"If you ask me, the light's winning."
REVIEW: True Detective: Night Country is a surprisingly hopeful twist on the gritty cosmic horror themes introduced in the show's iconic first season. What does it mean for a despairing world?
This article contains minor spoilers for True Detective Season One
Last night I finished True Detective: Night Country and, for the most part, found it deeply satisfying.
Perhaps more than any other TV show, True Detective has been haunted by the specter of its truly unapproachable first season. That story featured Matthew McConaughey in one of his most iconic roles as the troubled Rustin Cohle, a doomed philosopher cop trapped in the labyrinth of his past.
If you have not seen it, you must. I maintain that it is the greatest single season of television ever produced, a perfect eight hours of storytelling with a rewatchability factor higher for me than any other piece of modern media.
While discussions about True Detective’s cultural impact often highlight McConaughey's performance as Cohle, recently rewatching Season One reminded me of the similarly remarkable depth Woody Harrelson brings to his role as Cohle's charismatic but equally troubled partner. Harrelson's portrayal of Marty Hart is an absolute masterclass in conveying moral complexity of a different kind, and it is duly deserving of acclaim.
I never bothered watching the critically and culturally panned second season and all I remember from Season Three was Mahershala Ali’s grounded performance in what was otherwise a mostly forgettable story.
Night Country, however, is a solid entry into the series. The best since the iconic refrain of The Handsome Family’s Far From Any Road first echoed from our television screens in 2013.
Season One’s sickeningly muggy and evocative bayou aesthetic is finally matched by Season Four’s chilling and infinitely spooky Alaskan tundra.
An Unlikely Triumph
With its almost exclusively female showrunners and cast, it is an aspirational new direction for the series that was bound to ruffle some feathers. Predictably, the noble keyboard defenders of the online Manosphere–a loose internet term referring to the burgeoning army of misogynist online luminaries that includes figures like Andrew Tate and Michael Knowles–were quick to pan the series almost before it was released.
Given the series' track record of underwhelming its audience with new installments and the vocal skepticism from the historically sane and measured 'men with internet access' community, Night Country appeared to be facing an uphill battle from the start.
With its almost exclusively female showrunners and cast, it is an aspirational new direction for the series that was bound to ruffle some feathers.
Perhaps this is exactly why the season feels so satisfying. Expectations for this show had fallen so low that a solid entry into the series with solid writing and great performances from the cast feels surprisingly refreshing. The audience no longer expects the show to mimic or surpass the triumph of Season One, and as a result, they are pleased to see it taken in a bold new direction.
It also just got better every week. Viewers who were not scared off from the season’s inauspicious start got to watch the world of Night Country unfold in new and fascinating detail each week, and every week, more and more people watched. Before last night’s finale, the show reached a ratings peak that surpassed even its acclaimed first season.
My own complaints about the show are mostly trivial: too many jump scares and other Paranormal Activity style elements for my taste, and a filmmaking style that is not nearly as evocative as the brooding, expertly-composed frames of the first season. Cosmic horror is at its best when it is a slow burn, and having a Conjuring-esque scene where a spectral character darts across an empty hallway in the first ten minutes of Episode One was off putting for a fan of the genre.
Cosmic horror is supposed to be about dread, not fright. The lurking fear, rather than the heart-pounding scare. Season One’s slow revelation of supernatural elements within an otherwise deeply grounded and familiarly human story made them infinitely more believable than Night Country’s ghostly jumpscares.
But the actual storytelling is good, the setting is perfect. Season One’s sickeningly muggy and evocative bayou aesthetic is finally matched by Season Four’s chilling and infinitely spooky Alaskan tundra. What’s more, the focus on indigenous folklore and activism is a storytelling choice that I really like.
In Leftist circles, we talk alot about indigenous femicide, or the thousands of cases of murdered indigenous women that seem to garner next to no national press coverage and spark little mainstream activism. It is a chilling topic that gets very little attention and it was really refreshing to see this season shine a spotlight on it.
Cosmic horror is supposed to be about dread, not fright. The lurking fear, rather than the heart-pounding scare.
What’s more, the show respectfully incorporates many elements of Iñupiat folklore and even included its Iñupiat consultants as characters in the show. Mainstream representations of indigenous life are often very stereotypical, not to mention deeply inaccurate.
In contrast, Night Country refuses to depict its indigenous subjects as proverbial ‘noble savages’ or spooky animist shamans. It treats them as real people, with real problems, most of which are caused by the extractive colonial entity inhabiting their ancestral lands.
Cosmic horror and indigenous spirituality
Indigenous spirituality is at the heart of the cosmic horror elements within Night Country, and it is hard to tell a story about that without relying on well-worn tropes of medicine men, spirit cults, and animist nature religion. Night Country appears to lean into these tropes heavily at first, only to deftly subvert them later on in the season.
