'm not going to promise this is how we're going to do it going forward. We're going character by character. Just to get a sense of who these people are and sort of their main relationships.

So we're not going every character. We're going to get the main characters and there's sort of like sub-relationships here. So we'll start with Of course, where else to start? But at the top, Chief of Police, Liz, Danvers, who is crucially, I think, when we talk about, you referenced Barrettown, this idea of these small communities where everyone knows each other, unless you're not from there, right? And Liz has been there for a while, but she's not from there.

Chris Nandy pointed out that she's wearing a Minnesota hoodie. We don't know where she's from exactly, but we know she was transferred in there When she's talking to Navarro later, she's like, I wasn't here for the Annie Kay thing. That was you. You know, that wasn't me. I wasn't here. You can't blame me for that. So, like, she was transferred in after the whole Annie Kay case, which we can presume we're

going to be digging back into in this season. What does it mean for an outsider to be here in this community? Rob, any early thoughts on that? And what does it mean for a person to come to this kind of place? Literally like the edge of the world, effectively. There is an isolation and a remoteness that Danvers opted into on some level, even if it was just professional, even if it was just kind of a transfer. But the fact that she signed up for this, I think, is telling of something about her character

and where she is. And we get all these nods and allusions to some tragic backstory for her in terms of some family trauma, like the potential loss it sounds like of at least some family members. members, we don't exactly know how many. That brings me to my next bullet point here, which is ghost baby, exclamation marks, scary, exclamation mark, right? So Holden Danvers, which is the name of the child, and we know that, I know that from close captioning,

Holden, a dream slash ghost version of Holden, whose little hand reaches over Danvers' shoulder while she's trying to sleep. Yeah. He's mommy. She says Holden. And then he says she's awake. You're like, oh, no. No.

Not the scary murder tagline of the season. She's awake from a ghost baby. Oh, no. But I do want to call out something about this episode that is really what True Detective does so well, which is it's not just trying to be eerie. This shit's genuinely eerie. And I got that same like bone-chilling feeling from this episode and the, especially the crime scene at the end

and this like, as Chris put it, like this Bosch painting of disfigured victims. That felt very, like very akin to the scenes in True Detective Season 1, akin to like the murder tabloes on Hannibal, like these very visceral, violent and also like artistically posed scenes that will tell us something and it gives us a lot to chew on.

Oh my God, Hannibal was such a time. What a time to be alive watching Hannibal on network television. Network television. That's not happening again. The question that a lot of people have is, is this why Danvers hates the Beatles? Because the indication we get from this first episode

is she has lost a small child and probably also her partner. In a car crash, it seems, because we get this flashback of her walking through broken glass. And then the reaction that both she and Leah have, we'll talk about Leah in a second, to this drunk driver and how upset Liz is at this drunk driver, et cetera. So were the Beatles playing when the car crashes?

Is that why Danvers has such an outsized reaction? Or she's just like channeling her, Gen Z, who gives a shit about the Beatles vibe that I don't understand. But Gen Z has decided the Beatles aren't that important. And I have never felt so combative against a generation. Truly fucking baffling, Joe. What are they doing?

They're great. Everything else they do is great, except for this. Rob, I know you, something I know about you that I learned from your wife is that you're a fan of a DVD menu. Oh, yes. So you know that when a movie ends, we sit on the DVD menu, we don't loop it. And we certainly don't loop just one scene over and over again. So why do you think that one scene from Ferris Bueller is playing? in Thalelal Station.

Yeah, creepy buffering. I love it. Honestly, like, we get some creepy static in this episode, but creepy looping buffering is a new one. I'm guessing, just by the way that the shelf is arranged, this isn't a crew that takes, like, particularly great care of their discs. I think there just might be a little scratch on that guy,

and it's kind of catching as it goes around. But we do get the bouncing DVD screensaver once, you know, once Jody Foster successfully turns off the twist and shout, which... Look, I'm here for. Let's bring it back. I didn't even know how much I missed it until I saw it. Bueller?

No, specifically the screensaver. Although, Ferris Bueller and the Beatles in general, never has it been clear that we're on HBO. Like, they got Twist and Shout money. That's a real budget right there. All right, let's talk about Danvers and her sort of preternatural powers of deduction. Later in the episode, she doesn't sleep well.

Very rest of her. I don't know that she'll be looking for Kualoids to solve that problem, but listen, she doesn't sleep well. She has her spiral made of evidence. I was at first slightly put off. We're in Solal Station. You know, I'll have plenty to say about John Hawks' character, Hank Pryor, a little bit later. But Hank, not a great detective, has made some assumptions based on lunch meet.

Liz, it almost seemed like her superpower was connected to her being a mom. You know what I mean? To literally making sandwiches? It wasn't just the making sandwiches. It was like the smelling the laundry. It was like this very like mom domestic thing that I was like, what? And then we'll get to Leah. But and that sort of like made everything sort of snap into place for me.

Not for us to judge anyone's mothering style, but Danvers, I think we can confidently say, not mother of the year material just yet. And which makes her like making fun of Hank in front of his own kid. all the more dickish when, you know, we see her parental style with Leah. Okay, so what do you want to say about watching this detective detect? Like, anything spring out to you?

