True Detective: Night Country’s ending, explained

After searching through the ice caves around Ennis, Alaska (i.e., the Night Country), Navarro and Liz discover that they lead back to an underground lab beneath the Tsalal Research Station. They finally apprehend Annie K.’s former boyfriend, Raymond Clark (Owen McDonnell), who had been secretly hiding off-and-on in Tsalal and its underground lab ever since his fellow scientists died. The duo binds him to a chair and demands that he tell them what happened to Annie K. and what occurred the night that Tslala’s scientists were taken out to the ice.

Following a fair bit of psychological torture, Clark reveals that he and his fellow scientists really were digging into the ice around Ennis to extract the DNA of a micro-organism frozen in the region’s permafrost that could “save the world.” The scientists realized they could successfully do just that, too, but only if the pollutants from the Silver Sky mining factory continued to heat up and soften the permafrost itself. The Tsalal team subsequently began to push the mine to increase its levels of pollution — a decision that has wreaked havoc on the lives of Ennis’ citizens. Annie, an environmental activist, discovered not only what Clark and Co. were doing, but also found their underground lab.

In a fit of rage, she loudly destroyed all of the materials they’d collected, which resulted in her being caught and attacked by Anders Lund (Þorsteinn Bachmann), who stabbed her multiple times with a star-pointed tool from the lab. While Clark briefly tried to save Annie, he eventually relented, watched Lund and the rest of Tsalal’s scientists brutally assault her, and then ultimately killed her himself. In the wake of their murder, the scientists asked Silver Sky to clean up their mess for them. In response, Silver Sky sent the late, definitely-not-great Hank Prior (John Hawkes) to relocate Annie’s body.

Raymond Clark believes that his fellow scientists were killed by the spirit of the Night Country itself. He isn’t correct, though. After Navarro and Liz discover a distinctive handprint on the hatch that leads down to the Tsalal underground lab, they realize that Blair Hartman (Kathryn Wilder), the woman whom Navarro helped protect from her abusive partner in Night Country‘s first episode, may know more about what happened to the station’s scientists than she’s let on. When they visit her home, they come face-to-face with not only Blair but also her fierce protector and co-worker, Bee (Diane E. Benson).

In her dining room, Bee explains that she discovered Tsalal’s underground lab while she was cleaning the station one day. When she went down to investigate, she found tools capable of making the same puncture marks that were found on Annie’s body. Realizing that the Tsalal scientists must have had something to do with Annie’s murder, she and many of Ennis’ other female cleaners and blue-collar workers attacked the station. In a series of flashbacks, we see Bee, Blair, and many of the other women who have been present in the background of so many scenes throughout Night Country shut off Tsalal’s power and load its scientists into the back of a shipping truck at gunpoint.

Bee reveals that it was she and her co-workers who forced the Tsalal men to take off their clothes and walk into the icescape surrounding Ennis. When the men didn’t survive, she surmised that the Night Country did want to take them for what they did to Annie. Liz, in response to hearing all this, announces that she will be publicly sticking to Ted Connelly’s (Christopher Eccleston) story that the Tsalal scientists were killed in a freak slab avalanche — absolving Bee, Blair, and their co-conspirators of any suspicion. When Navarro then asks Bee whether she left Annie’s severed tongue at Tsalal for the police to find, she replies that she didn’t. It’s a small moment, but one that leaves open the possibility that something supernatural really did have an interest in making Navarro and Liz restart their investigation into Annie’s murder.

During their impromptu stay at Tsalal, Liz and Navarro solve the two mysteries that have been plaguing them all season and experience moments of unexpected emotional catharsis as well. Navarro reaches out through her supernatural visions and comes into contact with a spirit that seems to offer her, more than anything else, the peace that she’s searched for her entire life. Liz, meanwhile, starts to come to terms with her son’s death years prior after Navarro gives her a message from his ghost.

In the Night Country finale’s epilogue, viewers learn that Hank’s body was never found and that Navarro left the Ennis police force and the public eye altogether after she and Liz solved their Tsalal and Annie K. cases. When she did, she left Liz a recorded confession by Clark detailing all the damage Tsalal and Silver Sky’s mine have done to Ennis, which Liz leaked to the public. The mine was shut down shortly afterward, and a series of quick scenes suggest that not only are Peter Prior’s (Finn Bennett) relationships with his wife and son actually healing in the months after their family unit was nearly torn apart, but that Liz’s bond with her stepdaughter, Leah (Isabella LaBlanc), has also begun to improve.

True Detective: Night Country then ends with Liz responding to questions about Navarro’s disappearance by remarking, “This is Ennis. No one ever really leaves.” Her comment is accompanied by a shot of her and Navarro enjoying a quiet moment together on a lake. The image brings Night Country, like so many True Detective seasons before it, back one last time to the relationship at the heart of its story. Even more importantly, the season’s ending proves that even the darkest periods of one’s life can be survived, so long as they’re willing to truly face both themself and their past.

True Detective: Night Country episodes 1-6 are streaming now on Max.

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