The Watch - The Finale of 'True Detective: Night Country'

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

Chris and Andy break down the finale of 'True Detective: Night Country,' and this season as a whole. They talk about how the show ultimately spent too much time in the past (1:00), whether or not the reveal of who killed Annie and the scientists landed for them (14:27), and where the 'True Detective' franchise goes from here (33:37). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Producer: Kaya McMullen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Imagine being a million miles away. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Trimfaya. Tap this ad to learn more about Trimfaya, including important safety information. This episode is brought to you by Brooks. Running connects us to a rush of energy that flows through our world. The cheers of friends that unlock a new gear within us, the intersection of interest that inspires a run crew,

the support that gets you over the finish line. Connection is why we move forward and what inspires us to keep going. Let's run there. Learn more at brooksrunning.com. I need supports to have to clear the run. Stand up and walk now. Hello, and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan.

I am an editor at the ringer.com and joining me in the studio, his man cave is an ice cave. It's Andy Greenwald. Sounds good. I like that. Thanks. Andy? Hey, man. Hey, here we are to talk about the finale of True Detective Night Country,

which just aired if you're tuning in on Sunday night. Come with us. Now what happens to do our theme music start? Andy, would you like to have a general conversation about this show, True Detective Night Country before? Well, a little bit. a little bit about what happened? I mean, I don't know where your head is at with this.

I want to be very clear. This did not land for me. This did not work for me. I found... You can use land. You're the guy who can say whether or not it stuck the landing. Legally, I can't say it on this podcast. Oh, yeah.

I don't want to get into why, but Kaya and I can explain to you later. Yeah, right. I think that making things is incredibly hard. And I think that making murder mysteries is incredibly hard. and I am fascinated by some of the choices made over the course of these six episodes, and I'm very eager to talk about them with you. But overall, like, this was a disappointing night of television for me. I don't want to come on here and be like,

and then guess what happened in the station, you know? But I want to be fair-minded. I want to go through a bunch of stuff and have a, you know, free-flowing exchange of ideas about it. Because it's no fun to be like that was bad. I don't think it was bad. I think there was some things that were, I'm struggling to wrap my head around. I want to have a chat about the nature of TV mysteries

and especially those told over these kind of limited series, limited season arcs. I think that we've had a lot of experience with these. They are often the most fun and the most engaged we are with television and often the most disappointed that we can be with it. I think I share your feelings that the end didn't really work for me. I'm trying to like still kind of separate the signal from the noise, so to speak, about whether or not,

And we've done this sort of bifurcation of the show all year where we're talking about Night Country and we're talking about True Detective. This episode had some very clear callbacks to True Detective. Couldn't be clear in one case. But really more, I wouldn't say superficially, but like I think philosophically rather than narratively, which is completely fine.

I did not want this show to necessarily answer questions about Carcosa or Yellow Kings or, you know, international, generations-long conspiracies of evil human traffickers. It is a relief that it did not attempt to do anything. But obviously, like, there is that connective tissue. So we'll talk about that. But yeah, why don't we just talk about the episode kind of on a brass tax level before we get into more generalities?

Okay, do you want to, I did like the opening shot where it's chip, chip, we're in the night country. I like that. Yes. So we start with Navarro and Danvers tracking Clark back to essentially his workplace. Although they didn't seem to know that. Not until they got to the ladder. Yeah.

Right. Right. So they basically, Navarro and Danvers is the episode opens up, crack open a cold one, meaning the earth, and slip into an ice cave and kind of follow their noses or they're hearing sounds that sound like voices, but in fact sounds like I think it winds up being the machine hum of a laboratory, an underground laboratory. And they find a ladder. The ladder goes up into the Solal station.

It being permanent night. Well, they see Clark, too. They see Clark too. He's there. Yeah, for sure. And. Codiac Clark, we call him. Is that what we call him?

Just trying that out. They capture Clark and... Well, he gives them some business. He gives them what for? Like, he knocks out Evangeline. He traps... Evangeline Navarro needed some time in the blue tent. Do you know what I mean?

Like, she has been under concussion protocol since day three of night. I know. And one thing that I feel like... She's got her ass kicked a lot in two weeks. Yeah. I need some clarity on this. Not medically. Like, I'm really curious

because TV and movies have given me very, very, very different visions of what happens when people's heads are hit with things like fire hydrants. Uh-huh. Because I feel like that would be... That was just a fire extinguisher, by the way. You've never picked up a fire hydrant?

Wow, I've just flunked the safety exam here at Spotify HQ. I just feel like it could have gone in a number of ways, All right. And I will say my other favorite image of the episode was Jody Foster going ham with an ice spike to break through the glass. Yeah, that was cool. That was a cool scene. So, yeah, after sort of some fencing back and forth with Clark, Navarro and Danvers managed to capture him. They managed to tie him down to a chair. Yeah. And waterboard him, so to speak, with the sounds of Annie's death, which finally breaks him and brings him to a point where he will confess.

I guess. First of all, that scene reminded me of when we all got the U-2 album on our iPods. I was going to ask you, like, what would be the sound that would make you break? I think my did Don Draper buy the World of Coke ad. I think if you just played that 10 times in a row, I would tell you anything you want to know. I had some, I mean, I don't know how much you want to do this. We're going to go through the episode chronologically. You can stop as we go. We can chat about this as we go along. I had some questions about their interrogation. style because I feel like we have been looking for this person who is the only survivor of a catastrophic incident and they kind of just told him to shut up. He's also the chief suspect of a essentially like multi-person murder.

