Wanting again, 2014 was really a special time: Obama was in workplace, skinny denims nonetheless reigned supreme and “True Detective” established itself with an unabashed emphasis on masculinity. Three years earlier, Ryan Murphy had revived the anthology sequence with “American Horror Story,” nevertheless it took the imprimatur of HBO, huge film stars and a “critical” style like crime to offer the format actual status. In pairing Matthew McConaughey with Woody Harrelson on a journey by the bayou, creator Nic Pizzolatto elevated a few of that style’s clichés and left others intact — together with a marginal presence for girls, crowded into bit roles as wives and villains to make room for portentous monologues and four-minute monitoring photographs.
The fourth season of “True Detective,” subtitled “Night time Nation,” is each a pointy break from the present’s previous and an implicit response to its shortcomings. After a disastrous Season 2 and an improved, if understated, Season 3, Pizzolatto has totally ceded all showrunning duties, although he retains credit score as an govt producer. In his place, Mexican filmmaker Issa López takes the reins for a haunting homicide thriller set in far northern Alaska. (Director Barry Jenkins additionally joins the “True Detective” workforce by way of his manufacturing firm Pastel.) And to share the titular function, López casts a primary for the franchise: a number of feminine leads, within the type of residing legend Jodie Foster and boxer-turned-actor Kali Reis. However “Night time Nation” doesn’t simply tweak the “True Detective” method by way of gender. The six-episode season additionally takes a notably totally different strategy to the supernatural, a background motif of previous installments that right here turns into a central theme.
Foster’s Liz Danvers is the police chief of Ennis, a fictional city that experiences the actual phenomenon of polar evening, by which the Earth’s extremes plunge into darkness for days at a time across the winter solstice. Simply after the final sundown of the yr, eight scientists at a secretive analysis station appear to fade into skinny air. To search out out what occurred to them, Danvers has to re-team along with her estranged former companion Evangeline Navarro (Reis), who’s spent years hung up on the unsolved homicide of Native midwife Annie Kowtok (Nivi Pedersen). When proof emerges that the 2 instances are associated, Danvers and Navarro begrudgingly pool their assets.
As “Night time Nation” continues, it begins to furnish the main points that make Ennis really feel like a lived-in place, such because the longstanding tensions between the Native group and a mining company they cost with dumping pollution into the water provide. On an interpersonal degree, Danvers is a prickly misanthrope with a penchant for ill-advised affairs, whether or not with a highschool trainer married to the mine’s native supervisor or with the boss who exiled her to the Arctic within the first place. Her solely colleagues are a father-son duo: Hank (John Hawkes), a tragic sack pining for his mail order bride, and Prior (Finn Bennett), a younger father whose dedication to the job causes a rift along with his spouse Kayla (Anna Lambe), who’s placing herself by nursing faculty. Danvers is widowed, although nonetheless elevating her teenage, half-Native stepdaughter Leah (Isabella Star LaBlanc), who will get concerned with anti-mine protests each to behave out and to discover her personal heritage. In only a few hours, we get a crash course in Ennis’ tightly woven social net, a claustrophobic atmosphere at odds with the open house that surrounds it.
Earlier than the present’s realism trickles in, although, “Night time Nation” begins on a fantastically creepy observe that resonates all through the season, a tone sustained partly by a credit sequence set to Billie Eilish’s “Bury a Buddy.” When a deliveryman stops by the station, all that’s left of the scientists is a severed human tongue and the parade scene from “Ferris Bueller” blasting on a loop. Not that it takes lengthy to search out the all-male crew: They flip up bare, frozen and useless, found by native eccentric Rose Agineau (Fiona Shaw) who herself claims she was led to the our bodies by the ghost of an ex-lover. (“It’s an extended fucking evening,” Rose says. “Even the useless get bored.”) However there are indicators, like burnt corneas and ruptured eardrums, the scientists didn’t merely die of publicity.
The 2 investigators react to those occasions like a contemporary riff on Mulder and Scully. Danvers insists there should be “an actual rationalization” for the deaths, whereas Navarro is extra open to the paranormal. However there’s an added racial dimension to this believer-skeptic divide. Navarro is an element Native, the butt of Danvers’ crude jokes about “spirit animals” and different perceived superstitions; her sister, Julia (Aka Niviâna), struggles with both hallucinations or visions, relying on one’s perspective. Lastly, there’s the rewarding distinction between Foster, a veteran getting into her meatiest function in years, and Reis, whose revelatory depth belies her current transition into appearing. Each the roles and performances complement each other, giving “True Detective” two true, evenly matched co-leads for the primary time since Harrelson and McConaughey.
In every single place Danvers and Navarro look, an ominous black spiral retains popping up, drawn on a wall or scratched right into a rock. The image is a callback to the eerie dolls and stick sculptures of seasons previous, however the query of what can or can’t be defined by pure logic is far more central to “Night time Nation” than any “True Detective” earlier than it. Whereas in the end ambiguous, mentioned ambiguity reads extra like an intentional alternative than a pink herring (or Yellow King, if you’ll) — one which ties into the season’s extremely particular setting, which turns into greater than only a placing backdrop. The hardened feminine cop in a blue-collar group, as seen in sequence like “Comfortable Valley” and “Mare of Easttown,” is now as a lot of a trope as parts of the primary “True Detective.” In redefining what the present could be, “Night time Nation” additionally invigorates the archetype by putting it in a contemporary context.
‘True Detective: Night time Nation’ premieres Jan. 14 on HBO and Max at 9:00pm ET, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Sundays.
