True Detective: Night Country review: Jodie Foster revives HBO's flagging franchise

In the sixth and final episode of True Detective season 4, a suspect is taped to a chair for questioning by Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis). The two Alaska detectives want information about the murder of an Indigenous activist named Annie K. (Nivi Pedersen), but the subject of their interrogation — disheveled and distraught to the point of hysteria — is speaking in riddles. “Time is a flat circle,” wails the potential perp. “And we are all stuck in it!”

It's one of many times Night Country makes dutiful — and unnecessary — references to the first season of Nic Pizzolato’s HBO crime noir, which reinvigorated the genre when it debuted in 2014 and made TV safe for movie stars. Creator Issa López (Tigers Are Not Afraid) originally pitched Night Country as a stand-alone drama, but HBO saw an opportunity to revive their languishing Detective franchise with this icy murder mystery. (Pre-existing IP is a flat circle, and Warner Bros. Discovery, like most studios, is stuck in it.) Melding Night Country with True Detective doesn’t harm López’s story, though I’m not convinced it needed the quote-unquote help. Strip away the spooky atmospheric embellishments and obligatory Easter eggs, and the series is still a shrewd and engrossing saga about community, generational trauma, industrialization, and how perilous it can be to underestimate women.

The long polar night has just begun in Ennis, Alaska when a group of eight male scientists goes missing from the Tsalal Artic Research Center. A grotesque piece of evidence left at the scene convinces Alaska State Trooper Evangeline Navarro that the case is related to the unsolved murder of Annie K., a cold case she simply cannot shake. Alas, the only way she can pursue her theory is by working with Ennis’ irascible Chief of Police Liz Danvers, and the women can barely tolerate each other due to a mysterious professional falling out some years ago. But as the evidence mounts connecting Annie to the scientists, Danvers and Navarro reluctantly join forces to find the truth, despite skepticism and pushback from their Y-chromosomal colleagues Captain Ted Connelly (Christopher Eccleston) and Officer Hank Prior (John Hawkes).

Night Country makes it clear from the outset that men are not the ones who get things done in Ennis. When she first walks into the Tsalal station crime scene, Danvers immediately begins detective-ing circles around Hank, who sees an abandoned sandwich on the kitchen counter and notes that the lunch meat looks fresh. “The mayo’s like syrup,” Danvers counters. “Mayo doesn’t go runny until a couple days out of the fridge… The things you learn when your kid leaves their lunch in the backseat of the car.” Hank’s son, Peter (Finn Bennett), is on the force, too, but he takes his (copious) orders from Danvers at all hours of the endless night. In our first introduction to Trooper Navarro, she subdues a burly, abusive drunk with comically little effort. And the most powerful person in town is Kate McKitterick (Dervla Kirwan), head of the Silver Sky mining company, which employs half of Ennis even as it spills toxins into their land and water.

Though the extended darkness isn’t exactly integral to the story, it enhances the impression of Ennis as a place where weird stuff just kind of happens, man. “I think the world is getting old, and Ennis is where the fabric of all things is coming apart at the seams,” muses Rose Aguineau (Fiona Shaw), a local eccentric who sees dead people and is handy with an ice ax. Adds the delivery driver who reported the scientists missing, “You see people who are gone sometimes. It’s a long f---ing night. Even the dead get bored.” Voices seem to whisper on the frigid winter winds, and that creepy spiral symbol, which fans may remember from season 1, keeps popping up in the detectives’ investigation. Its meaning is elusive, but Rose warns Navarro that the mark is “older than Ennis itself.”

Navarro is a member of Ennis’ large Iñupiaq community, and she suspects something otherworldly might have lured the missing scientists to their fate. Danvers rejects such theories, and the two engage in several patented True Detective drive-and-talk debates. “There’s no magic!” scoffs Danvers. “There’s a real explanation for this.”

It’s a familiar dynamic, and on paper, the character of Danvers is familiar to the point of predictability: An abrasive, sarcastic workaholic whose misanthropy masks the pain of a tragic loss, and a lonely, demanding boss who expects everyone around her — especially poor, hapless Peter — to put The Job before everything else. But there is a kind of magic in Foster’s performance; the actress is having so much fun as this DGAF gadfly that she transforms Danvers from a potential cliché into a mesmerizing and often-hilarious antihero. There’s a running joke about Liz’s multiple affairs with the married men of Ennis, and Foster delivers her character’s most obnoxious dialogue with gleeful relish (“I’m sorry Bill’s such a terrible lay. You have my sympathies!”). Even as she brings legitimate comic relief to the (literally) dark proceedings, the actress ensures that Danvers’ volatility remains rooted in the anger that cleaves so stubbornly to grief.

Foster is such a force, Night Country suffers when she’s not screen, and even at just six episodes, the story sometimes drags. Reis brings a transfixing intensity to Navarro, but the ongoing subplot about her sister, Julia (Aka Niviâna), who has inherited their mother’s mental health issues, is somewhat stagnant. An attempt to explore Peter’s home life feels similarly repetitive, and his wife, Kayla (Anna Lambe), is largely reduced to a one-note, “you work too much!” nag.

The True Detective touches, namely the mysterious spiral, don’t enhance the story. That symbol — which is inserted in several scenes as a shocking-reveal cliffhanger of sorts — is kinda-sorta explained in a variety of ways, none of which change our understanding of what happened to Annie and the scientists. At the risk of making more work for already overloaded TV viewers, it’s worth noting that Night Country benefits from a second viewing, especially since the “who” in the “whodunnit” will almost certainly come as a surprise. (No spoilers, but the reveal is viscerally satisfying.)

The reality is that Night Country probably wouldn’t have been made without HBO insisting on affixing True Detective to the title, and it’s unlikely the network could have attracted a two-time Oscar winner like Foster to co-star in the project without linking it to the celebrated franchise. That's the biz. The victory here, I suppose, is that it did get made, allowing Issa López — already a successful, well-respected writer and filmmaker in her native Mexico — to show the American TV industry what she can do. Perhaps the next time she has a compelling show to pitch, her name will be selling point enough. Grade: B

True Detective: Night Country premieres Sunday, Jan. 14, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO and Max.

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