And they definitely didn't ask him anything. They just told him to shut the fuck up a lot and then stuck an iPod in his ear. Yeah. You know, like I feel like and then they did get some stuff from them and then they went away for a while and they come back and they were like, oh, so by the way, what happened to the scientist? You know what I mean? I feel like there was a more efficient.

way of interrogate. Yeah. So one thing that I think I at once liked but also wondered whether either A, I was reading too much into it or B thought could have just been maybe a little bit more explicit is the amount of time that passes. Now obviously they're on New Year's Eve, this sort of episode ends on New Year's Day at some point. It's still permanent night or constant night there. But one of the reasons why I think some of the Solal station stuff felt jagged, is this idea that they're supposed to be there for hours and hours and hours.

And at one point, Liz goes and takes a nap. A long nap, long enough for a human man to freeze to death. There's a lot of going off and looking for snacks, peeling oranges. There's a lot of like intermission going on for this thing where you would be like, we have finally found the killer. We've got him strapped to a chair. We have broken him with audio torture. Let's find out everything we need to find out.

Now, that's when they seem to take breaks. The only question, it's funny because the show's detective strategy throughout, which I really liked, and it did finally come back again, is Liz is like you're asking the wrong question, ask again. The only question that Navarro asks Clark after finally getting him after the entire series is, did you really love Annie? That feels a little bit like, that's more ringer dish than anything else. You know what I mean? Than the watch. I kind of think so. But I'll also say, and this is part of my larger conversation I want to have with you, is take.

take everything else away from this episode. The arc of Night Country going from the men in the station to Liz and Navarro in the station trapped in there, dealing with the elements, dealing with the supernatural, dealing with whatever other juju is in there.

Yeah, sleep deprived, hungry visions, etc. This is good. Yeah. And this is clearly the roadmap that they started with. Like this is something that they were writing two. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's a good idea and it's a nicely symmetrical one for the series. I think one of the main ways that the series... And the moment when they kind of go up the ladder

and open the hatch and they're back in Solal, I was like, oh shit. Yeah, it was a WTF moment. It was cool. And Twist and Shout is playing. I was like, this is really rad. But I do think that one of the ways that series like this can go awry and we have no knowledge of the actual behind the scenes process is when you become so obsessed with getting to an end point, the journey becomes secondary to the destination. And there are many examples of shows where you can feel that. Now, I want to be very careful when I say this. I don't know what went on behind the scenes.

And I also think there are many, many strong arguments to be made against the, we'll just figure it out as we go strategy, especially when you only have six hours to film. How much of it is a feature and how much of it is a bug? Not to use a cliche, but... I use that cliche weekly on this podcast. We've watched countless six to eight episode limited series mysteries,

or at least start out as limited series mysteries. And I think generally speaking, those first three or four are where we're happiest because that's where there's just possibility and there's just speculation and there's the most amount of dramatic tension because there's the most amount of like permutations of plot, right? And you're also still very much

getting immersed in the setting, the world, like every new place they go to is like, ooh, Oliver Tagok's hut is interesting. Like, you know, after you get through four or five episodes, like they're circling back through the same houses, they're circling, they're going down the same streets. It's always dark with a drone shot when they're driving. Like, you get used to it.

And I think as you kind of come to, as you round third on these mysteries, typically, the inherent problem with it is that, like, as all the doors close, the one you have to go through seems maybe it's hard to make that last door you go through to be as satisfying as you want it to be.

But here's why. I mean this sincerely. Like, my relationship with the show, my feelings about this final episode are completely different if I have a different relationship with Liz and Navarro. I think the show's cardinal sin

isn't the revelation of what happened to Annie, what happens to Clark, what happened to the scientists, etc., which we will get to, into. It's to me that the work wasn't done to make either of these women compelling, not just protagonists, but a compelling partnership. The show had not a single thing to say about the relationship between these two women other than the shared history of Wheeler. There was never any sense that they ever got along particularly well. There was never any sense that they cared for

each other or knew each other's quirks or finished each other's sentences not in a cutesy way, but in a professional way, which is the hallmark of a two-handed detective story. where it's, or think about lethal weapon. You know, it's like, well, they couldn't be more different, but they complement each other, and they have a dynamic and a chemistry. This show did not do that because it was too busy loading everyone with past events, past trauma, past things that needed to be healed through the mechanism of these six episodes. There wasn't enough time in the present.

And had I had a relationship with them and felt something for them and felt invested in them and, more crucially, in their relationship, who did it doesn't matter. Yeah. I don't care. No, that's right. And I think that, you know, I actually found, I think one of the lingering mysteries to some extent, I mean, we know that, we know that Evangely killed Wheeler. We do, we saw that. And Liz was like, I was going to do it myself.

