True Detective - S04E02 - Night Country: Part 2

[00:00:00] Welcome to the True Detective podcast where the lore hounds your guides to the weirdness

[00:00:21] of the long night. I'm David.

[00:00:23] I'm Jon and this is our coverage for this thing. It's really cool. It's interactive. I could see this being officially from HBO. It's that good. It's kind of fun. I'm nerding out.

[00:01:40] I have a good time with it.

[00:01:42] I can tell.

[00:01:43] Well, if you want some more information

[00:01:45] about our Patreon or our upcoming programming schedule, opposing questions to more answers that we don't have. So I really felt that certain key details were paid off and that was really good. So that feels satisfying as a viewer, just like, Hey, we're moving. Like there's, there's progress here. Uh, I'm really impressed by the efficiency of the storytelling overall, the world building, the way that they trust the audience to just get it.

[00:03:05] Like we don't on a regular basis. Interesting. They were able just to pick up and go and start filming. But anyway, it feels like I imagine Alaska would feel like.

[00:04:20] And that's really, that can be a really hard thing to pull off.

[00:04:24] And so I just really appreciating all of that production detail.

[00:05:22] Um, Callie Reese is, is amazing. I can't believe that this is like a, her first big show like this.

[00:05:27] Yeah.

[00:05:27] Yeah.

[00:05:28] Good for her.

[00:05:28] Yeah.

[00:05:29] Uh, John Hawks is amazing.

[00:05:32] Uh, as prior, uh, his, his, well, his in show, or I'm sorry, not, I'm not

[00:05:39] thinking about his in show son, but I was thinking about Fiona Shaw.

[00:05:42] She's great.

[00:05:43] She brings a lot of gravity.

[00:05:44] Eccleston, right?

[00:05:46] You know, he's showing up.

[00:05:47] Eccleston.

[00:05:47] I did not recognize for.

[00:06:43] You walk into a cafe and a bunch of people are sitting around and you're like, is this lunch or is this after work drinks?

[00:06:47] I don't know what's going on here.

[00:06:49] So it really has a nice disorienting effect on the whole development of the plot.

[00:06:57] I love how the music is being used,

[00:06:59] especially the diagenic music.

[00:07:00] That's music that you hear in world.

[00:07:02] So if somebody is listening to the radio in their truck or something like that,

[00:07:06] and then we pan back out and it's also, I'm like really excited because I can't wait for people to see certain things or like, I've seen a couple times where people are spot on about something and I just want to shout, yes, you got it right. But we can't. It would be rude, even if it were legally allowed, right? I wouldn't want to do that anyway. But it's interesting to see the theories that are out there. There are some good ones. There that the bigger wins feel earned. Yeah. And I hope that they do that in this season. And it feels like after episode two, I feel like that. I agree, I agree. I was telling you that I was much happier

[00:09:41] with this episode than the last episode.

[00:09:42] Yes.

[00:09:43] Lot of world building in one to on-rampus,

[00:09:46] but she's now confidently moving us forward. You know, weaving it in a little bit. But we'll talk about it when we get there, but they are major hooks. And I don't I'm I'm so far, I don't feel put off by any of them. They seem to be reasonably appropriate. Cool. What about you? I thought it was great. I thought that it was, you know, the first episode, I think I expressed to you,

[00:11:02] I'm I'm a little nervous that the show isn't for me kind of thing.

[00:11:06] I don't usually pick up shows like this. It was making me ask, what is happening? What is this person doing? What did this, what happened here? Where is this? All these factual questions. What a good mystery box makes you do is ask why. And that is what this episode made me do.

[00:12:20] This episode gave me a lot of factual answers and not a lot of reasoning answers, not a

[00:12:26] lot of analytical answers. was a punch. It was amazing. It really braced me and I was, it answered and opened up like we've been talking about. It just, it collapsed down a whole bunch of things and then suddenly the world became much bigger than we could have possibly imagined. And that's a really great hallmark of noir end of this episode gave me chills because it did just that. It took the world and we were like, oh, we can understand this world. Great, it's all working out. And then it flipped it inside out like some weird origami art thing. And it suddenly became an entirely different thing. And that was exciting and exhilarating.

[00:15:02] Yeah.

[00:15:04] Okay, I'm done monologuing.

[00:15:06] Cool. And they have a host, Alice, I'm going to pronounce her middle name incorrectly, Konik, I think it is how it's pronounced, Glen. And she's a member of the Alaskan Indigenous community and is a podcaster already. So I just want to highlight the fact that HBO did the right work.

