True Detective Night Country review: Jodie Foster & Co deliver one of the franchise’s best seasons

Jodie Foster plays Elizabeth Danvers, a no-nonsense detective who has been held back in the Alaskan frost as punishment for insubordination. (Screen grab/YouTube/Max)

“What are they looking for, digging that ice up?” a senior detective, played by peerless Jodie Foster, wonders out loud in a scene from the latest season of HBO’s True Detective. She is talking about a scientific expedition being carried in an icy Alaskan desert. “The origin of life?” her junior, a handsome, well-mannered man, says with boyish sincerity. “Uh..that thing,” Foster remarks with that familiar sense of exasperation. It’s just the kind of existential dejection that made the sweltering, ponderous first season of this franchise, a landmark moment in TV storytelling. A gazillion attempts since to replicate and imitate the eerie dread, grimness and internal conflict have come up short including the franchise’s own seasonal follow-ups. A decade later, under a new showrunner (Issa Lopez), the profusely poetic show re-embraces its pragmatic worldview, updates its own tropes and confidently re-installs itself as this bleak outpost of humanity sans the signs of easy redemption.

Jodie Foster plays Elizabeth Danvers, a no-nonsense detective who has been held back in the Alaskan frost as punishment for insubordination. Danvers has her own difficult alliances to deal with, which includes her sexually experimental daughter, a grumpy on-the-brink-of-retirement deputy and her former partner Navarro played commendably by Kali Reis. Danvers also has this fascinating dynamic with her young protégé, Peter (Finn Bennett), whom she trains with the unsentimental demeanour of a mother figure who wants to make sure he doesn’t become his father. Much like the iconic first season, the case at hand is a purse string, a labyrinthine mystery punctuated by fear, myth and religious symbolism that will ultimately take the shape of the detectives trying to uncork it. The mystery, obviously, is secondary to the contrasting outlooks trying to solve it.

Night country is situated in the Alaskan winter, a prolonged period of time when the sun doesn’t come up. The event that sets things into motion is the coming together of a six-year-old unsolved case that Navarro and Danvers walked away from, having resigned to lesser opinions of each other. Navarro has never not thought about it since, while Danvers has re-deployed her ability to compartmentalise to be able to stay sane. A severed tongue plops up as a fresh clue, coinciding with the discovery of a team of scientists found frozen in the snow, in what looks like a sculpted piece of staggering art. Danvers and Navarro don’t have long before the bodies thaw and handed over to a more reliable pocket of law enforcement. In some ways, Night Country dips into horror, gore and sensuality like no season before it.

Foster has obviously played disaffected, unemotional women in the past but here she is encased by discontent. Rather than address her emotional battles, Danvers would much rather take someone else’s on her plate. She is rigid, unaccommodating, problematic and behind her time. Contrary to her, Navarro is soft, vulnerable and a bit desperate to find that streak of redemption to hang onto. The two are pivots to a plot that gradually begins to circle them with as much disdain and doubt as they hold for each other. Both are imperfect, flawed, messy but just about committed to want to make the world a mystery lighter; to erase from a cold, harsh landscape a story made barbaric for its lack of an ending. Trauma repurposed as a form of dissent has been central to the world of True Detective, and here it borrows added heft through a largely female cast, visibly unburdening itself of the male gaze that has preceded this latest season.

True Detective Night Country automatically qualifies as a companion piece to the lyrical self-involvement of the first season. The one that ushered in the era of character-driven procedurals. In contrast to the warm, industrial landscape of the first season, the snow-covered terrain, the banal uniformity of it all offers the actors a dimension to reach for. They become the shades we cannot see. The show is stunningly shot – all in night-time, of course – but rarely feels upstaged by the spectacular nature of a place so blithely situated on the edge of the earth, adrift from human contact and maybe even imagination. There have been mysteries set in icy, disconnected towns before, but Night Country has the advantage of parsing it through the body and work of the actress who practically invented the naïve, on-screen female detective, some thirty years ago.

Foster is as effortlessly exceptional as you’d expect her to be in a six-episode season that in more ways than one manages to rid itself of the elegiac tone of the original. That chaff of Rust Cohle’s (Matthew Mcconaughey) balladry makes way for a more maybe suppressed form of disenchantment. After all what do people who can’t look at the sun for months, write poetry about? Our relationship with the sun is tactile, with the moon it’s figurative. It makes sense then that the women leading Night Country hardly have time for rhymes and frosty meditations. Because in between the endless night sky, the spiteful cold and the sterile land, maybe even poets can only really write about dry sensations, things like lust and adrenaline. Their source may be debatable, but their necessity beyond doubt.

True Detective Night Country is streaming on JioCinema.