Well, in part because, you know, she didn't grow up here. She's not from this area long term, as we said, but she so quickly identifies the woman's tongue and the repetitive behavior that would cause some, like, scarring on it from this Anupiac woman who would have been licking a fishing line. Like that's obviously great detective work, but kind of teaches us about Danvers eye for detail

beyond just like the maternal experiences you're talking about. Like she's picking up on all kinds of things all over the place that these other cops are not just yet. It also kind of reinforces every time she's looking to one of them for help and one of them is idly texting or just kind of clueless at a computer that there's not a lot of backup to be had here. Right. Like whatever is going to happen, Navarro and Danvers are probably going to,

have to be the ones to do it or as far as they can bring Finn along in the meantime. But there isn't like another agency to call in. There isn't another station down the road. Like this is a small community. And Danvers is kind of it. And so the fact that we feel like the investigation is in pretty capable hands, if also like maybe hands that are on the verge of a nervous breakdown. My favorite armadow of our film.

Okay. So Leah Danvers is a stepdaughter. We find out through context clues. Do we know that? Well, she says, you know, you don't really have to be my mom, Liz, think my dad would have understood. Yes. That says step. Or, I don't know about stepdaughter.

Not, I don't think she's Leah's biological mom. No, not biological. But I think there's probably, there's a bunch of different scenarios. One, like, cut and dry, stepmother by marriage. There's, like, maybe she was involved with Leah's dad, but not that far along when he died. And then there's maybe, like, she's just the person who could take Leah in and was willing to do it for whatever reason. I think we'll learn more about that, but clearly not a biological mother-daughter relationship. I think that's fair.

Caretaker, not biological. Leah is queer, having sex with a younger girl. Do we care? So the girl is 16 and Leah is, wait, one guess is 18, something like that. Ish? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how old Leah is supposed to be just yet. Leah seems like she's also a teenager.

So it's just sort of like a... And I think also this strain that comes from not just being a... a stepdaughter or at least not a biological daughter, but also a different race or culture than the person who's taking care of you. You already mentioned this sort of the racism of Danvers. Yeah. Let's just just hear a juicy little clip, shall we, Kai?

It's a woman's tongue. It's an anupiac woman's tongue. And you know this because spirit animal came to you in a dream? My spirit animal eats old fucking white ladies like you. for breakfast there is careful. That conversation happens, and there's also later the conversation between of our own inverse about how missing white women are treated versus missing Native women.

This is something that the show has us on its mind. But I think it's important to think about Leah as this, like, you know, let's say teenage or a very young, you know, native woman and, like, in the care of a white woman who doesn't understand the nuances of what that might entail for this young woman she's in charge of, you know? Yeah, definitely doesn't seem to fully understand her daughter's circumstances or her stepdaughter, adopted daughter's circumstances. And Danvers is certainly cold and curt, and as we played, you know, pretty casually racist here and there in this episode. She's also, like, seen enough as a cop to make her very good at her job, clearly,

but also make her pretty disaffected with what they see. Like, you also get that line from Navar about how, like, we carry all, the case is with us. And Danvers is very quick to say, no, we don't. Yeah. Let's talk about Trooper, Evangeline Navarro, our co-lead, our co-detective, right? A veteran who, as we heard at the top of the episode, believes in God, busted down to trooper status from used to work with Danvers and is now a trooper, a trooper,

because it's something that happened. Is native, but my question is, like, how connected to the community? There's this woman in episode one who asks her, what's her? name, hun, who's your ACA? And Navarro looks like kind of uncomfortable about that. There's also a line later, we'll talk about her sister, but this idea of like moving, like who moved, where, when sort of thing. Like, how much is she a part of this community too?

I'm not sure. And then was previously obsessed by the death of a local woman, Annie Kay. And this is the parallel case. Previously obsessed or maybe just constantly obsessed? Continues to be obsessed. The obsession is not evaded. So we got this Annie Kay mystery. with the Salal Men and sort of how

how it usually goes with shows like this, not just true detective, but a show that I love that is the very, very cozy version of this is the BBC series Shetland. This is just like one of my comfort British murderer show watches. It's the comforting British murder show.

There's so many. They wear a lot of net wear. There's always a murder in the past that you have to figure out to solve the murder now, right? And so that is probably what is going on here. Annie Kay, star-shaped wounds, murder weapon never found, the tongue situation. What do you want to say? Yeah, one thing about the star-shaped wounds, I don't know if this is just me connecting dots having watched season one so recently and it being so fresh for me.

But the season one finale and this big conversation at the end of it between Russ and Marty about like the idea of a star as something cutting through the darkness of the universe. and in this episode, the star-shaped wounds are very much like the opposite, right? It's like the evil kind of finding its way back in some ways through these wounds and through us in certain ways.

So maybe that's just me reading too much into star-shaped things, but it kind of feels like true detective invites that a little bit. I think if we're looking at spiral tattoos, I think star-shaped wounds have to also make us think about about season one.

Annie was an activist who pissed off the mining company, the money company employs in most of the town. And he's brother Ryan, who we heard in the opening clip, says, recalls this fight that he had with Annie

before she died. You kill the mine, you kill Ennis, no jobs, no mine, taxes, no schools, nothing. She didn't care. We were barely speaking

that last year. Talk about a conspiracy. If we're going to talk about a conspiracy and true detective, there's a company that owns this town. and I always look askance at a company that owns a town

is this pinging conspiracy things for you, Rob? How are you feeling? You hate a theory, but come on, like... I don't hate a theory, and look, you know, as we all know, mining companies, they've never done anything wrong. There's never been any kind of conspiracy or protection racket.