So there was a kind of moral, they're sharing the moral burden of that to some extent. That's like when we go out to dinner and you take the check first. I was going to do it. but I think that Liz and Evangeline, I would be very curious to know why. Obviously, that's the straw that broke the camel's back for their sort of partnership. But there was a lot of illusions in the beginning of like,

you know, she's going to take you on, kid, and she'll break your heart, like that there's something that Liz did that sort of disappointed. Yes. Evangeline, like I'm pretty interested in their kind of partnership and their relationship. Like I said that there was that intimacy when Liz goes over to Evangeline.

his house at that point and seems to know where at least she used to keep canned goods and stuff like that. There's a kind of familiarity that I don't think is ever really referenced in the last two episodes because there's so much, like you said, either it's the trauma of their pasts and their kind of identities or it's the mystery of the present. And so it's a little bit, you know. Often when TV shows go off the rails, it's because they are the wrong shaped story for the wrong-sized box. And I think that giving Issa Lopez the credit for what she wanted to do and what she wanted to say about this world and these characters, this wasn't long enough. Because there was not enough real estate to do anything in the present when everything was about stuff that had

happened in the past. Things that we saw are things that we didn't see. And that's a problem. That's a problem that we didn't get to spend time with these characters, seeing them react to things in real time, understanding their shared history. There just simply wasn't space for it. Yeah. Salal, it turns out, had discovered some groundbreaking medical advances within the basically like prehistoric ice of this place. But the problem with that is the only way to functionally get at this stuff. To soften the permafrost. Was to continue to pollute Ennis, which the mine was happy to oblige them because the mine has a financial relationship with Solostation and both. entities have this financial relationship with the Tuttle organization, which is a reference

to the first season. We never really got much clarity or... But then we find out that Annie's sin was that she was the real true detective here. She discovered this. Her investigation is seemingly the best investigation because the investigation of her investigation gives us nothing other than Pete Pryor Googling and Liz and Evangeline walking into a cave. Yeah. So Andy discovers what Solol's research was about. and destroyed their work, years of work, and Lund, who you may remember as being the Pizzou-looking guy

in the hospital, they had a couple of episodes ago, is so enraged that he stabs her 30 times with this rod that he's got. And in a callback to Danvers' telling of the Wheeler killing, Clark kind of alides his role. So in much the same way that Danvers sort of tells prior about Wheeler, and in the scene you can tell that's not exactly what happened, Clark's telling Danvers and Evangeline I loved her

I couldn't do anything but he is in fact seemingly the person who finally kills her in this But this is another The show just sort of The scientists aren't characters The scientists have as much personality In this scene as they did when they were a frozen

Corsicle and were led to believe that these people we know nothing about Immediately fall in line with their superior And violently gangstab A woman That that's immediately all of their reactions which I haven't worked with a lot of Arctic scientists. I struggled with that, accepting that.

But I also think that the two things that you've just given us in terms of the development of the show point to two of my bigger critiques. One, Clark is like, we did it. We found the thing that was going to fix the world. He doesn't even say that. It's just a yada yada, yada. We found a magic thing. Yeah.

And any... And we get a view, we get a little bit of a... skeleton of like a... Big old ice snake or whatever. Ice thing that is shaped in the spiral pictogram. And Annie not only discovered this and discovered the pollution, but then in a fit of rage, destroyed their magical, groundbreaking work.

Their evidence, yeah. Okay. That's fine. But what could have been interesting was give me some stakes here. Say, literally, we found something that would cure pancreatic cancer. Not all cancer. One specific vicious cancer.

but it was polluting one town. And so then it becomes, you know, a very familiar moral argument, the trolley car argument of like the greater good versus the small local thing. Maybe Liz's husband isn't there because he died of pancreatic cancer. So she would have wanted that.

Connect this magical work to the quotidian day-to-day life of the investigation, the people, and I'm interested in it. Yeah. Instead of Annie just to know and knocked it all away, this also connects to the other thing.

This is my Liz and Evangeline point, and I feel like it's worth making here again. Our relationship as fans of this genre, and stop me if you don't agree with any part of this, it never comes from clever permutations of plot or revelations of identities of evil or murderer or the evil that men do. It comes from feeling emotionally invested and interested in the people along the way. And it has to be someone along the way. And I say that very succinctly because I've already given you why I don't think Liz and Evangeline were necessarily that compelling in the present. What we have in this finale is a show that has not given us fully fleshed out protagonists.

It has also not given us fully fleshed out victims. And it also hasn't given us killers. The show, you know, just a... Okay, so let's just say devil's advocate. Yeah. Do you think that there's something to that? Do you think that there is something... Is the show trying to say something by like inverting all of our expectations about detectives, killers, and villains?

It's possible. Now, my guess is, I didn't talk to Issa, but my guess is that she can speak about these choices passionately. I'm not suggesting in any way that this is laziness or this is like a lack of ability in terms of constructing story. Sure. I think that very often when people are given the chance to work within a genre, there is a very strong creative desire to subvert the genre. Yeah. Make a mark on the drama. do something different with it. Of course,

like all creative people have that energy and also that ego and I respect that a lot. If the argument was to say that these scientists are faceless on purpose, that they are what happens

when, to put it bluntly, men think they know better. That is a, that's an argument. Yeah. And that is thematically interesting. As is to your point about like there being an absent,

an empty chair with the villain piece, Clark dies believing that something that took the shape of Annie but is much older than Annie and is possibly ancient as a force that's out there in the night country that that's what killed the Salal scientists. And even though we get the explanation for like what led them to running off into the night, I think that there is like still a cool idea somewhere in the like thing you can't put a name on.

