![]() The “Yellow King” storyline that kicked off True Detective in 2014 was set in the South, the geographical and narrative antipodes of Night Country-an oppositional scenario that at once delineates artistic incongruencies (hot vs. The same could be argued of events in Ennis, the perspectives of its residents. Chicanery and magic bear a close resemblance in the dark. Or maybe it’s a parlor trick and we’re rubes. All matter, all space, condenses to an origin point if your field of view is broad enough. Time is circular, distance illusory, free will a charade. The recurring orange and coin suggest the mutability of physics, of reality at large. He flings a coin into the desert night, only for the object to unerringly arc back into his hand. This conjures to mind a passage of the novel wherein Judge Holden, the big bad, enthralls a band of scalp hunters with his fireside meditation on the natures of God, man, and warfare. The orange mysteriously rolls back to her from the opposite direction, and we are reminded of an earlier scene featuring a close-up of a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), abandoned half-read at Tsalal Station. In a moment of overboiling frustration, she fishes an orange from her parka pocket and hurls it across the ice. Most important, she bears witness to the numinous. ![]() She is a damaged crusader who won’t abandon an old murder investigation and a seer with one foot in the realms beyond, plagued by whispering spirits. Despite the show’s heritage as the latest installment of a well-established series and its complement of inescapable references to a broader array of like-minded narratives, Night Country turns out to be as slippery as a seal and just as elusive.Įvangeline Navarro is the nucleus of Season 4: the living, reacting causeway traversing worlds and cultures. While Night Country bears certain hallmarks of these works (conspiracy, corruption, paranoia, isolation), an ethereal undercurrent of magical realism sets it apart from the pack. Night Country also joins a cinematic catalog that includes, among many others, 1951’s The Thing From Another World (and John Carpenter’s seminal 1982 remake) Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) Smilla’s Sense of Snow (1997) 30 Days of Night (2007) and the more recent streaming series Fortitude (Season 1, 2015) and The Terror (Season 1, 2018). Where does Night Country land in the tradition of “polar” horror and suspense? One can trace this season’s roots to 19 th-century works The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1838) and Jules Verne’s An Antarctic Mystery (1897), via Night Country’s foregrounding of Tsalal Research Station, where eight scientists have vanished under exceedingly ominous circumstances. Season 4’s aesthetic captures the essence of loneliness, of estrangement, particular to the Arctic. ![]() It’s a land where voices echo and the wind moaning across the tundra sounds an awful lot like ghosts. Their streets and roads spiral from town center axes into surrounding hills worn to the gumline by eons of wind, connecting to nothing, vanishing like the ends of hemorrhaged veins into the vast empty. Reachable by radio wave, by sailing, by flight. The oldest, most rural communities are akin to ice-bright stars in a constellation-geographically isolated, adrift upon a black sea. To live in wintertime Alaska is to cultivate an affinity for extreme cold and darkness, or at least a stoic indifference. The frigid setting of Alaska is near and dear to my heart this season, which concludes on Sunday, also promised to combine some of my favorite genres-noir, suspense, and supernatural horror. Mild spoilers for all six episodes of True Detective: Night Country below.Īs someone born in the Land of the Midnight Sun, and a longtime traveler through its wilderness, I noticed my ears perk up when the trailers rolled out for Issa López’s Max series True Detective: Night Country.
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