That's never been a thing that's happened. We've watched justified. We know that the mining company's fine. This is fine. If we all do, dig coal together, how could anyone possibly turn us against each other? It's really a way of bonding. Ryan also says the water's

bad and Annie would have said told you so. So water being bad, connected to the binding company, connected to pollution, something to think about. Especially when the people at the Sol Station are like, in part what they're researching is, you know, the origins of life and the evolution of life, but

also global warming and its effects. Like the environmental concerns are right here on the surface for us from the start. We meet Trooper Navarro's sister Julia. I wrote sister strained. Has mental health issues just like their mom. This is like, this is the one story beat where I was like, this is maybe one element

to many. There's just like a lot of relationships and dynamics that we have to get wrap our arms around pretty quickly in the pilot. And this is one where I was sort of like, could this have been an episode two thing? We're only six episodes of the season. Yeah. So there's a lot we have to work through. But how did the introduction of Julie?

here work for you. I mean, I like seeing a different side of Navarro. We've seen her be gruff and be authoritative, especially in terms of her actual police work and sometimes destructive to the people who she doesn't seem to like very much, or at least to their cars. I'll say this, a character who could unlock

a very different kind of plot line for Navarro and maybe gives us a sense of why she cares about people and has that kind of caretaker instinct. Do we get this line from Danvers about how Navarro is, like, kind of obsessed with women who get hurt. And that's part of the reason why she's been so deep in this Annie K case. In the same way that Danvers seems to be obsessed with drunk drivers, right? Like there's something that has happened with these characters that is drawing them

toward these sorts of incidents and these sorts of crimes. And so that we get the allusion to their mother, that we get the idea of like she has promised her sister, no hospitals, I think gives a hint at the severity of some of what her sister is dealing with and the seriousness of it. I'm eager to see how that plays out because I think these sorts of characters like a sibling, a parent, a spouse on a show

who's like mentally dealing with a lot and maybe, if they have to say no hospitals, I worry about the way those plot lines are managed and dealt with and the role those characters play in the show because sometimes they just turn into like oh, the distraction from the case. And I don't want, I don't want Julia to become that.

I think you make a really good point about this idea of like seeing Evangeline is, such, and we're going to talk about her physicality in a second, which I think is worth noting, but to see the tenderness that she has with her sister, you know, that side of her. She might not have the same degree of tenderness to offer to Eddie, who is, I have put it here, hookup strained. She goes to have sex with Eddie to, like, blow off steam or whatever it is she needs. we should mention

that Kelly Risu plays Navarro is an athlete Right Kind of a very different sort of HBO alum That I don't know they've ever seen before

Like from the HBO boxing pipeline Into acting on HBO There's obviously a lot You know, John Hawks like case and point guy who's been on a bunch of different HBO shows already. A lot of HBO veterans I don't know that I've ever seen

an HBO boxing veteran pop up on one of these shows in this capacity before. Her physicality is is insane. Like, she looks amazing. Um, and so that, like, when we see her take down, uh, you know, at a shitty, drunk, abusive guy at the top or whatever, we're sort of like, yeah, she can do that. She can do anything. Like, she is so strong. Um, I want to talk about the sex scene, though, because it's interesting, like, so talking about, like, uh, this being a

flip mirror of two detective season one where we have, like, Alexander. to Dario, like, very fetish-sized, like, all this stuff about, like, the way in which sex was shot 10 years ago on HBO. And, like, we went through a whole Game of Thrones revolution about, like, sex in HBO and how we do things. This sex scene is so interesting to me, so character-driven in terms of, like, I'm not even sure she has or is interested in orgasm. She is, like, interested in the power of making... Of making him climax, and she's just sort of like, he's like, she like forces an orgasm out of him. And it is like entirely this like very complex power play. What are your thoughts about this?

Well, there's kind of the truism that all, all sex scenes on film and maybe this, I'm sure some psychologist would just tell you all sex period is about power in some way, that those dynamics are baked into everything. But it's very clear what's happening here for that character. And she's stealing his toothbrush. Like what bigger power play is there than taking someone's SpongeBob toothbrush? Spongebop toothbrush? I'm going to say right out the gate, I'm a vague Eddie fan. Vives off Eddie are like very good. I like this guy.

Need more Eddie. She needs to buy him a new toothbrush. Honestly, using someone else's toothbrush is messed up. It's a no. It's a no for me. I don't support it. And stealing his toothbrush is even worse. I don't support any of it.

Last thing on Navarra, I want to say, before we leave her to roll. on through the characters, the Bailey's move at the end of the episode. When she sees the guy who she took down in the sort of crab factory at the beginning, and then towards the end of the episode, they're at the like state liquor store. The crab factory at gmail.com. Like that, that's our first idea for an email address. 100% taken. Maybe Bailey's in the gas tank might be another one.

