If there’s any series that can afford to take a big hit in its finale, this is it. True Detective: Night Country. After all, it’s HBO’s fourth season true detective The series’ central mystery involved a group of scientists who were all killed at the same time and whose frozen bodies were discovered together in the tundra. And the same scientists stayed Frozen, giant blocks of ice were kept cool in the town’s community center. I called him “corpse!” They named it. This is crazy in the best way; ridiculous, scary and creepy.
For six weeks Night Country It made us wonder what on earth could have created this terror on such a large scale. So it’s incredibly disappointing that the reveal of the scientists’ fates feels like the easiest possible solution, devoid of all the creative energy that inspired the first five episodes.
What’s particularly frustrating is that in Sunday’s 75-minute finale it seemed like Night Country He was building something magnificent. The revelations came thick and fast as detectives Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) and Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) tried to get to the bottom of what happened to the scientists while trying to uncover the truth behind the grisly death of local woman Annie K. The person whose murder was never solved. They discovered the truth about Annie; She was killed by scientists after they began attacking their research. So what happened to the scientists?
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When they noticed a unique handprint consisting of only three fingers, it led them to a surprising discovery: Their deaths had a much simpler explanation than the scientists thought. When they went to the house of three-fingered woman Blair (Kathryn Wilder), they learned the truth; A group of Native women discovered that the scientists had killed Annie and took it upon themselves to avenge her death. They raided the research center, forced them to undress, and took them into the frozen wilderness, where they inevitably froze to death. The series treated this revelation like a girl power revenge story; It would be much more interesting if there were. Night Country had done everything to lay the groundwork for this in the previous five episodes. But it didn’t happen.
Instead, this latest change has made the show a victim of its own success. A huge block of ice made of dead scientists was a fantastic, unforgettable invention; It was an invention that encouraged us to question what happened to them and, perhaps most importantly, who or what was responsible. However, this meant that the series created a lot of expectations for itself that would be difficult to achieve in just six episodes. Perhaps escape had to be waited for; You can’t please everyone, so why please anyone? While the women confessed to their crimes, they made vague suggestions that there was a spirit that killed the scientists after leaving them on the ice. But even this potentially fascinating nugget was delivered with a grin, followed by the statement, “It’s just a story.” Ah.
Liz’s reaction is the bigger problem. Given her long-standing frustrations with the police force and the fact that she was desperate to find those responsible for Annie’s murder and bring them to justice, it made sense that Evangeline would be willing to ignore the truth about the murders. And since the women killed the scientists who killed Annie, Evangeline considered the scientists’ deaths to be the end of the cause that tormented her. His connivance and eventual resignation from the police brought his course to a satisfactory conclusion.
So how can we believe that someone like Liz, who we know is so committed to her job, would let a group of murderers in Ennis escape? Of course, we had seen evidence that Liz did not comply with every article of the law; He allowed Evangeline to kill Clark and helped stage a past murder by making it look like a suicide. But that wasn’t enough to convince us that Liz would pass on a confession without hesitation. He wasn’t one to forgive major transgressions, but his tacit acceptance of this explanation went against everything we’d learned about him. Worse still, such a rapid unmasking was an extremely convenient arc to wrap around what we thought was an extremely complex mystery.
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If so, it would have made more sense for Liz to initially ignore the findings—given that the entire group of women were staring menacingly at her—and report the truth once she got to a safe area to do so. He narrowly escaped death the night he learned what had happened to the scientists, so it might seem logical not to want to arrest a group of people hours later. However, in the next scene, we saw Liz talking to the investigators. Despite her (understandable) curiosity and questions, Liz couldn’t muster more than “Some questions don’t have answers.” This indicates uncertainty to want It was a great ending Night Country He continued to lean into his sad unknowns. But since we’ve just discovered there’s nothing mysterious about the deaths, it turns out the show is trying to have its cake and eat it too.
The end result was a shocking last-minute twist for our hero. She had a history of saying some pretty bad things about Native people throughout the series and had a rocky (to put it mildly) relationship with her Native stepdaughter. Liz also had a testy relationship with Evangeline; It was pretty obvious that they hated each other in the beginning. They eventually came to an agreement in the finale, but it still didn’t provide enough of a sense of growth to justify Liz doing a 180, putting all her deep-seated prejudices aside for the sake of girl power.
Revealing that there is no otherworldly element in the deaths of the scientists is diametrically opposed to the series’ own interests. If the supernatural elements were to be left for the last 15 minutes of the season, why focus on them so heavily throughout the previous five and a half episodes? Night Country It was full of unexplained things. It’s a shame, then, that the series chose to give a big shrug instead of buying into its own universe.
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