‘True Detective: Night Country’ Episode 2 Recap: The Downward Spiral

“Don’t confuse the spirit world with mental health issues.” Pop quiz: Is this a quote from this week’s episode of True Detective Season 4, or a plot summary of True Detective Season 1? Trick question: It’s both!

Leaning ever deeper into the paranormal, “Night Country: Part 2” forges the closest ties yet between that blockbuster first season and any of its successors. It’s not just the familiar spiral symbol that keeps popping up — unintentionally so in Liz’s photo array last episode, then tattooed on both murder victim Annie K. and her secret lover and likely killer, the scientist Raymond Clark (Owen McDonnell). Clark also appears to have drawn it on the head of one of his fellow scientists before…whatever happened to them, and before he himself vanished, whereabouts unknown.

There’s also a direct link to the culprits in the ritual child abuse ring around which that first season is centered: the Tuttle family, a wealthy and politically powerful Louisiana dynasty. The Tuttle name is on the company that secretly funds the ill-fated Tsalal research station, and presumably the Tuttle fingerprints are all over this case. Maybe they’re connected to the relatively down-to-earth but still loathed mine owner, Kate McKitterick (Dervla Kirwan), since it’s not like you become a mine owner without money. 

Point is, Season 2 skipped over the cult/occult stuff entirely, despite then-showrunner Nic Pizzolatto’s early promise that it would be about “the occult roots of the transportation system” or something like that. Season 3 included a brief mention of the Season 1 cult during the course of it show-within-a-show, a true-crime documentary about Season 3’s case, but it was just a red herring; though it established the two seasons exist in the same universe, there wound up not being any link between the Tuttles and the kidnapping and murder at Season 3’s heart. Now it’s all back with a vengeance.

I have mixed feelings about that. Returning to the scene of the series’ most famous crimes, as it were, is sure to be a crowd (and network!) -pleasing maneuver. That goes double now that Pizzolatto is gone, and die-hards are probably looking for reassurance that he did not create Rust Cohle in vain. But it feels like pretty well-trod territory, doesn’t it? Unless the show takes a detour, I’m a bit bored with the scenery.

Worse, to me, is going all-in on the supernatural as an actual, verifiable, even commonplace phenomenon. Ennis is apparently a gateway between the worlds of the living and the dead even when ghosts aren’t leading lovely old stoner hermit ladies into the snow to find a Jake and Dinos Chapman installation. People see dead people there all the time. Painful childhood mementos pop up inexplicably with alarming frequency. Mix that with the cult stuff and we could wind up with a very different, much more literal Yellow King than what we wound up with in Season 1.

My concern is that in its reindeer-like stampede toward the past, this season has forgotten what made that past work. People found True Detective Season 1’s Lovecraftian undertones engrossing because that’s all they were made out to be: undertones. Was it possible the cult that Rust and Marty were investigating involved sinister sacrifices to some actual, real supernatural entity? Certainly; the entire season played with that. Played with that, not broadcast it, not made it crystal clear that that’s what was going on.

Sure, some people felt this was a bait and switch given how things panned out in the end — in short, Rust Cohle confused the spirit world for mental health issues. But it was the idea of solving this Call of Cthulhu RPG-style supernatural mystery, where the closer you get to the truth, the closer you get to insanity and the annihilation of your very soul, that hooked audiences and made the story sing. I’m fond of saying that despite my mixed feelings about True D Season 1, it’s the only show to ever give me two nightmares in a single night. And it did that without banging us over the head with spooks like The Ghost Whisperer in the first couple of hours.

The real reason I don’t want True D S3 to go for broke in that direction is this: I don’t think this show has the chops to be genuinely frightening. It’s jumpscared me a few times — the mystery man still running around the station at the beginning of episode 1, the first appearance of Travis (Erling Eliasson), the car crash, various characters pulling jumpscare pranks on various other characters, and of course the fact that one of the frozen scientists turns out to be alive and screaming. But to dig deep into the true black, the cosmic void, the annihilating evil at the heart of all truly great supernatural horror? I don’t see The Exorcist or Under the Skin or The Shining or The Blair Witch Project or Skinamarink in here. I don’t see Twin Peaks or The Terror or Channel Zero here — or True Detective Season 1, for that matter. I don’t think this season’s horror, such as it is, is going to horrify me, and that’s important.