And I did have to have to ask. Twitter about this because I was like I would never waste Bailey's and someone else's gas tank personally but like what is it about Bailey's something blah blah blah ethanol in the gas tank will fuck up your fool line anything that's not gas in the gas tank I guess

will fuck up the innards of your car so it doesn't really matter you could piss in someone's gas tank it would also be terrible so that's fair I also have it burned in my brain just to again bring Woody Harrelson back into this from the movie Kingpin that you can't put sugar in your gas tank or it will ruin your car

I mean, there's plenty of sugar in Bailey So here we are We learn a lot from Kingpin It turns out Next on the list I think you referred to him as Finn a couple times I think that's the actor's name Oh yeah my mistake

Yeah, sorry Peter. That's good Peter Pryor This is Liz's pet Right, but my question Okay, two things Number one, speaking of Mary Vestown Spoilers from Mary Vestown Skip ahead if you haven't

Please don't let me get attached To another golden retriever Young Detective When I got hurt So badly by Mary Mastown I'm very scared for this character for that reason. Follow up question. Peter Pryor is Liz's pet.

How much of this is like true wanting to mentor someone and how much of this is just her fucking with his dad, Hank, played by John Hawks. Yeah, the Hank and Danvers relationship, I might be the most fascinating on the show so far. I just cannot figure out their whole deal at all. I want to level it up from strained to like fraught. Like it is, he does not like taking order.

from her. That is evidence. He's hoarding case files at his house and refusing to give them up. Okay, why? And he's being very squarely about it. My eyes on you, Hank. He's texting throughout that first scene. Like, why? Who is he texting? Is it just like his mail-order bride?

Or is it, you know, something to do with the case and conspiracy? I don't know. He's so weird about the case files. Here's the one sort of, like, dynamic that I was able to suss out going back through the lines. when Danvers is downloading information to Peter over a bowl of what looks like tomato soup. And Peter, by the way, Chris said a couple times, Chris Andy said a couple times that they liked that there was no like new kid in town to explain all the dynamics to. And that's kind of true. But Peter kind of takes on that role as like new to the force. A little bit, yeah.

Because Danvers like sits him down over soups and gives him some exposition. But she says about Navarro, she says your dad had to take her. off the case. So this is before Liz's time. So before Liz was there, Hank had authority to take people on and off the case. So was he like the highest ranking officer before she got there? Did she jump over him? Something like that.

You know what I mean? Like it feels like he's just pissed that she's there and that he has to report to her. That would certainly explain the undermining, you know, in terms of the case files and stuff like that. Yeah. And it feels not ungendered, I will say. John Hawks is really interesting casting for this character. You and I love John Hawks. Yes.

But this character who seems like to be into a little bit of macho bullshit, it's interesting to cast someone like John Hawks who is... I've never seen him do this before. No. He's incredibly well quaffed, by the way. Like very put together. Like his... You say it like you're surprised.

Come on. No, John always looks great. but like for a for a shitheel Alaska cop the uniforms are very like stylish his hair is very nice can I tell you my John Hawks story really quickly that I started telling you to get via text and then decided it would be better podcasting I demand that you turn it into content

one time in the Sunday at film festival in like 2005-2006 I was volunteering and John Hawks was in a film there me and everyone you know maybe possibly could be. That makes sense. And we were walking out of the movie at the Eccles in Sundance, and he was standing outside the front door giving out CD. He had a beanie, and he had CDs in the beanie, because he is a band called King Strangler,

and he was giving out copies of his CD and being like, we're playing this venue later. And so my friend Christina and I went to go see John Hawks and his band, King Stragler, play at this like random you know a cafe that they have up in Park City what does he play? I feel like he has bass player

energy. I think it's just a guitar I think he's I think this is not a great band I have their CD I've listened to a lot he's great I will say the band doesn't really exist anywhere he's great there's like four tracks on the

it's on Spotify I checked you guys can listen to him oh I will there's four tracks on there that he sings, and those have, like, a lot of character to them. He has this very, like, Keith Caridine, like, sort of, like, talk-singy thing that he does is very good. The ones that he's not singing on are not very interesting, I will say. Anyway, John Hawks, what a strange bird.

I love him so much. He's phenomenal in everything. You love John Hawks. What do you want to say about Hawks being here and how excited you are? Yeah, I'm just so used to him as, I think, like, a kind of a kindness and decency. in a lot of his roles. He plays a lot of upright men. And maybe this is just me speaking from a perspective of someone who like deeply, deeply loves Deadwood. And so that will always be kind of the anchor point for John Hawksome. But like even in

Eastbound and Down, even in other properties, like, I've never seen this sort of performance from him. So I'm very eager to know what he does with it and where he goes with it and kind of what this character is hiding. There's just a, there's an affect specifically to the way that like Hank is operating during these crime scenes. And I'm like, what? What is this guy up to exactly? Sinister. My antenna are just going crazy. Sinister and squirly.

There's like one shot when Deamvers is like going through and like sniffing laundry and looking at the treadmill and doing everything. Where she just like, she just walks past him and he just looks so suspicious. Like everything he's doing looks so squirly to me. So yeah. Also never trust someone who has like, what is it? Like Manwitch and his. Multiple cans of Manwitch. Multiple cans of Manwitch.

It's a really good little, like, he can't even rustle up a chip for his kid, but Liz has a bowl of soup ready for him. You know what I mean? It's a nice little two-meal situation. Let's talk about Kayla. Kayla, Peter's wife. Calamistrained. And Darwin is his son. Do we know wife?

A partner. Kayla is his partner and Darwin's mother. Darwin is his son and very cute. Great artist. Big question for you. Why are these children named Holden and Darwin? Is this Santa Barbara? Why are we naming our children Holden and Darwin in the year of our Lord 2020 something?

