True Detective Season 4 Episode 4 Explained- Night Country Has Claimed Us All And Theories On The Killer
It’s Christmas Eve, and everyone is lonely, forgotten, and rotting. At least, it feels that way for most of the major players in True Detective Season 4 Episode 4. The past can catch up to you no matter how far you run in The Night Country. As regrets come full circle and tragedy knocks on the door, Danvers and Navarro are pulled further into a dark place they may never escape.
Everyone has burdens to bear and their flaws, which brought or forced them to Ennis. Navarro was brought to Alaska by her mother to outrun their abusive father and her demons. Those demons followed her, though, and now haunt Julia. When Danvers discovered her undressing in the middle of town, she called Navarro. Things looked like they might finally be turning around when Julia agreed to go to The Lighthouse, but however silent they were, ghosts refused to be ignored. It appeared Julia was embracing treatment, but when a spirit and an orange appeared in her room, she gave up fighting and decided to join them in the afterlife. In a heartbreaking scene, she disrobed, laid her clothes neatly on the ice, and walked into the sea to die.
Despair and heartbreak were everywhere in Ennis. Christmas Eve should have been a night for the family, but it was just pain for most. Danvers’ obsessive need to solve puzzles makes her forget others have lives outside of the job. Through reflections from Captain Conley, who is back in town to oversee the rash of crime that has been happening, we learn that Danvers was never precisely the warm fuzzy type, but after Holden and Jacob’s death, she got worse. She is a great cop but a terrible boss, and poor Peter takes the brunt of her abysmal management skills. Subconsciously, she probably wants everyone to be as lonely as she is.
Danvers has a habit of pushing others away. When Leah vandalizes the Silver Sky business offices, they argue, and Leah goes to stay with the Priors. They provide her with a shared heritage that Danvers can’t provide. It also gives her the support and love Leah desperately needs. Unfortunately, it left Danvers all alone with Annie’s murder and a bottle of vodka. Liquid courage numbed her pain, and she went to Captain Conley, but things quickly soured because she couldn’t help but punish herself and everyone in her circle. She is forced to send Peter and Navarro to Oliver’s camp because she is too drunk, and they discover him missing. His friends take a defensive posture when they discover them and force them to leave, but not before Navarro finds more spirals.
On the way back from the camp, she learns that Julia committed suicide. Needing to punish herself, she confronts the facility and fights with the local miners. Like the actress who plays Navarro, she can hold her own in a fight, but three against one will never end well. She went to Qavvik’s place to lick her wounds, and he cared for her just as he had been doing all along. If she stops blaming herself and accepts his love, she will be in better shape than Danvers.
I almost felt sorry for Hank this week. He is abusive and cruel, but he is also human, and his Russian bride took his money and broke his heart. All of the things he did to welcome her to his house felt especially sad when he returned home alone on Christmas Eve.
Despite being mistreated by his father and taken advantage of by Danvers, Peter is developing into a good detective. He found another man with similar wounds as the scientists. His name is Otis Heis, and he is still alive but hiding. By the end of True Detective Season 4 Episode 4, Danvers and Navarro found him. They were looking for Raymond Clark but found Otis instead. The man was a shell-shocked ghost of his former self. He self-medicated with drugs and was terrified of something. He was also wearing Clark’s coat.
While Danvers tried to talk to Otis, Danvers chased a ghost to a Christmas tree. Danvers found her there, staring at the tree. Whether Navarro is genuinely lost or lost in thought, we don’t know yet, but she certainly believes she deserves what is coming for her. Wheeler’s girlfriend cursed her for not saving her, and now she thinks the bill has come due.
All of the little details you may have missed in True Detective Season 4 Episode 4
Julia folded and laid her clothes neatly, just as the scientist’s clothes and shoes were laid near the human popsicle. Why did any of them do it? The men were terrified and moved to this location, which makes you think someone else undressed them and left their things neatly to be found. Was it done out of respect? Was it the holdover of a disciplined, almost obsessive need to control things? In Julia’s case, it seems like the last act of someone who had given up and wanted to leave things as tidy as possible.
