‘True Detective’ Season 4 Episode 3 Ends With Anders Lund Going Full ‘Silence of the Lambs’: “Hello Evangeline…”

“Be prepared. He’s hard to look at.” That’s the warning a doctor gives Ennis Police Chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Alaska State Trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) before they visit Anders Lund (Þorsteinn Bachmann) in the final sequence of True Detective: Night Country Episode 3 on HBO. The sole survivor of the Tsalal corpsicle, Lund has been convalescing ever since one of Danvers’s younger lackeys snapped off his frozen limb by accident, bringing the comatose man back to life. Danvers believes he is their key to figuring out what happened to the men at the Tsalal Arctic Research Station and, potentially, Annie K (Nivi Pedersen). However, Lund turns out to be less of a star witness than a creepy harbinger of more horrors to come in True Detective Season 4.

“We woke her,” is what he says to Danvers when she asks what happened that night out on the ice. Navarro soon hears the haunting echoes of a voice whispering, “She’s awake,” again.

“She’s out, she’s out there, in the ice,” Lund continues, shaking his own head in fear.

“Who’s out there?” Danvers asks.

Lund replies, “She came for us…in the dark,” before descending into blood-curdling screams. Danvers attempts to press the man for more information is stymied by both the doctor’s insistence on sedating the patient and word that more trouble has fallen upon the hospital.

Danvers rushes to break a violent fight that’s occurring in the waiting room, leaving Navarro alone with Lund. That’s when it happens. A strange, unearthly voice possesses Lund and creepily greets Navarro: “Hello, Evangeline.”

“[Bachmann] gave me my own Silence of the Lambs moment with the ‘Hello, Evangeline…‘” Kali Reis gushed to Decider last month. “That was so creepy! And then I would look at the playback and I’m like, ‘Agh!'”

Lund’s message for Navarro gets even more terrifying as it gets more personal: “Your mother says ‘Hello.’ She’s waiting for you.” Lund points at Navarro and then collapses, convulses, and dies.

If you found the moment unsettling from the comfort of your home, rest assured that Reis also was creeped out by Bachmann’s prosthetics and performance.

“The special effects team, they just did such a great job. Like I knew he didn’t have things missing and he wasn’t frostbitten, but you could picture how it would smell if somebody had been in the hospital,” Reis said. “It was so creepy!”

Adding to the experience? The fact that Icelandic actor Þorsteinn Bachmann leaned into his big moment.

“He was like a comedian, so he was playing around with it,” Reis recalled with a smile.

Reis and Bachmann might have had fun on set with the chilling final moments of True Detective: Night Country Episode 3, but the moment could be polarizing for viewers at home.

Is True Detective Season 4 leaning too much into the franchise’s mystical roots? Is Lund’s cryptic response to Danvers’s questions designed to throw all of us further off the case? Or will this unabashed moment of horror be the thing that hooks into folks’ psyches through the season’s end?