I don't know. Here's what we don't do, Rob. Yes. We don't ignore children's drawings in True Detective. Absolutely not. In season one, the green earmuffs show up in episode one on a child's drawing. in season three, the pink room, I don't think you have seen season three yet,

season three, the pink room is a thing that shows up in child's drawing very early in Julia's drawing, it's a big thing. So let's just listen to the conversation that Peter and Kayla have about this thing that Darwin has drawn Kai. Still local legend. You leave him at the laundromat with your grandma?

Yeah, it is. Right. You know why? Okay. Uh, Yeah, I'm sorry. I was late. It's just a little thing. It's kind of crazy.

It's all good. But I have classes, so my grandma's there to take care of Darwin, and she happens to like to tell him stories from his culture. Local legends. The woman with scary eyes, and all of her fengies have been cut off. Sorry, all of her what? Her fengies. The Reddy detectives came through for me on this one,

but anything that you want to say about this drawing before I get into what the Red of Detectives had to say? Oh no, I haven't fully theorized out exactly what the fingerless creepy drawing could represent just yet. I'm just using it as a mood piece. I'm ready to frame it and put it up on my wall. I'm ready to meditate upon it.

And, you know, and there's a nice, like, I like the way that Kayla says Shapsa like to tell him stories from his culture as a way to, like, shut up his white dad or whatever. But local legends, Sedna, goddess of the sea and underworld, In one Baffin, this is from Wikipedia.com, you're welcome. That's the level of research I've done for this.

In one Baffan Island tradition, Sedna was 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. Sedna gained control over the animals. This is what I bold and highlighted for myself. If humans angered her, she could stop the animals from coming to their hunting sites, thus causing famine.

Two things we get in this episode, Rob, we get caribou jumping off the side of a cliff when a hunter is trying to hunt them. We also get a mention of a crab shortage in the Blue King crab factory at the beginning of the episode. So Sedna is a sea goddess but also rules over the Inuit underworld. So a sort of Hades-esque goddessy goddess with all of her fingies cut off. Anything you want to say about that, Rob? I think she's just cool, too, to dig into a little more cross-cultural mythology, like to get into this native community and some of, like, specifically what would be important to this grandmother who we have not met yet. I hope we get to meet her.

She seems like a great hang encouraging artistic pursuits in her grandson. I hope we could spend some time with her. but I'm eager to see how that plays into an already hyper-complex lore set for true detective. And again, the kind of cross of all of these ideas of evil and gods and power and demonic forces and the things that are kind of tugging at us to do what we do. I think if you were asked Kayla's grandmother, what people meant when they said she's awake,

they would probably say the figy-less Sikh goddess. But I have another theory about that, but we'll get into that in theory corner. But the thing to keep in mind about True Detective, to your point earlier, is this idea that, like, the supernatural is going to be here, and we're going to get all whipped up and caught up in it. And then usually the answer is something a bit more mundane, right? Like, usually it's bad people. But this mythology and supernatural questions on the corners of every, on the margins of everything is something always worth to keep in mind.

Speaking of ghosts, good, good ghosts. Last one at least, Rose, I think it's Agenau, as played by the legend Fiona Shaw. Rose sees someone, and I'm not going to get trapped by this again, Travis. I'm going to say,

Travis is some guy. Person of interest to Rose, certainly. Her boyfriend, her husband, Rob, before we start recording, her son, question mark, I think boyfriend husband, but we don't know. A guy she knows.

Rob is like, listen, don't presume people are married. And I hear you, Rob, and I think it's a good question to raise. First time we see Rose, she's gutting a wolf who is, like, still alive or not? I don't know. Is it just, like, her, is the act of gutting a wolf, like, stimulate nerve endings that makes, but, like, did it also kind of howl? Like, did I mistake that?

I feel like I experienced that, too. Okay. Seemed not right. She hears voice on the radio, and then good old Trave shows up, and then later Trave does. your first indication that something might be wrong is that he is barefoot in the snow. Yeah. And then he does interpretive dance later.

And I thought it was awesome. Look at all we can accomplish with modern dance. Lassie could only sort of like bark and gesture with her nose. Travis can do like whole interpretive dance to be like some scientists have gone down the well. And one of the theories I saw that I'm kind of bonded to is the idea that he was in some way acting out the positions of their demise. I think that would be a pretty cool idea if that comes to pass, but we really don't know much about the victims yet and exactly kind of the state in which their bodies ended up.

So we'll have to cross-check that later. Rose seems very blazé about the fact that she saw a ghost. Unbottled. Lives in the middle of nowhere. It doesn't seem to give a fuck. We don't really know much about her at all, except like Navarro seems to kind of know. Navarro knows everyone.

That's sort of the idea. Something that Issa said in her interview with Chris is that there should be like a detective who is very rational and is good with the facts and then a detective who is like good with people. And Navarro, I don't know. I don't know that I feel like it's that clear cut though. Not this season, yeah. Navarro has like such a chip on her shoulder.

He's so angry with good reason with like, you know, the guy who she put Bailey's in his gas tank or whatever. But like, I don't know that I would be like that person. She's great with people. She's got a real touch. She's got a real touch with people. But she knows everyone. She goes to talk to Ryan, like all this sort of stuff like that.

