The Enigmatic Return of ‘True Detective’

The fourth season of True Detective–and the first season of True Detective to have a colon and a subtitle (:Night country!)–is challenging television.  It’s the kind of series where you have to rewatch episodes because you missed something. It can feel like reading a Tolstoy novel where you have to keep flipping back to the list of characters to keep track of who’s who.

It also can be necessary to read many of the available supporting articles online in order to make sense of what’s going on like this excellent and thorough piece in Vanity Fair that explains all the easter eggs and symbolism. That’s not to say that this hard work isn’t worth it.  The narrative is quite dark, beautiful and suspenseful and there are some amazing performances from a cast that includes Jodie Foster (her first role in a TV series since the 1970s), Fiona Shaw, John Hawkes, and newcomer Kali Reis.

The series takes place in the fictional enclave of Ennis, Alaska, a mining settlement positioned in such proximity to the North Pole that, one fateful December evening, the sun bids its final farewell, ushering in weeks of uninterrupted darkness. Ennis is–obviously–a cold place (they filmed in Iceland) and the people who live there are quite ornery and hard. There is tension everywhere: between indigenous people and the whites, between the mining personnel and the environmentalists, between various factions of law enforcement, between the abusive violent men and their long-suffering but resilient women and, yes finally, between the living and the dead. There is a lots of alcohol/substance abuse, plenty of inappropriate NSA sexual relations, not to mention prayer AND psychic phenomenon.

Someone has committed a gruesome crime: eight scientists are missing and then found naked and frozen to death, their post mortem expressions vividly recalling Munch’s Scream painting. Later the show reveals that one of them is alive and in a coma and another one is simply missing. They thaw comically in an abandoned ice rink. Tsalal Station, the clandestine research lab that employs them, gets funding from an NGO that has shady financial ties to a mysterious and powerful corporate entity that has popped up as an agent of evil in previous seasons of True Detective. But just when you think this is a case of “follow the money”, there are spiral tattooes, dream sequences and visitations from the dead that seem to indicate that supernatural forces, and not a singular killer, might be behind these baffling deaths.

Detectives Liz Danvers (Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Reis) are professional adversaries  struggling to solve the case.  The source of their animosity towards each other has to do with another unsolved crime from the past that haunted the two of them and ultimately led to Navarro’s transfer to a less prestigious position.

Before this season actually aired, Gay Twitter nicknamed this season “True Detectives: Cold Lesbians” because pre-release trailers featuring heated confrontations between Foster and Reis–both looking quite commandingly fetching in their fur-trimmed regulation parkas–seemed to promise that Jodie was going to finally at long last going to play an actual lesbian rather than a coded one. Sad to say, both Foster and Reis’s characters seem to be exclusively having lots of NSA sex with men. It is a testimony to Foster’s Academy Award winning acting skills that she really seems to be genuinely enjoying hate sex with Christopher Ecceleston.  Nevertheless, the chemistry between the two women, while not strictly sexual–it seems–ties all these disparate plot points together.

It’s impossible to watch Jodie Foster act and not feel an authentic sense of world-weariness  from a real life that piled unthinkable responsibilities upon her. She was a child actor and thus a breadwinner for her family, played a child prostitute in Taxi Driver, was the inspiration for the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, and endured the life of a (sort of) closeted lesbian in Hollywood. In addition to the acting itself–58 years of on-the-job experience plus training at Yale–Jodie simply intrinsically looks like she’s been through some shit.  For that reason, She has never done a comedy. She does not have a skin-care line. Ms. Foster is not here to play. For that reason, her performance as the somewhat racist and insensitive police chief ties what should be a confusing and absurdly complicated storyline into a compelling and highly watchable drama.

It seems that the very town of Ennis plays a role in the deaths of these scientists and other crimes from the last. And Ennis itself– the center of so much conflict–is but a microcosm of the world.  Shaw plays Rose Aguineau, a survivalist with a past full of secrets and a fabulously rustic home on the tundra who is a mentor of sorts to Navarro.  Her communication with the dead leads to the finding of the bodies of the scientists. Rose sheds some light on Ennis, explaining that as the world gets old, Ennis is where the fabric of all things is coming apart at the seams. And that certainly seems to be the case. A mine that employs 50 percent of the residents of Ennis– and thus is its primary source of income–is also poisoning the water.

An iPhone video surfaces of the scientists’ last few moments before they disappeared.  “She has woken!” exclaims one of them. It’s still early the season but I’m placing my bets that “she” is, in fact, mother nature.