[00:16:20] They went out, they found somebody who's qualified,

[00:16:23] both culturally and from a perspective and a point of view, staff. Navarro and Rose talk and Angie asserts that the scientists' bodies are tied to the Annie K case. Navarro stumbles on the folded clothing of the missing men. Not all of the frozen men are dead. This was terrifying. I don't know what you thought at the end of

[00:17:41] the scene. It freaked me the hell out.

[00:17:43] That freaked me out too. I was like, ah, I was glad I was wearing headphones when I watched this. And it was a really great needle drop too, because we went from the scream straight into the Billie Eilish song. And it really, you know, I've talked about this before, especially when we were covering Andor back in the day, where you can use the energy coming out of one scene to push you

[00:19:04] forward into another scene.

[00:19:05] Yeah. I'm in, I'm in. That's a good name for it. As good a name as any. That's right. I believe Issa Lopez actually coined that, or somebody on set coined it, and then it carried over and then became part of the script. I believe that's the right, I could be wrong. But about burnt corneas, ruptured eardrums, obviously they're shrieking in horror, has escaped, we know by the end of this. Right. Or perhaps committed these atrocities. And what's weird and interesting is, I think Navarro says later that it's not even there, or maybe it was Danvers, we'll get to that scene, that it's not even, doesn't even seem to be like

[00:21:41] their clothes or it's not a complete set of clothing

[00:21:44] for all of them.

[00:21:45] Right, yeah, they're and more of the clues or we'll see certain scenes that have been filmed or stuff like that, so. Yeah, Westworld kind of had that too.

[00:23:01] And I liked that.

[00:23:02] Totally.

[00:23:03] But also like, I don't want to figure it out

[00:23:04] before we get there because I want to be surprised. So the first up is Danvers and the school teacher Bryce. So Danvers talks on the phone with a nurse about the status of the living guy. And then she walks into a class at the local high school where she dismisses the students so that she can talk to Bryce, the local geology teacher, about what the Salal Research Station was up to.

[00:24:23] So interesting, you know, Leslie Knope being a steamroller and her friends all love her because she's so sweet and she'd do anything for them, but she is a steamroller and she like drags people into anything that she's doing. I feel like Danvers is that without the sweetness.

[00:25:43] Danvers wouldn't do anything for you. No sweetener in that cup of coffee, absolutely not.

[00:25:45] Danvers will steamroll you, but if you need your interesting. And not unlike Eccleston, she obviously consumed Bryce pretty well. I mean, this guy seems like a pretty, you know, he's a, you know, the stereotypical frustrated high school teacher, right? Yep. But she walks into the room and he's recoiling in fear.

[00:27:05] Not fear, that's maybe that's not the a microorganism that could potentially stop cellular decay, among other things. So this is one of the major lines of inquiry that the Reddit detectives are working on, which is, you

[00:28:24] know, did one of these ice core samples or the organism that they were working At a certain point, I'm waiting for Christopher Eccleston to put on a leather jacket and whip out a sonic screwdriver and be like, stop drilling into the earth. You're going to cause a problem. There's aliens down there. He's putting on his Northern English accent and he's back as the doctor. Exactly. Perfect. A great way to end the season. That's the twist. I just saw that. Exactly. You did. All right. So this scene was then sort of combined and intertwined with

[00:30:42] all around that's so spooky to me. And that is one of the things that most interests

[00:30:45] is interests me about this season so far.

[00:30:47] Like, sure, I want to know how the people died in the in the

[00:30:51] corpse of gold, but I don't know.

[00:30:52] I'm kind of more interested in Rosen Travis so far.

[00:30:55] Uh huh.

[00:30:58] Did you pick up on any of the details of Travis himself?

[00:31:02] Did any of those details stick?

[00:31:06] Um, not really, but I see that you have it

[00:32:06] already know, or if you do know, go back and binge watch season one again for the 50th time. But yeah, it's a pretty big connection here.

[00:32:09] Cool.

[00:32:12] Interesting that the Rose and Travis were just buddies of various types. They were close

[00:32:19] friends but not married. That sort of tracks, the fabric is tearing. So we have the three kinds of dead, and I 100% agree, this is a central mechanism of this plot.

[00:33:43] And I think it's really important that we hold onto these.

[00:33:46] The ones who miss you,

[00:34:43] I love Navarro saying, how do you stay okay? And she just takes a big long drag on her split.

[00:34:46] In a very green manner.

[00:34:51] Yes.

[00:34:53] And very importantly, don't confuse the spirit world

[00:34:55] with mental health issues.

[00:34:57] I think this is a really key point.