And I think if I was going to give the show like this finale a compliment, I did like that aspect of it of like this guy who's literally scaring himself to death at this point is still believing that like Annie is out there represented as some sort of force. And frankly, Evangeline and Danvers

have both had enough experience in the last two episodes to be like maybe there is something beyond. Yeah. And I think I agree with you. I think the show is absolutely at its best when it twins the ineffable, indescribable supernatural with something that is also systemic and hard to get your arms around, but practical, such as the way the women are treated in this town

who are cleaning up after these guys. So that is also a huge theme, and it has an almost supernatural fury in the way that vengeance is reeked upon them. I get that. Yeah. But where I can't find, where it's like running your hand along an ice,

wall is that give me an in here. If the show is about Annie's investigation, that's interesting. That show, okay, so there's a local indigenous woman who has a forbidden relationship with a scientist and discovers what's going on and it was put in peril with it. Like, that sounds like a pretty good show. Yeah, I mean, Annie's relationship with Clark might have been the most interesting thing about the series in retrospectively, about the season, in terms of like their kind of deep attraction to one another and what it was that they bonded over.

I mean, that trailer that Clark had purchased from the guy was essentially a shrine to these images and, you know, like, whether they're like indigenous to that area or like just like these things that they're, the two of them were seeing in the ice, the tattoos, like all that shit was really interesting. This is what I'm talking about, though. Once you start drilling down, so to speak, to get to like, okay, let's make a choice and say what it was. So what it is, I don't know. I mean, like, Danvers decides to take a nap after this. Clark escapes and freezes to death.

You did miss my favorite part, which is when yet another orange rolls out this time from the refrigerator. And Navarro, like, very, like, mystically says, you know, my mother loved oranges. I'm like, you know who else loves oranges? Everyone. Universal approval rating. I'm not a big oranges guy. Oh, here we go. See, this is me. Taya Pro or at Khan. I love a good orange, especially like a cutie. Yeah, so this is the thing. When I was kid growing up and they'd give you, you a kid,

orange slices and there were these bulky tasteless things that had a lot of seeds. I don't want that. But now that we live in the bounty that is California and you get these little Clementines or tangerines, they're delicious snacks. You're just in the pocket of Big Newsom. You're always talking about California is the... It's great here. The agricultural... Do you know how cold it is everywhere else? I don't know. Okay. Speaking of being cold, Liz, is also seeing visions. So Navarro obviously has been experiencing these things with like the oranges with seeing things at the dredging station several episodes ago.

She's very distracted by this, but Liz is also seeing visions now of her son, Holden, who died in a car accident. And Navarro has also been talking about, frankly, suicidal ideation for the most part in talking about wanting to walk out into the

abyss of the ice. Yeah. Before he does that, he does say something that I need, I just want to know what sound you made in your living room when Clark says time is a flat circle. I think I was like, He's going to do it, Jim.

He said a gym. Yeah. I think I was like, I like the idea that it's in conversation with the first season. And I like the idea that there are certain people in the world that have seen things that make them say this thing. Right. But it did feel a little Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the screen. You know what my reaction was? I was like, oh my God, he admitted it.

Immediately out. Immediately out. in a way that the other stuff and I think we were born out in our theory that the Tuttle Carcosa stuff was really more of I met you know that I felt like Issa was giving things to the fans

you know like this is which they did not receive necessarily the way they were intended yeah so Liz falls into an ice hole a hole in the sea where's the sea I think that the sea so at the end of the episode Liz has absolutely prime

waterfront wheel state And I wonder whether or not, is that mean she has a beach house? Or does that mean... In the winter? Her house is actually this sick spot over the water. But in the winter, it's just a fucking tundra. I think it's that. I think that there's, yeah, there's the sea.

And then there's the like, we can walk over at six months of the year. Some land bridges. Guess who won't be walking over any fucking frozen seas? Is it my guy's CR? This guy. But think how dope it is under the ice. That's your shit. That's the C.

You're so close to it. That's true. What else happens? Oh, by the way, this entire time, Pete's got to throw his dad in the fucking hole. Like, Pete's still using Fantastic to clean up his dad's body. I, again, this is the wrong reaction. But when I was like, we're doing the house cleaning montage of just like, just Pete in his skivvies, just grabbing the Mrs. Myers. People just dropping by in blizzards while his dad's teeth are in the wall.

I mean, that was a tough one. And again, it's like, I can see it. Jim, I can see the vision. Jim. She schemed it up real well. You know what I mean? 12 personnel. It's fascinating, a lot of motion.

The idea that Peter Pryor, and again, that name is, feels loaded with significance, that his journey was quite literally killing his father and corrupting his soul to save his, like, there's a lot of heaviness there. Yeah. But he also ran out of road as a character. So... Well, I thought that there was going to be something going on out there with Rose. Well, also, yeah, right. Also, he goes to Kyla, and he's

just like... I got to do this one thing. I got to do one bad thing. And Kyla, who's been real chill about everything this entire series is like, you do that. You do that one bad thing, buddy. And then come back and hug your son. Then he goes through... So again, it's like Rose living out there, giving speeches and making canapes

and I was about say sharpening a rifle, but sure. These are fascinating and beautiful ideas, and they lead to theorizing. And again, I'm sure that Issa will be doing a lot of interviews tonight, tomorrow, where she explains what Rose means in terms of someone who, a woman in this case, who checked out of a certain kind of life, to live a certain kind of way,

and thus making her the person who can say to Peter Pryor, it's not over. in that sense that time is a flat circle but also the implication that Rose has done some stuff like this in her life

you know yeah and obviously knows what to do with a dead body you know like she's a hunter as well I would also say that like I would never be able

to do a crime certainly not cover up a crime but I feel like you know who says that killers murders sociopaths kind of cut that clip save it for the future investigation

but I'm just saying that if I was in the night country I feel like night country lens it. You know how everyone is a wine expert when they go to Sonoma? Like, if you're in the night country, like, you could lose some bodies. I honestly would like try to have you put in some sort of hibernation state if we were in the night country together. You would just be like, it's cold. It's so cold. Who would you be saying? Gunga din? I'd be like, we're at the bar

at noon because it's dark. Right. Yeah. It would be like, this is the best. Are we sleeping in like a solal type hotel? Are you like, good night, sir, lying back. Um, so prior is getting rid of his dad's body. I can't believe you think I would be a good hang at comics. No, I think you would be fine for the first couple of days, but then I think you'd be like, I have head gold. It's 100%. I'm not, you know, I haven't flown to England once like you.

