‘True Detective: Night Country’ Episode 3 Recap: Thin Ice

This is what I was worried about. Three episodes in and it’s clear that barring a major, likely audience-infuriating twist at the end — gas leak, chemicals in the water, Navarro is schizophrenic like her mom and sister (I actually think this one’s semi-likely) — that True Detective: Night Country is also Ghost Country. It’s a land of magic and mystery, where the dead speak, the maimed know your name, someone in the darkness plays catch with an orange with you, and an ominous She has been awakened. It’s also a place where basically none of this is actually scary.

Plotwise, this episode advances the ball in several key respects. It sets us to wondering why, if they were so happy together, murder victim Annie K. and suspected killer Raymond Clark kept their relationship a secret. It lets us know Hank suppressed at least one important tip on the case, a friend of Anna’s who called in the relationship. It introduces us to Oliver Tagaq (Lance Karmer), former Tsalal researcher turned dangerous, gun-toting hermit. It shows that Navarro first met Annie when she showed up at her birthing center to arrest her and instead wound up helping to deliver a baby first. It reveals that for years Liz and Evangeline alike have been passing off the death of a suspect at their hands as a domestic-violence murder-suicide, though we don’t know all the details yet. It tells us that the scientists died before they were frozen in the snow, likely of fright. And it shows us the last moments of Annie K. before someone or something on the ice tears her away from her camera, screaming.

Meanwhile, in subplot-land, Evangeline’s sister Julia (Aka Niviâna) continues to struggle with her worsening schizophrenia. Qavvik, hoping to get closer to Evangeline, finds out about her horrific upbringing. Leah attends an anti-mine protest and is forced to wipe her facial markings off by Danvers, who I think sees the face of murder victim Annie K. whenever she looks at her own stepdaughter with those traditional lines on her chin, but who is also being defiantly racist about it. A local woman gives birth to a stillborn baby and Liz attends the memorial service in her home, badly shaken not only by its tenderness and sadness but by its similarity to her own plight, and finally by the revolting black water that pours out of the sink when she tries to wash her hands, an unmissable metaphor.

Unfortunately it’s going in a supernatural horror direction overall, and I think that’s a big mistake given the skill set on display here. Now I’m not gonna sit here and dispute that individual moments are creepy or gross or capable of getting a jumpscare out of you. If you got the heebie-jeebies when Lund (Þorsteinn Bachmann) sat up like the Undertaker and started talking to Evangeline like the Mouth of Sauron, I could hardly blame you. 

But the atmosphere is all wrong. This is a police procedural, a crime story, murder in a blue-collar town, one death representing the death of a way of life. That requires a shaggy, wandering tone, and a focus on fact-finding, that work at cross-purposes with the kind of relentless ratcheting-up of tension and dread a season-long horror story on television requires. 

I could get past some of this if I thought the filmmaking in general rose beyond the level of confident competence. The clumsy, pedestrian music choices knock me out of the action repeatedly, with montages set to either sub–Tom Waits gumbo or whispery women who sound like they’ve kissed by a rose on a grave. Meanwhile, the use of color, often interesting when the vast arctic vistas bathed in various glowing greens and reds and blues are on display, too frequently falls back into the workmanlike teal-and-peach palette I’d hoped cinema had left back in the Obama administration.

There’s always the acting to fall back on, though, and that remains formidable. Jodie Foster is the kind of good you barely even notice, the kind that makes you think “Oh, I guess that’s just what she’s like.” She’s adroit whether throwing her weight around for good reason, throwing her weight around for bad reasons, being a terrible and outright racist mom to her stepdaughter, being a thoughtful and patient mother figure to both Deputy Pete and any little kids who happen to toddle her way. These don’t seem like traits that are just thrown together at random in Foster’s hands; they feel like the contradictory but emotionally logical actions of a complicated, inconsistent person. The fact that she lost her kid in a drunk driving accident doesn’t help. The fact that she and Navarro appear to have provided over the murder of at least one suspect in the past — an abusive drunk who murdered his much younger teenage girlfriend — probably doesn’t help either, though it does explain their falling out.

Speaking of Navarro, very new actor Kali Reis once again spends an hour riding shotgun with Jodie Foster and seeming no more out of place on screen with her than Anthony Hopkins or Harvey Keitel were. The same can be said of Finn Bennett as Pete Prior, at least in a way; his material is less demanding and intense than Reis’s, but it comes with the additional challenge of needing his character to try and impress Danvers, not just spar with her. Come on, you’ve met Liz Danvers. Of the two characters, who do you think has a harder time getting the reaction they want out of her?

So that’s where we stand at the halfway mark. Great local color, not so great coloring. Sharp performances, dull horror. A story with an appropriately bloody heart, told for the first time in series history in a way that feels like something you could get from another show, up to and including Season 1 of this show itself.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.