[00:34:59] And this goes back into what Jules,

[00:35:03] Navarro's sister is dealing with, right?

[00:35:06] There's obviously some sort of mental health concerns there. 48 hours. Ted Corisaro, it took me so long to figure out that this was Christopher Eccleston because the voice is just so different. I don't know if it's that his accent as he's from northern England. And I don't know if his northern English accent makes

[00:36:20] his voice sound a little bit higher.

[00:36:23] And I think in general, British accents

[00:36:25] end up sounding a little higher in tone than American accents. please. No. It's the same thing as with Navarro and. No. And. Yeah. So, here's my, this is my head cannon on this, if you will. Okay. Allow me. State troopers are state troopers and I've heard some conversation too about the relationship between the state troopers and this law enforcement agency and some people were saying, oh, she got

[00:37:43] busted down to state trooper. Typically, being a state trooper like that. And that would be the jurisdiction of that police force would be for that municipality or area. I think what they've done is they've created a fictional force that's a little bit more regional in scale, more like a sheriff's structure, or maybe a little bit more like the UK, where if you're a member of the force, you're a member of the force, and it's just, you know, you're at that office or this office, you know, you're either at the downtown London

[00:39:03] Met office, or you're out in, you know, Lincoln organization, this is her jurisdiction, this is her territory. And she's like a captain of a ship where Corosso is maybe an admiral, right? Right back in. You're gonna get write-ins if you don't get this right. I know, I'm gonna get it right, Corisaro.

[00:40:21] Corisaro's like an admiral back in the way back, right?

[00:40:24] And he's got nominally authority over her, He didn't even want to argue it. He's like, she knows the law. She's not making that up. She cited chapter and verse. It was perfect. And she went straight to it. A reading from the book of APB. APB, yeah. It was brilliant. And I think that all goes back into the point that we are establishing that Danvers is competent.

[00:41:42] She's a competent investigator.

[00:41:43] She's competent law enforcement.

[00:41:45] She's in the sense edge. I totally agree. I totally agree. And so, I think what part of what we learn throughout the course of this episode in different parts and pieces is that she was promoted, transferred to this location. Hank wears captain's bars.

[00:43:06] So, was he next in line? Did she take his think that's, yeah, it's a small complex character and I love it. I love the dimensionality that they're giving us. Okay, so we cut scene to the town ice rink where we meet Kate McKittrick. She's somehow a big wig at the Silver Sky Mine. Liz requires the use of the rink. And then the Corpsicle is brought through the center

[00:45:40] of town, all set to Little Saint Nick by the Beach Boys.

[00:45:44] And then Navarro shows up.

[00:45:47] Big scene, lots going on. said one, we learned that Navarro had crossed paths with Kate McKittrick. And so when Danvers is talking to the younger prior, she says, oh, you know, she started bothering mine people when she was investigating any case case, even Kate McKittrick, and young Peter was like, whoa, you know, like,

[00:47:03] that's, that's not good. So was like, oh, you came to watch me play. She was like, no, I didn't. She's like, where's that damn kids part, right? Again, completely withholding. She could have just been like, oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so busy with this case, but I hope you did great.

[00:48:23] Anything, or maybe just go watch her play.

[00:48:26] Even if she couldn't, uh, at the site. I think this is the scene where we see the spiral design. I did. I have the spiral design and I can't remember now, which, um, yeah, we talked about it earlier, but yeah, we, we got that here. And then, um, we get, uh, prior who is the, you know, uh, young, clever guy, he figures out how to unlock the phone. I thought that was pretty good. Um, and then more Danvers and, and

[00:49:41] Navarro friction, right? So we're deepening that's fine, ask that. Don't ask what he did. Right. All right, Navarro checks in with Ryan at Kavik's Bar, or Kavik's Burger Joint, sorry. We get some more backstory about the mine and we meet Chuck, who seems to know Clark, and a fight breaks out about the impacts of the mine

[00:51:01] on the local environment.

[00:51:04] So Kavik apparently means Wolverine.

[00:52:03] together or not working together, but something's happening because of the two are here. But there's a lot of theories about what's happening with the mine and what the mine is

[00:52:07] doing to the environment.

[00:52:08] I think that's interesting too because the show is dealing with all real world circumstances,

[00:52:13] but none of them are... They're not pushing that forward in a way that, hey, this show

[00:52:18] is just an allegory for what's really happening to the earth.

[00:52:21] No, it's just a story.

[00:52:24] And then here are real world things that are happening. So nice little tease to bring his character forward. Moseley is the new Mark Lee. There you go. I'm calling it. There you go. Back to the ice rink, Danvers and Peter Pryor work the case in Liz School's Peter in the ways of the Sherlock. We've got the last Airbender coming up. Are we gonna have the last Sherlock?