So I don't have that same. So Navarro saved Liz from hypothermia. They're warming up. There's, you know, like, they're kind of reconciling a little bit. And then they have kind of, uh, because of one of those, you know, classic like, Navarro says something and Liz is like, wait a second. What did you say before that to hatch? and they go back to the hatch that leads up into the Solol.

She gets closure on her son. She allows just moments before all of this when Navarro is talking about, I've seen your son. Can I ask you so you're not going to remember this? But I have to go back and look at it. We just watched it. I don't, is that what Holden says to Navarro? Because I thought he said, protect my mommy.

I didn't have the closed captions on. She says to Danvers, your son says he sees you. But I thought earlier that he was like, protect my mommy or something like that. Oh, unreliable narrators. Well, I mean, it's a consistent thing in the show. I just thought... What would you want to know? If you were Liz, of course you would be like,

yes, my son sees me. That's incredible. Yeah, that was a gift. That was some human... I mean, they were quite nice to each other once they were both seeing shit. Yes. And then...

Before that, though, when she was like, shut your sick, sick fuck mouth. Like, a lot of swears in the show. And then later, she falls in the ice once. And it's just like, tell me visions. I would be like that, too, if I fell in the ice. They figure out... to go check the hatch for prints.

And they do this by pouring like a chemical solution on the hatch and using a UV light and there's a handprint sort of to the right. One thing leads to another. And they figure out that that print must belong to one of the sort of workers at the Solal station. Do you want to comment on the moment right before that discovery? Yeah. When the Doomcore cover of Twist and Shout starts. Oh, yeah. That was when I left my body.

And when you exited your body was Eicholing? That was going to the Doom Court, Eagle I. Do you think there's like, the night country is the place where these shadow versions of all these artists play these bad versions of their famous songs? They go over to the dorm or apartment complex where the cleaning lady from Salal lives. But they all live? Yes. So this is like, I know it's dark. It's very Agatha Christie.

It's very like we get there. All of the sort of characters are assembled. Is the implication that they all live there or that they had a rager because it was New Year's Eve? I don't know. I think maybe it's supposed to be like a kind of like housing situation. But I do think that like it's really more these women all coming out and at once being held accountable but also telling their story about what happened.

And what happened is they find out because of their invisibility to these scientists, they're walking around this research station. They basically figure out what. What Annie found out and what happened to her. These women knew a lot about the unique shape of the stab wounds. Yes. And rather than going to the police, they decide to exact justice themselves, round up the men, put them in the back of a truck, take them out into the ice, undress them, and be like, see what happens. See what happens.

I could have guessed what happens. And we all know the slab avalanche slash demon out in the night country gets them. Did that house remind you at all of where you lived? Roxbury in 1999. It was just like another dude coming out. Just a bunch of dudes. I listened to the Promise Ring too. Really took me back.

And then they kind of all agree to cover it up. I mean, just as they will with Hank's death, with Otis's death, with the Solal station guys, with Clark. The final sort of real scene is a montage of Evangeline leaving Ennis moving on with her life. I would only stop you to say it's not just a montage. it is a classic true detective internal affairs investigation with the framing of two cops. Yes, that's what I was going to get to. They're interviewing Danvers.

She's giving her sort of version of events. Her story as a way. Which is essentially like some things can't be explained. And some questions don't have answers, which obviously goes against her philosophy as an investigator. And we don't know who put the tongue. I have a bunch of what we don't know. Oh, I'm sorry. No, it's okay.

But the series ends with Liz sitting on a beautiful. deck looking over an incredible body of water and she is joined while while insisting in her voiceover to the inspectors that Evangeline is gone for good. She is joined by Evangeline. Now, whether or not that's a spectral version of her or like emotionally, psychologically, like she's there, but like. And I should add that I was confused by that. Yeah, you thought it might be Louia. I thought it was her daughter. That's okay. I partly because Well, she's talking about Evangeline in that scene though. Yep. I guess I thought it meant that Liz was somehow healed,

like her family was somehow going to move forward. Because, again, I don't understand, this might just be my ignorance. I didn't, I don't fully understand the Evangeline arc, you know, of, is she walking out? I guess the idea is that she just, she walked out, but she came back. Yeah, I mean, also, like,

I think she walked out towards that sunrise. I don't know, she did whatever she needed to do. Yeah. Did you have any. reaction to the Northern Lights because I thought it was interesting that once Pete, well, once Rose stabs the oxygen out of dead Hank's lungs and they dump him into the frozen water. Yeah. Like, Yahweh is like, a light show to celebrate your achievement.

Is that Yahweh's voice? You have done it. What is, why is he kind of like the movie phone? My religion is. Why don't you put your dad into the frozen sea? Why don't you tell me what kind of patricide you'd like? to commit. My religion's very private to me, so I won't be speaking on that, but

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the active cash credit card from Wells Fargo, be a 2%ter, learn more at Wells Fargo.com forward slash active cash terms apply. Here's some kind of takeaways. Hank was the inside man all along obstructing the anti-investigation, disposing of her body.