Julia knew she would end up at The Lighthouse. Did she also know she would walk out and die later that night? Ennis is special. Rose thinks the veil between life and death is thin there and being torn apart. With all the ghosts walking around, it is hard to doubt her. Unfortunately, Julia lost her life not because she had a mental illness but because the past relentlessly haunted her.
Rose was a college professor in her previous life. According to Rose, she was an academic who was a prolific writer. She got tired of listening to herself talk about things that weren’t important, so she quit her job and left for Alaska. I wonder what Rose taught. Was it anything relevant to what is happening now?
When Navarro asks Oliver’s friends about the spiral, the dogs begin growling, and the men close ranks. They know what the symbol means and are scared but not speaking. It makes you wonder what would be bad enough to make men as hardened as these this wary.
There is something terrible in the ice caves that Otis Heis mapped, and Annie died in. Is it biological? The fossils in the walls were prehistoric whales, so it wasn’t something otherworldly or unknown. Whatever biological material might have killed the whale and might still live in the ice could be unexplainable, though. Maybe whatever prehistoric biology in the cave walls causes hallucinations? If everyone who comes into contact with it slowly loses their mind, it could explain everything.
The one-eyed polar bear made another appearance in True Detective Season 4 Episode 4. Danvers nearly wrecked her truck, avoiding it, and the stuffed bear was tossed into the snow to prove a point. Danvers should start listening. Symbolic of climate change, it could be a message that the mine is irreparably harming the town.
Carcosa in True Detective Season 1 and Night Country in Season 4 are mythical places that operate on several levels. Carcosa is a literary place that was brought to life by a deadly cult and a vicious family. In Lousiana, it was in the ruinous backyard of an unstable forgotten son. Night Country is found in the decrepit, rusted remains of an abandoned dredge and an icy secret cave. We thought all along Night Country referred to the endless days of night they have to endure during the winter, but we now know it refers to the shadowy place where the living and the dead mingle. Let’s hope the living can figure out what happened before it kills them all.
Theories on who killed Annie and the scientists
I predict all of the supernatural elements are red herrings. Across all four seasons, the one constant has been grief, regret, and corruption. The mine is essential to the town; they likely found something in the mine they shouldn’t have. It may be tied to TSALAL, or it could simply be something more tedious like pollution and environmental raping. If the mine is doing something illegal that is destroying the land and water in Ennis, everything would have a far too mundane answer.
Money is a big motivator, and people kill to protect or obtain it. Silver Sky Mines gives the appearance of being a greedy organization. Power and money commonly corrode morals, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the mine is protecting something they uncovered. If Annie wanted to stop them, and she and Clark had been working towards that goal, he could be running scared. Whatever was found in the cave could also be in the mine. Maybe the miners found an ice cave? Toxins and poisons could explain a lot of the strange behaviors in Ennis. The dead share space there. That can’t be denied, but Annie’s and the scientists’ deaths could all be attributed to disease or toxins.
Another possibility is Annie’s killer could be different from the men. If the scientists had discovered something they were protecting, they might have killed Annie to keep their secret. The guilt and grief would have destroyed Clark, and Annie could have haunted him until he got revenge on the scientists who killed her. Atoning for mistakes is something many of the people in True Detective have always done. Season 4 is no different.
Regret seemed to be the theme of True Detective Season 4 Episode 4. Peter believes his wife resents him for making her keep the baby. Hank regrets being tricked, and Navarro and Danvers regret not being able to do anything about Wheeler’s domestic violence before it was too late. That regret grew when they were unable to solve Annie’s murder. Now, they are on a mission to find out what happened to the scientists and Annie, who appear to be intimately tied to their murders.
Navarro is convinced they are cursed for not saving her. She will also be haunted by her inability to save her sister. Danvers can’t shake her grief over Holden and Jacob’s death. We don’t know if she was to blame or is simply heartbroken as any mother and partner would be. She may believe the dead aren’t with us, but clearly, they are. Interestingly, she is willing to accept that Navarro saw something that day when they found Wheeler’s girlfriend dead. Will Julia return to Navarro, and will she help
As the Managing Editor for Signal Horizon, I love watching and writing about genre entertainment. I grew up with old-school slashers, but my real passion is television and all things weird and ambiguous. My work can be found here and Travel Weird, where I am the Editor in Chief.