So it's interesting. The polar bear, last and not least. A new entry in The Slam on the Break so you don't hit the majestic animal canon. It's a rich text. And it's a one-eyed polar bear. What do you want to say about this polar bear? Obviously, we see this like a little stuffy

that probably belong to Holden that Danvers encounters in her sleepless state. And then we get the one-eyed polar bear in the street. Anything you want to say about this? I was trying to piece together the wall. one-eyed part. A polar bear popping up in an Alaskan city, I mean, I can't say I know a lot about polar bear habitat and patterns, but like that seems plausible enough that a polar bear could crop up as to why it would have one eye. And whether that's, is that a bit of symbolic? Is that something

where it's in some way connected to the violence that befell these scientists or other people? Like, did it get caught up in something where it was wounded? I find myself yet again waiting into like the is this literal or is this thematic thing with true detective, which I think is exactly where the show wants me, to be honest. Obviously, makes me think of Lost, but when am I not thinking of Lost? But you put a Polar Bear in the middle of a mystery show.

I'm going to think about Lost. That takes us through all of our, like, characters that we met in this episode, which is a lot. But like, I think pretty cleanly, I think the dynamics are pretty clear in terms of them. There's more to learn. but in terms of like, strained, strange, strange, strange,

fraught, I think we got it. Rosie's pretty chill with everyone, including Dead Travis, but sure. Well, and Fiona Shaw, we should say, barely says a word in this episode, but her presence and her performance are, I think, hugely important to establishing Ennis as a place and just kind of like the show in general

and, like, the world that it's operating in, right? We are yet again coming off a fargo, treading in, like, this dreamlike space sometimes, Joe. So I think Fiona's performance is as clear to that and is important to that as anything we've seen so far. The last thing we're going to do is Theory Corner. But before we get there, I just want to run down like the most important clues slash questions I have coming off in this episode. And I encourage you, Rob, to do the same. So I'm going to be thinking about your DVD excavation for a long time.

I think she's awake, repeated in the episode, slash, We're all dead on the whiteboard, our two bangers to start with. And one of our listeners on Twitter pointed out to me, and I should have remembered this, that there's a actually pretty good Doctor Who episode called the Impossible Planet in the Satan Pit. Yeah. We're literally the devil's involved. And this idea of he's awake is this repeated phrase. I have a clip that I pulled, Kai, can you play this?

He's awake. He is awake. He bathes in the black sun. He's of the words of the beast. And he has work. So, yeah, I don't know if this is, I mean, that's about an elemental evil taking over people. I don't know if he's a Lopez is a Doctor Who fan. But he's awake, she's awake, is very evocative.

Anything you want to say about the we're all, here, can I give you my We're All Dead theory? Yeah, let's take into that. If you go back and look at the intro to the lab guys, again. That's not on the whiteboard when we see it in that intro. So it means it was written while the event was happening after the event happened. I don't know. At least after that possession seizure moment. Like whatever that is, it happened after it. My best guess was that they like found something they shouldn't have environmentally. By they shouldn't have, do you mean like mining company

pollution or do you mean like alien organism? I was thinking mining like the mining company wouldn't want them because I'm still on conspiracy right?

And in I was telling, I was just telling Guy before we started recording like in season one or true detective you know, it's like governors

and religious organizations and all that sort of stuff like that. Governors are certainly involved in a lot of these true detective seasons. Season 3 was chicken billionaire.

Not to spoil anything for a hero, but like... I can't wait. There's a chicken billionaire conspiracy. This is a mining company conspiracy. And it's like, we're all dead, meaning like, we're all being poisoned was my... Like, we found something in the water. We're all dead because there's like this pollutant in the water. And the mining company wouldn't...

I mean, I don't know that I would stop to write that on the whiteboard, but I'm not a scientist. So I don't know. But that the mining company wouldn't want them to have found. that. That was my first instinct on that. What do you think? I was thinking something kind of similar whether it's something related to the mining company or something kind of more like a broader

discovery just about the state of the environmental world and the kind of like gallows humor that comes with that sort of research. Yeah. I think there's the mystery of what's happening in that moment that we see of the kind of seizure seizing and everyone kind of stopping to look at what's

happening. I'm not so convinced that that's going to lead directly into the violence or the disappearance or the potential murder of these people. I kind of think that's a prelude and that there's a chunk of time we're missing between that situation and then a moment where they would write that on the whiteboard where it's not so panicked in like a we are all dead because someone is about to stab us way, but like in a more existential way. Exactly. Here's the key quote that I think, I don't know, a name drop. Annie, when she's going around pissing off people before she dies, she pissed off mind people. Kate McKittrick specifically.

And Peter's reaction, that was like, fuck. So we didn't meet Kate McKittrick in this episode. We don't know who she is. But I think if you get a first name, last name, name drop, and someone says, fuck, then that's just like a person worth noting. The fucking drawing. True Detective has taught us to pay attention to children's drawings. Yes.

So the drawing. Annie's coat. How did Annie's coat make its way onto? Raymond Clark. Or vice versa. Is it his code that she ended up with somehow? Clark is the person who was seizing, who said she's awake, the beginning. Clark is the name of a character from The Thing.

We also made a character named Blair early in the episode. That is also the name of a character from The Thing. So, you know, just on the lookout for the Thing character names. If you haven't seen The Thing, by the way, stop this podcast. Don't even listen to another episode of this podcast until you. watched it. Just please remedy that situation. I should have,

I should have, this is before I, I, we were like going seeing movie friends, together friends, but I saw, um, a screening of the thing at LMO last year.