Rose, who there was a lot of speculation of like, who is this woman who can see her dead lover, Travis, who may or may not be Rust Cole's father. Like what's up with her? Is she the yellow queen? Does she have some sort of connection to like a pagan evil? No, she's Rose. She seems to know a lot about the cost of killing someone, but that's all we really find out. We never really hear her story about that. That's okay. I'm fine with that one. Pete is back together with his wife because it wasn't Danvers. It was his dad that had the hold on him. That's my take. Yeah. So it's cool to work a lot. The mine has been closed because someone, probably Liz, leaked the video of Clark. helpfully recording a complete statement and testimony about how Sala and the mine had been poisoning the town. Now, my understanding, again, tell me if I'm wrong here, because I was definitely lost on incredulity island

at this point in watching the episode. But the assumption that I took from that was that during the time Liz was taking a nap, but before she allowed him to walk to his death in the ice, Navarro did a more traditional interrogation and filmed Clark admitting everything. So she would have a record. That, because when, I think also when Liz is like, how the fuck could you let him leave?

I think maybe the implication is like she got what she needed out of this guy. And then let him do what he wanted to do. And maybe that's why she kept asking him if he loved her. Because it seemed to be that was the most important thing to Navarro is whether or not this was like tragic for him or whether he was like a homicidal asshole. So, so the mine is shut down. Yes. The great work. Nature is healing.

The great work has ceased. Yeah. The incredible potential of the. frozen prehistoric ice snake is denied humanity. Are you thinking of zagging and being pro-salal station? I'm 100%-p-what-do-sagging? I'm pro-salal station. I am 100% pro-salal station.

Are you sure? You have to have a sense of perspective here. Okay. What if I just had to sacrifice the feud to help the mini? It seems pretty cut and dry to me. No offense, but like, a lot of people get canned. That's why they didn't name it, I guess. But I'm just saying, I,

Also, again... If you're going to do it in that kind of fashion, though, I don't trust you to, you know, like, what if? I'm just 30 seconds. If I have to, like, take a vaccine of prehistoric bone marrow, yeah. Like, you're probably going to be charging me through the nose for that. Oh, you think it's like Glaxo-Smith-Kline tuggle?

Yeah. I think if the main thing the pollution did was just melt the ice a little bit, like... I don't think that's the main thing. As someone... As someone... No, no, that was the bad thing. Yeah. But the good thing was relatively minor.

And as someone who defrosts a lot of bagels in the morning, things like that, I feel like there was another, there was a third way here. Have you tried using pollution to defrost your bagels? I'm just saying like, just pure sewage, room temp. Tuttle has a lot of money. They could buy a lot of like hair dryers and hire some people to stand there, just like, just softening things up a little bit. Why do we have to throw the whole project out?

Mine closes, Quavik, you know, probably one of my favorite dudes in this show. That's my guy. He gets his SpongeBob toothbrush back from, Navarro before she leaves town. Here's some on-answer questions. It's for me. And this is without doing like a deep-read, deep dive,

but I imagine some of our listeners are probably thinking some of the same things. What was the shrine trailer thing? I really wanted to know more about the nature of Annie and Clark's relationship. Were they on this like trip together where they were like, we can see into

the fucking nth dimension through this pictogram? Or was it simply just, well, Two kids kind of falling in love, but then she finds out her boyfriend is, in fact, an evil scientist. Again, I think that one of the strengths of the whole project of True Detective has been the balancing act between specifics and suggestion. And I, everyone knows my criticisms of the previous seasons, but I do appreciate that the metaphysical stuff was window dressing, essentially, towards a more specific story about what people. people do. I also don't mind the implications on the margins here of something connective, something demonic or whatever. But at a certain point, we need some clarity. And instead,

we have a show that was about a complete non-believer, Liz, and someone who is a completely credulous believer. But what does any of that mean? What it means in the practice of the show is that Navarro sees wild shit a lot and talks to dead people. Well, welcome to watching true detective. Well, thank you. I mean, like, that is, but this is... But your point, which is, is there... Where in the Venn diagram of indigenous belief and oral tradition and story culture and this weird town that might be a waystation

for the underworld, where's the Venn diagram where all these things overlap with Carcosa and Tuddles and who did what? I just need to just plant me somewhere so I understand what these things are saying to each other. So is that symbol significant... I can spin myself out. and speculate, like, about what they were looking for.

It's like, you know, as they suggest, the Tuttle Corporation is a holding company for all these places. But I don't even want to know what the Tuttle's are looking for. I want to know what Clark and Annie are doing, making, you know, making a, like, dark Alexander Calder exhibit. I thought that was, that was so fucking cool. You know what I mean? It was cool, but why were they doing that?

What was their secret demonic love that then ruptured when she became, you know, she became obsessed with writing the new version of Silent Spring? Tell me about that. So one of the actually, the last unanswered questions I have is just like to what extent were some of the things that we saw in the show actually things that happened versus things that either Annie or Danvers perceived. The tongue is real because they actually run forensic investigations or research into it to figure out like how old it is and who it belongs to and stuff like that. But at the end of the confession, so to speak, of the ladies, they're like, that wasn't us. We didn't cut anybody's tongue out.