It is as if Director Issa López is telling the audience “this is what you think you know about the lived experiences of indigenous people, now let me show you why that’s actually bull****.”
Season One’s slow revelation of supernatural elements within an otherwise deeply grounded and familiarly human story made them infinitely more believable than Night Country’s ghostly jumpscares.
(Very) Minor Spoilers for Season Four to follow
One of the primary ways in which these tropes are subverted is the nature of the spiritual entity that serves as the show’s opening antagonist. In a brilliant ending to the opening episode, a scene unfolds that is beautifully evocative of H.P. Lovecraft’s iconic At the Mountains of Madness and the true story of the mysterious fate of the Dyatlov Pass expedition.
The audience is clearly supposed to infer a supernatural explanation for this scene. Hints at an ancient folkloric entity–perhaps the Iñupiat sea-goddess Nuliajuk–lurk around the edges of the story, and penetrate the dreams of its indigenous characters. But throughout Night Country, this horrifying–and explicitly female–specter is, in stages, revealed to be mostly a manifestation of white, western notions of native folklore.
This narrative strategy challenges the audience's preconceptions regarding the true nature of horror, culminating in a season finale that posits that real terror lies not in the supernatural, but in the distinctly human propensity for brutality, which often eclipses any ghastly explanations. Similarly to the show’s first season, this narrative feat is accomplished while keeping potential supernatural explanations for certain events mostly intact.
Hope and Madness
Minor Spoilers for Season One to follow
Though famous for its brooding, pessimist outlook, True Detective Season One actually ends with a rather hopeful forebode. After a final confrontation with the main antagonist of the show, a wounded and contemplative Rustin Cohle tells an anecdote about growing up in Alaska and making up stories about the stars. He tells Marty of a revelation he had while in the hospital.
“It’s just one story. The oldest. Light versus dark.”
“It appears to me that the dark has a lot more territory.” Marty replies.
“You’re looking at it wrong. The sky… once there was only dark” counters Rust.
“If you ask me, the light’s winning.”
Night Country expands on this theme in its own finale, leaving the viewer with a relatively hopeful and uplifting conclusion to an otherwise bleak and dire story. There is an interesting explanation for this which I believe is worth returning to my little diversion on indigenous folklore.
The supernatural themes in the first season are pretty uniformly dark and “demonic.” This heavily plays into a familiar cosmic horror trope: God is real, but he hates you or is largely indifferent and definitely creepy. Season Four opens by giving you the precise same feeling relative to its supernatural themes. In fact, there are many direct symbolic and narrative parallels to Season One’s spiral cult of the Yellow King.1
The same spiritual plane which, in Season One, serves as little more than a terrifying maw of cosmic horror to the white protagonists appears in Night Country as a space of potential healing and resolution for the indigenous characters.
Somehow, the showrunners find a way once again to subvert audience expectations regarding these spiritual elements. What is seen through the lens of the white residents of the fictional Ennis, Alaska as a horrific spiritual manifestation of the indigenous other is revealed, in the final act, to have positive and redemptive aspects, rather than merely dark and vengeful ones.
The same spiritual plane which, in Season One, serves as little more than a terrifying maw of cosmic horror to the white protagonists appears in Night Country as a space of potential healing and resolution for the indigenous characters, and perhaps for others as well.
Rethinking the Indigenous ‘Other’
This may have been my favorite aspect of the latest season. The showrunners were unafraid to delve into the psychology of white encounters with indigenous spiritual practices, which have been historically dismissed by whites as purely malevolent. The show’s willingness to confront these biases head-on adds a profound commentary on cultural misunderstandings surrounding traditional religious practices and the potential for a deeper comprehension of indigenous spirituality.
This redemptive spin is a refreshing addition to True Detective’s often formulaic parent genre of Lovecraftian fiction. H.P. Lovecraft, the “founding father” of modern cosmic horror was, after all, an atrocious racist whose writing was simply stuffed with barely concealed racial animus and white anxieties about lurking non-white masses threatening their imminent erasure.
This psychological inversion is a difficult feat to pull off, and in my opinion, Issa López and her team have done it beautifully. By centering the indigenous characters and elevating their unique perspectives, the showrunners sow the seeds of hope in what has, up to this point, been fertile substrate for despair.
When I watched Season One at a little shack on Edisto Island ten years ago, I was deeply impressed by the show, but not unaffected by its pessimist outlook. I spent months reflecting on the dark themes within the show’s story, and gave myself a small but not insignificant existential crisis as a result.
Night Country left me with the opposite feeling. There is hope out there, in the darkness, on that cosmic plane where few of us dare to venture. The night is dark, and full of horrors, human and non-human alike. But there is light out there too, in the cracks at the edges of our experience. There is always light. And what’s more, the light’s winning.
One day I will write my 3,000 word post about the King and Yellow and how a nightmare inspired a poem which inspired a book about a play that served as the inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft who inspired True Detective. But it is not this day.