Uh, and I, I would have, I would have been like, Rob, do you want to go see the thing? But like, uh,

it was so cool. I mean, I've seen the thing a million times, but to see it on the big screen was so cool. And what I loved is there were a bunch of, teens there who like listening to them talk beforehand like they had no idea like what the thing was who Kurt Russell was like any like they knew nothing and then the movie's over and they loved it. I was like yes.

And yeah, the thing. A masterpiece, honestly, one of the best movies of all time. Immaculate cinematic experience. I had the exact same experience at a different Alamo many years ago where it was like and they asked before often at these screenings like have you seen this movie before? Yeah. And it was basically split right down the middle. People who had seen in and people who hadn't, and you want that sort of jump and that sort of juice in the room for a movie like that.

And we should say, I think Chris was so right to call out Hara's Bosch is like a comp for how these guys look frozen to the ice. But it is also very the thing. Of course. The way that their faces look. Someone's reading Blood Meridian in the lab. we love to dig into books on shelves ever since my days of watching Lost someone's named Ralph Emerson

I just think that's worth noting one of our minors one of our lab guys named Ralph Emerson flag it we found a Wilco t-shirt anything you want to say about Wilco no? A bit of a red flag Okay

I'll do respect to Wilco but who owns the Wilco shirt is something I'm keeping a keen eye on Put it on the posters is true detective colonized that country who owns the Wilco shirt. Another question, what did Fekundo Molina's phone see? Because his phone, which was filming him, making the sandwich, TikTok, was aimed right at Clark before everything goes haywire.

And then when they find the phone, it's drained, but it was sitting in the exact same place. So Peter's like, we found this phone. It was right here is drained. So if they can open that phone, what is that phone going to show them? Right? Because the camera was just, we presume, running. That's a great call.

This is Navarro line. How's Daddy Connolly treating you good? And pointing to a photo where we see, speaking of Doctor Who, one Mr. Christopher Eccleston. I think he would rather us not speak of Doctor Who, perhaps. Christopher Eccleston, who's in this season of a detective playing someone his last name is Connolly. I don't know how cops work, so I just wrote some kind of cop boss in a photo in Denver's office. I mean, let's borrow from Navarro. Cop Daddy.

If she's the chief, what's above the chief, that seems to be where Eccleston is. Cop Daddy himself, so I'm excited. I love Chris Freckleson. Oh, thrilled he's in this show. I love Chris Freckleston and HBO show. Never a bad time. So excited for that. Theory Corner.

Some of Theory Corner got blended into Cop Daddy and Gimo. com. Okay, that's 100% taken. There is a cop daddy at gmail.com out there already. I can promise you that. All right. Theory Corner. Here's our big theory that we got from our listener, Catherine.

I'm not going to read the email because Rob already debunked to part of the email. But let's just put it this way. Is Matthew McConaughey involved somehow? Kai, do you have this clip from Jimmy Kimmel where Jody Foster's asked about this? I love this series. I know Matthew McConaughey is still an executive. You're making a producer on the show. He is.

He is because he's in there somewhere in the mix. Uh-huh. Okay. All right. All right. Very good. What a pro. Jody, come on.

I looked back through the seasons. McConae and Wendy Harrelson have EP credits on all of the seasons of True Detective. As is customary for these sort of star-driven projects. Yeah. I think, like, Pizzolato has an EP credit on this. I think Carrie Fukunaga still, I might still have an EP credit. He at least had one in, like, season two. So I think this is just their legacy EP from season one, if I had to guess.

But Rob, can you take us through some of the Russ Cole connections to this season? Anything you want to say? Yeah, I think a lot of people are understandably drawing the connection between Rust and this season because he's from Alaska. That character is from Alaska, has spent time in Alaska. There's a section of his interview in True Detective Season 1 where he talks about how he went back to Alaska for an eight-year stretch. there's some question as to whether that's actually true or just something he's telling the cops and had been really just hanging out in Louisiana

the whole time or near enough. But I think a lot of people are wondering will he or could he pop back up in this season? I don't necessarily see it just yet. I don't necessarily see the connective tissue just yet. And I think we would have to fudge a little too many lines and timelines to get there, especially if the show is staged contemporaneously now,

there would be a lot of explaining to kind of get rust from point eight, point B. I think the most important question we have to ask ourselves when we go at a theory corner in general is like, is this a story we want to see? Will this serve the story over? Rather than just like, oh, cool, McConaughey's here, which would be certainly a way to get some people interested in the season, et cetera. And a nice little contact reunion with him and Jody Foster too. Oh my God. An excuse for me to rewatch contact? Yes, please. Is this something we want? Is this something that's going to serve the story? Is this something we want? I don't.

I want to sit here and watch this sort of like female-driven season of True Detective and say, but when is McConaughey going to show up? Which I don't think is what our listener, Katham was saying at all. You know, I'm not calling her out at all. But like, I think, I think I don't want it. That's what I think. But I don't, I never mind a theory. And I understand, I don't know, Russ Cole is just such like a lighting and a bottle invention that I just don't know that I want to go back and spend any more time with him.

I think it's perfect, leave it be. Let great things be great things, yes. And I think one reason people are coming to this idea is the mutual shared dead child between Russ's character and Danvers' character. And so some people are saying, oh, could they be connected? Could they be the parents of the same child?