That wasn't our story. but we don't find out whose story it was. It's not just that we didn't cut it out, we didn't put it there. Yeah. Okay, so we don't know

what's going on with that. No. I also don't know whether or not... And I guess on a practical level, that was what... That was why it became the anti-investigation in addition to,

because otherwise there was no there, right, to connect these stories? Yes. Until you found out the Clark Annie connection. The tattoos probably would have eventually

started to pull it together, but the last one I had was just like Lund, who was the murderer's scientist into the station when he's also the guy who's basically a tree stump by the end of it and is, you know, they go visit him in the hospital.

He is Groot. And he wakes up and is like your mother I can't remember where he says basically your mother says hello or something like. It's basically like the Mark Wahlberg as an else. Yeah. But he is a fucking possessed demon. But only Evangeline hears him talk.

And she doesn't ever say, by the way, Lund woke up and had some stuff to say. So was Lund some something? sort of deeper evil. Was he possessed by some kind of like supernatural power or whatever? Like, what are we supposed to take from that? And other than that, like, yeah, there's a bunch of other questions I had about like, oh, and they saw that. So was that real? Was that in their heads? The Christmas tree and the dredging station, stuff like that. But that's about it. Well, I'm not going to have answers for these things, I don't think. What if I surprised you and I did?

I have two, I have two bigger points of concern. I'm not concerned, or just to commentary that come out of this. And I think both of them are really, I think, I think in many ways this show is emblematic of where we are with TV, good and bad. And there's plenty of good, and I apologize that we're not dwelling on a lot of it because I really had a lot of time for the show at the beginning. I really enjoyed Jody Foster's performance. I thought that, and I mean this sincerely, that for someone who has not worked in TV, TV before to be writing and directing six episodes of something to deliver on a particular vision. I think Lisa did it.

She delivered the show that I think she very much wanted to make and is proud of. And I think that's not a small thing. It's very hard to do that on this scale and execute. But I do think there continues to be a really worrying disconnect between the attitude of people who make TV as being, the things are business as usual, meaning we'll figure it out eventually. We are sunk cost. We've hired, we've booked locations in Iceland, we have these talent. We're going to figure it out.

We don't know what went on behind the scenes of the show, but we keep pointing out the fact that there were two writing teams credited with the penultimate episode, which suggests that there were some things still being done when they were filming or later in the process. You kind of can't just figure it out when you are a closed-ended six-hour show. You can do it when you're a open-ended comedy, and you're figuring out that it's funnier if Michael Scott is in on the joke. bit or whatever. You kind of can't do that. You have to, if you're spending this much money, doing this high stakes in such a limited way, you have to do, I think you have to do more to be

buttoned up before you get into it. And I say this as someone who loves the improvisatory nature of how a lot of TV is made. The second thing that I kind of can't get over with the show is it just reminded me that I would really, really love more programs that are about the present. I don't mean that are like ripped from the headlines 24, but I mean about the present. But I mean about the present engaged lives of its characters because we are more, as human beings, not even fictional characters, we are more than just like walking around skin sacks of our trauma and history. Yeah. We are more than that.

I agree. And I think that TV storytelling has gone with some great, you know, I may destroy you as a show about trauma. I mean, I'm not trying to paint with a wide, wide brush here, but I think that this mode of explicating characters. I think that was the promise of this show for me in those opening episodes is that it was actually something close. or to Danvers and Navarro having different approaches to detect.

Yes, and here's a crazy thing that happened. Yeah. And let's go. And that Navarro is going to kind of be an extension of the community that she's policing and Danvers is going to be more adversarial and what happens when these two people are put on an inexplicable crime together. It's wonderfully said. Absolutely.

Absolutely. But instead, we are constantly pulled backwards with not just Liz's loss of her son and a car crash, but also the Wheeler thing. And whatever happened to Navarro in war. And then Navarro's war story plus her sister who was dispatched with pretty quickly, but we're still meant to be taking that in. It's just not a load-bearing thing. I think those two comments are connected because, yeah,

you could do a long-form exploration of people's backstory while telling their story forward, but in more than six episodes. Yeah. So I know that I know I've been negative. I feel like you've been a little more fair-minded. But I think my frustration is more... I'm trying to look at my experience of the series in total. Okay, so let's talk about that.

total and also in relationship to the larger franchise. Well, I think that the larger franchise, I think that this was obviously, I think at times, like, very well stitched to the larger franchise in terms of like, it acknowledged without trying to alter the DNA, right? So it put itself into the larger conversation about True Detective and about like the world that Nick Pizzolato sort of started with those three seasons. But it didn't try to ever say, this is what Nick Pizzolato was. really going for in season one or three or whatever, specifically those two. I do want to evaluate

it on like the joy it gave me across the first three episodes to maybe the disappointment I felt in the last three. I think it's worth saying. Those especially, yeah, those first three episodes were very engaging. Like I was not, I'm not just saying like, oh, it's not bad. Like I was fully in. For sure. And enjoying the episodes. I was not second screening. I was not nitpicking. I mean, even episode is it five where they, I guess it would be five where they do, between the sort of privacy door chip exchange. Like, you're still into it. That was a beautiful scene.

Yeah. This was the first episode where there was nothing in particular that I could pull out and say, aha. Yeah. I'm, I'm viving with this. Which is strange because I did that recap. I missed some things.

