‘True Detective: Night Country’ Creator Issa López Shares How Jodie Foster and Finn Bennet Made the Danvers/Prior Relationship So Weirdly Oedipal

True Detective: Night Country premiered last week on HBO and Max, introducing long-time fans of the True Detective franchise to Ennis police chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster), Alaska State Trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), and a very freaky “corpsicle” of some dead Tsalal scientists frozen together in the Alaskan tundra. Oh, and a dead woman’s tongue popped up years after her murder case went cold. If all that and the nods to ghosts walking the earth wasn’t tantalizing enough, True Detective: Night Country also has another mystery for viewers lurking in plain sight: What’s up with the Oedipal relationship between Danvers and her puppy dog of a young partner Peter Prior (Finn Bennet)?

When we first meet Danvers, Prior, and Prior’s father Hank (John Hawkes) — who is also a police officer — the trio is investigating the abandoned Tsalal research facility with all the toxic family energy of The Bear Season 2’s “Fishes.” Hank Prior is clearly Peter Prior’s father, but it’s Danvers who immediately emerges as the eager young officer’s true parent figure. Moreover, as the episode wears on, it’s obvious that Danvers is happy to push Peter Prior to leave his own family in the lurch, steal from his father’s files, and just bask in her maternal glow. But is that all that’s going on? Does Peter have a crush on his boss? Does Liz want to make Peter her latest of many sexual conquests in the Ennis area? And did you maybe get the vibe that Liz was supposed to be Peter’s mom (like Decider briefly did after screening the first episode)???

“That’s interesting,” True Detective: Night Country creator, writer, and director Issa López said with a smile when Decider asked her. “You know, I guess Finn could be Jodie’s kid. You know, maybe, but yeah, no, no, no.”

According to López, it was always the intention that Danvers took on a maternal role in Peter’s role, a toxic one at that. However, it was only through watching Foster and Bennet’s performances in the editing room that she realized there was an undercurrent of dark, sexual, Oedipal energy lurking between them. And she loved it.

“I’m very happy with what we found on set. I think that the most exciting thing about making the things that you write is how they are never exactly what you planned and how they surprise you in the best possible ways,” López said. “So, on paper, it was absolutely a mentor-young student/mother-son thing. The emotional confusion stemmed from the fact that she’s kind of stealing someone else’s son instead of turning to the kid she has, her stepdaughter, to show affection to.”

In the first episode of True Detective: Night Country, we learn that the widowed Danvers as a teenaged stepdaughter named Leah (Isabella LeBlanc) in her charge. Leah is, like her dead father, a member of the local indigenous community, which adds another layer of friction between her and Danvers. The no-nonsense white detective would vastly prefer to throw herself into her work, and the relationship with Prior, than be there for Leah.

“She can relate to someone through the work in an intellectual way, but she can’t relate to someone that she really loves and feels responsible for and brings her back to the pain that she’s trying to leave behind because she’s an idiot with her emotions,” López said. “She’s profoundly, profoundly inadequate with how she deals with her emotions and absolutely emotionally illiterate.” 

“So that’s what I wrote. But when we were on set  — there was not on set, you know — but in the editing room, when I started to see the scenes together, I could feel that there was an undercurrent of a very, very, very, very slight…the possibility…  I mean, this woman, in the end, the ongoing joke is that she will fuck anything that doesn’t run fast enough. And she would never ever do this, but is there an undercurrent of attraction? You know, a very, very slight flirting? There could be, you know? I mean, Finn Bennet said to me, ‘I get just all flushed when I see her!’”

Rather than steer the final edit of True Detective: Night Country closer to her original scripted vision of the Danvers/Prior relationship, López fully embraced the messier, morally grayer undercurrents of what she saw in Jodie Foster and Finn Bennet’s performances.

“I do love the fact that nothing is clear when the emotions don’t come from the right places,” she said. “You know, nothing is clean in the end.”

Sounds like True Detective fans should ready for themselves for another bumpy, dirty, inventive series of crime drama…