It Was Like I Was Never There: ‘True Detective: Night Country’ And The Haunting Quality Of Trauma

If there’s a thing that the fourth season of True Detective, this time given the subtitle of Night Country, teaches the viewers, it’s that trauma never disappears. The season creator Issa Lopez brings new blood to the table, as the previous seasons were doused in – not as much toxic but typical – masculinity associated with those kinds of crime dramas.

When I was halfway through the second episode, I realized that I was in love with the series for the same reason that multiple other reviewers disliked it for; unlikable characters. There wasn’t a single character in this series that I could love graciously, and not feel ashamed about it, like I have done something nasty. 

There was Liz Danvers who was as kind as she was biting and a bully. There was Evangeline Navarro who had generational Bipolar mania, schizophrenia, and BPD, but also a tenderness toward battered women and Indigenous people, people she felt more connected to than her predominantly White workplace. There was Peter Prior who couldn’t seem to find happiness, his soul beaten and broken by a physically abusive, emotionally manipulative, gaslighting father.

Even when he found his wife Kayla, a beautiful yet determined young woman who wanted him to stand up for himself and preserve his personality, happiness remained as elusive as the answers that Danvers’s questions demanded from him. After years of abuse had turned Prior into a human being unable to demand his rights or express his disagreements, he got tossed around between more dominant and assertive on the show. And there was Annie Kowtok, a haunting presence that hovers above all others, searching and opening eyes, carrying the burdens and the dark secrets of Ennis, Alaska, making the endless December night even longer.

What I loved about True Detective: Night Country was how it treated difficult women like difficult human beings. There’s nothing that makes them any different than any other person. A challenging woman, Annie Kowtok falls in love with a White man, and that becomes her ultimate demise. Danvers is just a grieving mother, unable to cope with her trauma except in indulging in all the things that would numb her pain and bury her soul as she heightens her other senses. Navarro is a woman haunted by generational trauma, mental illness, and her inability to love, afraid that anything she loves would be taken away from her, and burdened by the history of the land, the natives to whom she belongs, and her daily dynamics with White people’s greed, their dismissal of her culture and her beliefs.

These women are in pain, in the infinite status of mourning with no resolution or relief in sight. They bury their traumas with denial and displacement, and they find it hard to even express their emotions to each other. They struggle with intimacy and admitting defeat or pain. Still, they carry a deep nurturing, maternal love inside them, whether it’s Evangeline with her sister Julia, Liz with her stepdaughter Leah, or many others. Jodie Foster gives an astounding performance, the way her face breaks as she feels so much for someone only to rebuff them and say something mean instead was heartbreaking but also relatable.

It’s not often that I watch a TV series handling difficult women with such sensitivity. Difficult women are shown as mythical, otherworldly cold-hearted types for whom people can have zero sympathy, or blank sheets of paper on which viewers could project whatever trauma or psychological disorder they secretly inhabit. But in True Detective: Night Country Lopez doesn’t shy away from stripping the bones bare off those women, making them vulnerable by exploiting the only mechanism they have used for survival, burying that particular vulnerability, and acting as if it was never there.

The ending could have confused some viewers and critics alike, it could have fallen short of what viewers initially anticipated or aspired to watch, but what the series lacked in tying up loose ends, it made up for in character development and plot progression. Shock factors were not probably as potent as earlier seasons, but the series was playing for kicks, it wanted to ground itself in the mystery without lingering on the big reveal at the end.

It is a haunting piece of crime drama but also an analysis of the tensions arising in modern societies, how crimes can uncover far more sinister motives, and how passion can lead to dangerous places from which there is no return.

True Detective: Night Country is now available to stream on Max. The season will be released on Blu-Ray on July 9, 2024. 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkL7cpG2UhE]