(Caveat about the supernatural stuff: Maybe the whole town is hallucinating due to the presence of mining chemicals in the water. That’d be one hell of a twist!)

There’s other stuff going on here too, though — stuff that’s more down to earth, stuff I like a whole lot more. No need to mince words: I love how central sex is to all of this, how horny these characters are. Why wouldn’t you be? It’s literally night time all the time. What better way to combat Seasonal Affective Disorder? So Leah keeps up her forbidden romance with her classmate, the best kind of romance to have with a classmate btw. Navarro booty-calls poor Qavvik again, only to discover he’s unprepared because he just jerked off, a fact she ribs him about mercilessly. 

And Danvers…well, Danvers is an interesting person. You rarely see a character that all the other characters on a show take seriously even though they nearly all despise her as well. But they do! No one can steamroll her, no one can undermine her, no one even really questions her judgment that much, not even Hank or Navarro or Kate McKitterick. Or, in the end, Captain Connelly (Christopher Eccleston in full “I’m too old for this shit” cop mode), the high-ranking official who “promoted” Danvers to this hellhole in the first place, just as she wound up “transferring” Navarro to the state troopers. Connelly wants control of the case. Danvers refuses. Danvers, however, wants control of Connelly’s dick. Request granted.

This is a terrific sex scene, friends. For one thing it takes the sexual attractiveness and sexual desire of older people seriously, as it should, because let’s face it, watching the Ninth Doctor rail Jodie Foster on a dresser is hot as shit. 

For another, it actually does reveal character in a surprising way, for the prudes who insist all sex scenes must always advance the plot. (When was the last time you had sex in a way that advanced your plot, y’know?) Remember how when Navarro fucked Qavvik, she rode him hard and held his hands down when he started to protest that he was nearing climax, essentially forcing the orgasm out of him? When Liz figures out that Connelly is close to cumming, she does everything she can with her body to slow him down while getting herself closer, so they can cum together. All this effort for a frenemy with benefits? She must have been terrific to her late husband, if not to any of her subsequent boyfriends; her younger self, whom we see in bits and pieces throughout the episode, definitely seems much happier.

Anyway, you see what’s going on with these sex scenes? Navarro’s care for other people is aggressive; this can make her a dogged defender of the downtrodden, but it also means making them nut prematurely and then stealing her toothbrush if that’s how she feels like expressing that affection. There’s an underlying selfishness to her, likely brought on by her and her sister’s shared trauma of being raised by an unmedicated psychotic. She really does like Qavvik, she’s affectionate toward him in a lot of ways, but you can see how tired he’s getting of being the butt of every joke between rounds in bed.

Liz really has no pretensions about caring about other people all that much. She likes her deputy Pete Prior, but she’s varying degrees of dismissive-to-cruel to her rival Navarro, Pete’s dad Hank, her daughter Leah, Pete’s wife Kayla, and even Kayla’s grandma, whom like Kayla she insults in pretty nakedly racist ways. But she’s sneaky about letting her human side show: taking genuine interest in Pete’s development as an investigator, being seriously concerned about Leah when they were almost in that car crash, looking into the Annie K. case despite all the bullshit she served Navarro about not giving a shit. It makes perfect sense for her to humiliate an asshole like Connelly at work, then show up later that night for a bout of vigorous, thoughtfully executed fuckin’. 

(Brief aside: What is up with HBO shows having explicit sex scenes where the most you see is some underbutt at best? What happened to “It’s not TV, it’s HBO”, man? Real Sex must not be allowed to have died in vain!)

The point is that this is the kind of stuff I want to see in a show. Real, raw relationship dynamics, manifested physically. The attention to detail in the set design: the media shelves at the research institute stuffed with DVDs of nerdy favorites like The Lord of the Rings, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and of course The Thing. Working-class people’s apartments and houses overflowing with bulk food and beverages, the cheapest way to buy them but the most inconvenient way to store them if you have no storage space of your own. Everyone’s got a sister, a brother, a lover, a mother, a dead spouse with their whole own story going on there; in some ways this is the most sprawling crime on TV in that regard since Twin Peaks: The Return. (It’s like Mare of Easttown’s Super Saiyan form where subplots are concerned.) My fear, then, is that the show will get distracted with the spirit world and lose sight of the things we can touch here and now. 

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.