Could they be talking about the same tragedy? I don't think there's reason to believe that would be true. And Park is in season one. They refer to Russ's wife specifically as Claire by name. So there would have to be a little bit of adjusting of a, you know, a name change, a going by a middle name. There would have to be a way of explaining that kind of stuff away. But I like where we're head is at or our heads are at.

You know, I like that we're trying to draw this connective tissue, even though personally I don't really want Matthew McConae to poke up. And I don't want us to necessarily be asking every week if he will. But that's the, you know, that's the Andy Greenwell inside of you and we embrace that. but just know that the internet will be asking that. I know they will. We don't have to be. We're not going to have McConaughey Watch Corner.

I'll promise you that much right now. Let me put it that way. I don't want it to like overshadow what's happening in the show. I don't want the point of the show to be, when is Rust going to come save this investigation? Speaking of a Fellowship of the Ring, either theatrical or extended edition, whatever you prefer, they call it to mine.

A mine. The mining company. company, something that one of the redded detectives noticed is that when Liz is poking around those like sample tubes, I'm not a scientist, specimen, canisters. Dr. Joe, back on the case. They're in numerical order, except it skips from 230 straight to 240. So canisters, 231 to 239 are missing from that. wall of...

They've been smuggled out in a barbosol can somewhere. A lot of dino DNA in there. Yeah, maybe the funnier guys took them. Who knows? That's sort of all I have for Theory Corner. I mean, my last question is, like, is this something spooky and supernatural, or is it just a human conspiracy or some version? I think what we're, well, we've decided after this conversation and after thinking about

previous seasons of True Detective is like human conspiracy as flavored by the supernatural, I suppose is what we're looking for. That would be my general preference, but based on the kind of lean back toward the magical realism. Honestly, in the hiring a visa in the first place, they're definitely leaning more into that part of true detective in a way that makes me wonder if this is going to be more outwardly spooky and supernatural, more of an underlying, there's something happening here beyond just people solving a case and evil people being evil for weird reasons. And Joe, I have to ask, if we lean that way, if the story goes that way, are we on the right podcast feed? Oh, is this House of Our?

You know, is this, if there's aliens involved, if there's monsters involved. If some lady lost all of her fingies, then she became the god of the underworld. That's a good question, but we're all full up on gods on the House of Our feed because we're covering Mrs. Jackson. So we're going to have to keep it here. I mean, this is where we covered yellow jackets. This is where we covered the last of us. Yeah. So there's plenty of room for genre.

Poker face, of course. Classic genre show. Anyway, Rob, what a joy. What a journey through Night Country. Anything else you want to say? Anything? Any DVD we missed? Any packet of funnian gone uneaten?

What do you think? There are so many DVDs we missed. But I want to draw our attention for just a second to the closing credits song, which is this magpie. nursery rhyme, turned into a song by the unthank sisters. Really the idea of like the magpie as an omen, right? And depending on the culture, there's associations with witchcraft, with the underworld, with the devil, a lot of our classic true detective shit.

But it's worth noting that in some Native American folklore, that magpies have like a bit of a better rep where it's more of like a warning of danger than an omen for it. And like as an animal who can offer guidance and direction. And as I'm looking through like the lyrics and the lines of the, that rhyme, which is for people who aren't familiar, one for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret, never to be told. Appropriately spooky. And I also had the thought that there are eight scientists at Solal Station. And if one of them is the murderer or the person who in some way activated or caused all this mess,

that would leave seven victims for a secret never to be told. Oh, Rob. I love it. On needle drop front, we didn't mention that the opening credit song is Billy Elish's Barry a Friend. A.k.a. the Madame Webb trailer song. I'm glad it got rescued to better and spookier effect. Do you think someone from Salal Station was studying spiders? In the Amazon with Madame Webb's mother?

in the Amazon. This is a great song, by the way. A really cool, spooky mood center. What do you want for me? Why don't you run for me? What are you wondering? What do you know? Why aren't you scared of me?

Why do you care for me? When we all fall asleep, where do we go? Great question. I mean, I go down into my study and make a spiral of all my notes on the floor. That's what I do. But who's to say what you do? All right. That's it for us for True Detective Night Country, season four.

episode one, we have not, I mean, I don't think we've settled on an email yet. Not yet. So one didn't really, so send your suggestions to either Hobbits and Dragons at Gmail.com, the house of our email that I check, or John Ham's nipple rings at Gmail.com, the Fargo account that is still in effect. It all goes the same place, actually. You know, in retrospect, John Ham's nipple rings were just, they were such a gift right out of the gate. And the problem with this kind of detective story is, like, it's such a slow burn. We're peeling back layers. How are we to find a lasting email address so quickly?

It's a great, it's a great question. I remember the Westworld email we used was Ed Harris bodysuit. John Ham's simple ring, Ed Harris body suit. Uh, Jody Foss or something. I don't know. I'll think about it. There's a formula here. We can mine. Well, I'll think about it. John Hawks' is CDBini. Perfect quaff. Perfect quaff. It's a really good hair. Really good Hawks hair. All right, thanks to Kai Grady for everything always pulling double duty today, especially to get Fargo and True Detective out there. You're the best, Kai. And we will see you next week in around Tuesday for season four, episode two, of True Detective Night Country. Bye.