Good Night Country

So, I hope you’ve had a chance to watch the season finale of “True Detective: Night County” because hot damn do I want to talk about it. The series, while leaving some things purposefully ambiguous, stuck the landing as far as I’m concerned. No, it wasn’t perfect. But goodness was it satisfying.

The fourth season of the anthology series was no doubt deeply gratifying for its intended audience. And I should know, because I am exactly that intended audience. A viewer who loves complex mystery narratives, but is bored by the genre’s tendency to mythologize its Complicated/Suffering Men.

“Night Country” can best be read as a photo negative of the original “True Detective” a decade ago. That series was unapologetically all about its dual male leads, a male creator and male sensibilities (and self importance, ahem). So you can see why its fanboys might feel as if the new season is a huge departure with its dual female leads, female creator and similarly unapologetic female narratives. But, you know what fellas? We’re more than half the world’s population. You can watch one season about us, it won’t kill you. Probably.

Season 4 creator Issa Lopez defly straddled the line between the sensible and the supernatural, leaving it up to us how we want to interpret everything we’ve seen. To guide our journey to whatever truth might be out there are Arctic Mulder/Scully archetypes in believer Navarro (Kali Reis) and skeptic Danvers (Jodie Foster). But the truth about Night Country is not all questions have an answer – just like in real life.

Now, as is so tiresomely always the case, not everyone is thrilled about this shift to female-centered storytelling. Chief among the whiny men brigade is series creator Nic Pizzolatto, who spent last weekend reposting (and then deleting) post after post from his fanboys criticizing the new season of the anthology series (and, naturally, stroking his own ego and other parts).

It should be noted that Pizzolatto was not involved in any of the creative decisions in “Night Country.” And given what I’d read about him behind the scenes from his former glory days of Season 1, I continue to feel entirely justified in skipping his seasons. What can I say, thin-skinned pseudo-intellectual macho posturing just isn’t my thing. I’ll let Kali have the last word (and then some) because, um, you’ve seen what Kali looks like, right? I’ve also seen what Pizzolatto looks like, and that ain’t a fair fight – for him, obviously. Damn, girl.

🙄😐 That’s a damn shame…but hey I guess “if you don’t have anything good to share, shit on others” is the new wave 🤷🏽‍♀️ lol https://t.co/4EOvu0oPSu

— Kali Reis (@KO_Reis86) February 20, 2024

SPOILERS FOR THE SEASON FINALE AHEAD

Now that we all know how Annie K’s murder ties into the deaths of the male researchers at the Alaskan outpost, the show’s take on frontier justice feels at once familiar and invigorating. Vengeance stories are nothing new for men. There’s a whole comic named Punisher, after all. But female vengeance stories, they’re so fertile given the millennia of injustices at the hands of, you guessed it, men we have to draw from. So that was a real, fuck yeah moment for me when watching the finale.

The other fuck yeah moment was the very, very end. That last image. The one people keep calling “ambiguous,” but I read as 100% stone-cold gay. That’s unequivocally Navarro appearing on Danver’s lake house deck. My interpretation is she came back, like Danvers said, from the Ice and they’re now living their best lives together. But it’s still just as gay if you read it as Navarro’s ghost coming back to visit – and not haunt – Danvers in a tranquil, romantic setting. Like, I don’t know if this is one of those cases of the straight world reading queer women through history as “just roommates” or “best gal pals.” But there is an unquestionably gay reading to the final scene which fulfills the unspoken promise of a series where both leads looked SO DAMN GAY the whole time. Like, even the most oblivious straight people must recognize Jodie and Kali’s aesthetics as capital L Lesbian, right?

So, thoughts, theories? Honestly, even if I didn’t love the series it’d be worthwhile to have this female-fronted version because it makes all the right people mad. Luckily, I also loved the series. I mean, you get that many talented women together, how could you not? We’re watching, and we’re awake.