We joked about others. For an episode of this length, I don't really find that a ton happened in some ways because the narrative was really tied up in two major scenes. Clark explaining what happened and the women explained. what happened. And Pryor's sort of communion

with his father, like his bearing of his father was really kind of surplus to events. There's no consequences from it. Nobody seems particularly strictly stressed out about it except for Pryor,

who we get like one last shot of him lying awake in bed. But I don't know. But I want to go back to that point you made, which is one of the things that we found interesting. And I want to stress this again.

We're just sitting here on the sidelines. And so, you know, the world go by and be like, oh, that's interesting to me is not a way for a creator of a show to be responding or making anything. But this is something that you and I both picked up on and agree about, which is the idea of the collision between who's doing the policing and who's being policed in a, in an interesting location such as Ennis is, that's a powerful one. And I think that, again, and it's brought up. I mean, like, it's certainly brought up. But by sidelineing Pete into the father's stuff,

the idea that comes up a couple times with Kayla where she's just like, I married the white boy and this is what I get. This is what happens. That becomes secondary and then it becomes even more troubling when she's like, go do your evil thing and come back to our family. In the same way that after she's had her experience in the ice, Liz is totally fine with her stepdaughter applying the traditional, I don't know what's called, the face painting that she was so angry about before. It's just like a, it's a magical supernatural switch. You get dunked in the water and you're baptized and believing in Ennis and you come out. the conversation about why she wasn't letting that happen and what it means to her, there's no space for that. So instead, she's just very angry about things she can't control throughout. We don't, because isn't the implication that her husband, who's never really spoken of her partner, is himself indigenous. And died in that car accident. And died in the car accident.

So what is the story of her hostility? And could we have looked at it more? I mean, again, it is the cheapest. I mean, this is the thing, though. It's like we... It's the cheapest form of criticism to be like, why couldn't the car? carve gone that way. But it's also like we ask if you're like, I don't need those characters to be the accumulation of their traumas, but if you're going to do trauma, show me like the nuts and

bolts of the trauma and tell the story. So it's difficult. I also think that I remain, this probably seems counterintuitive, but I still, I think my feelings about the success or failures or whatever you may want to call them about the season could be put into a different perspective and context if HBO is committed to handing the keys to more people. Like, I, I would love it. They wouldn't do this for any number of reasons. Like true detective, Desert Town, True Detective.

Right. They will never do this for both, for reasons, both financial, creative, and logistical. But if this edition was well, got good ratings or whatever, did well for HBO. Yeah. I would love it if Casey went on stage the next time he addresses people and it's just like, here are the two people who are getting the keys next.

I don't have more details, but like these are the filmmakers that we like. Then it becomes like a, then it becomes kind of an incredible, It's like the Sundance Lab. It's like, what's your detective story? What's your true detective? But it is tough to consider the totality of it when you have three seasons of one very, very specific dude and then this.

Yes, and also I think a chunk of the audience being engaged with it because they're like, I want to see some connective tissue to the mothership that I really adore. Yes. I don't know, like, demographically, how that breaks down in terms of the audience, like how many people out there were like

McConaughey is going to show up and he's going to be in the Solal station or something. It's also just so weird to be like, what is, we should have been doing this before, but we have been doing it for weeks, but like what makes it true detective? And like,

you and I both had a lot of time for season three. Does season three work better if it's not called true detective? Like if it's just a, Mahershal Ali showcase about a cop? And it's like called Soldier Story? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know.

But again, I think I would be more chill about some of the illusions and relationships if they were part of a larger project. Yeah. Well, I'd be interested to read some of the stuff that Issa says coming out of this and some of the sort of explanations about some of the material.

Obviously, some loose strings. I don't know. I mean, perhaps she would come back to this material at some point. I look forward to reading some of her statements about the show itself. I also would just say, like, to add to my collection of things I'm suddenly announcing as emblematic of television, like the kind of Joaquin Phoenix gladiator thumb on an entire project that people spent years on because we got six hours of it is tough. Yeah. You know, I think that there were a lot of things to like in this show.

I've already seen even in advance of the finale, people being like, well, why was so much time spent on John Hawks being catfished by his Russian bride? but I'm like, that made the show good to me. Yeah, it also made Hank something other than this nefarious white guy standing in the background of scenes. Exactly. Where you're like, I know you guys hired John Hawks to be something more than the sixth cop. Yeah, I mean, then also Christopher Eggleston showing up for two scenes. He actually was only in it for two scenes. I mean, I guess you could say like he was part of the conspiracy.

In his interviews, he was like, they said come to Iceland and do scenes with Jody Foster, who's one of my heroes. So he was happy to do anything. But I'm saying, like, those details matter. The attention that she paid to things within these stories. matter and are significant for the medium, for storytelling, and they are good. Like, I will continue to say, like, what she did with the cremation scene at the top of the last episode is really fascinating and very, very unique, and suggest a different way. I thought that the, I think the imagining of the station, the imagining of the ice cave

beneath the station, the idea of the hatch, like, there's so much stuff to liken this. I just don't think story-wise, like, it eventually, like, added up for me. And I think that, you know, to be frank, I think that that is a, ultimately a lot of this are the problems with the box, not what you're putting in the box. Yeah. Okay. Let's wrap there. We're going to be back on Thursday. We'll talk a little, Mr. Spade. Maybe we'll talk some Abbott Elementary. Maybe we'll talk some Tokyo Voice. There's so much stuff on right now. Thanks to Kaya for producing us. And thanks to everybody for listening to our true detective pods over the last couple of weeks. I'll see you in Karkosa, Branskis.