Review by C.J. Bunce
It took a new writer and showrunner to turnaround what has been a clunky police procedural anthology series, but HBO Max finally got it right in its fourth season, the subtitled True Detective: Night Country. That yawnworthy waste of some impressive actors in its first season, piled on with gratuitous violence, sex, slow movement is like another show altogether 4 years later thanks to new writer-showrunner Issa López and Jodie Foster in the lead role, along with the kind of supporting cast that will leave you disappointed these characters aren’t leading an ongoing series. Best of all this is another genre mash-up that will keep you guessing through its six episodes. Is this sci-fi? Supernatural? Something else?
If you gave up on this series before, you might want to give this season a second chance. It’s so different from the other seasons, you will ask whether this is a plain vanilla drama like Mare of Easttown, or maybe it’s a twisted Northern Exposure. Maybe it’s just another Fargo. Maybe this is a remake of The Thing and The Thing from Another World. Or maybe it’s the best season of supernatural detective work since The X-Files, Twin Peaks, and Supernatural.
Wisely showrunner Issa López shuns the “women in the refrigerator” trope for… refrigerated men. How did this group of secret scientists straight out of a Michael Crichton novel end up piled frozen and naked in the dark, frozen ice fields of Alaska? This feels like a Stephen King plot, with whispers of returning ghosts from The Shining.
Jodie Foster is Detective Liz Danvers, an always negative thorn in everyone’s side, who appears as if she has caroused with all the men in town, and is only sympathetic because she lost her son years ago in a car accident. Foster could have performed this role in her sleep as a re-tread of Fargo, but she didn’t. She is brilliant here, creating a memorable character like all her other fantastic creations over her long career, although her craggy nurse in Hotel Artemis first comes to mind. Foster’s performance is even better than her acclaimed role in Silence of the Lambs.
A two-time Oscar winner teamed with a former boxer? That’s Kali Reis as another detective, Evangeline Navarro, an indigenous local cop who has a history partnering with Danvers. She is obsessed with a cold case, of a missing young woman, a case she must convince Danvers is connected to the current dead bodies at the mysterious local science station.
In the way of both Danvers and Navarro is Oscar nominee John Hawkes (Three Billboards) as Hank Prior, whose best feature is his son Finn Bennett’s Pete Prior, who has the unforgiving job of being Danvers’ lacky. But Pete rises to the occasion, becoming that surprise supporting character sleuth that sometimes, if not rarely, can elevate the story from good to great. More barriers to the truth can be found in the owner of the local mine, Kate McKitterick, played by Dervla Kirwan (Doctor Who), and her husband (and another Danvers conquest), played by former Doctor Who Doctor, Christopher Eccleston.
More gravitas comes in the form of the great Fiona Shaw as Rose Aguineau, a local mystic with visions and important knowledge. As in Killing Eve, Shaw takes over a production in every scene she performs in. The good work goes all the way down the cast list. Isabella LeBlanc as Danvers’ teenage stepdaughter Leah is another character you want to know more about.
The script has all the right mystery tropes in the right places. Viewers get just enough information to solve the crime alongside Danvers and Navarro. When Pete Prior experiences those moments of drama that would be boring elsewhere, the story ties him back into discovering something to push the plot forward. It’s not all that twisty, but it’s clean and neatly drawn.
A contender for the year’s best mystery watch, catch True Detective: Night Country now streaming on Max.