[00:53:40] Is that something that we can do?

[00:53:41] Oh my God.

[00:53:42] So I actually was not bothered by the scene.

[00:53:44] I thought it dragged on a little bit.

[00:53:46] Okay.

[00:53:46] But overall I thought it was a much better this whole episode, I've got pictures of them all up on the detective's notebook. There's, I'll call them out in some other scenes, but we've got polar bear iconography all over the place. So where they're going with that, it's hard to tell at this stage, you know, and obviously we had a couple polar bears in the last one. They talked about paradoxical undressing, which is a thing.

[00:55:04] And it's in the later question. Why fold them, right? Not just leave them in a pile or leave them on the people. Right, exactly. Because yeah, why, what happened here? Well, and then like Peter does, he asks the question, why would you run out on the ice

[00:56:25] without your shoes on, right?

[00:56:26] Was that the question?

[00:56:27] Yeah. and deepening the relationship with Kavik and Navarro. There's been some talk around the internets about the sex scene that Kavik and Navarro had and whether, you know, Navarro was inappropriate in some way in how she was sort of managing Kavik during her relationship.

[00:57:43] Yeah, I think that certainly,

[00:57:45] at least reasonable to other later on. Yeah. So. Yeah. It's, it's strange. It's strange, but yeah, you know, we don't know the boundaries that they've set up. Right. I guess I would say we're jumping into this relationship in the middle.

[00:59:03] And, um, she did steal his toothbrush.

[01:00:25] SpongeBob is the king in yellow. That. They couldn't clean his room. Um, uh, Bill, the delivery driver, Sean, I guess fully naked and saw the tattoo. That's how we get the tattoo. So yeah. So this is all just a standard detective, um, moving the plot forward. I do like, uh, Big Lie. No, it's the Mandela Effect. The Mandela Effect. That's what they call it. I don't know that one actually. It occurs when a large group of people believe an event occurred when it did not. That actually could be something that's going on in this show as well.

[01:01:43] I'm going to read in the logo. Interesting. And corn and fruit of the loom denies to this day that there was ever a cornucopia in the logo.

[01:03:00] OK. Now, other people have gone down the rabbit hole

[01:03:04] and like even gone to the U.S.

[01:03:05] Copyright Office and found dug up kind of evidence how did we even get here? We were talking about, oh, the fake quote. The fake quote. Right, right, right. The fake quote. Okay, we got back. We got back. Don't worry. Thank you for saving us, David. The fake quote. So maybe that's what she's playing with, right? If everyone misremembers something happening, did it happen that way?

[01:04:21] Exactly.

[01:04:22] And then what is...

[01:04:23] Okay, so this gets into this whole question with Lopez putting this false quote upfront, it's intentionally messing with us in this same Mandela Effect way, I think. It's having us see things or relate to things that may or may not be there in particular desired effects. Does that make sense?

[01:05:42] Yeah, I buy it, what is time and how do we tell stories in time, backwards and forwards and forwards and backwards? Right. So are these, is this just memory? Is this just something happening in her mind or is there some kind of effect of Ennis happening, bleeding in, you know? Because I know you flagged as a

[01:07:00] true detective hallmark unseen for evil forces affecting the world. Right. Mm-hmm. I think this is

[01:08:05] So again, we saw Moseley outside the mind, so we got that.

[01:08:10] And I've got a bunch of notes here. There's a lot going on here.

[01:08:13] Can I just want to go back to Navarro really quick,

[01:08:15] singing and smiling?

[01:08:17] The idea of both these characters, Danvers and Navarro,

[01:08:24] being complex.

[01:08:26] And this is the uniform as a means

[01:09:42] to an end questions. Right.

[01:11:00] Okay.

[01:11:01] Major season one tie-in.

[01:11:03] Okay. for all intensive purposes. What did you make of Reese's or Navarro's comment to him at the end about he didn't disapprove of Annie's murder, that he was kind of maybe glad

[01:12:21] that she was murdered like that?

[01:12:25] That's pretty awful.

[01:12:27] What am I supposed to think about that? Yeah. So I don't remember the exact number, but people were doing TikToks about how dozens, I think, of indigenous women went missing in the same period and were never brought on television or anything. Right. There was no effort to find them or figure out what happened to them. And I think that's a big point that the show might be trying to them, and they should get justice, not to say that they shouldn't get justice, but it's just a shame that the stops don't come out for people who call it a lot of the time. The allocation of justice is out of balance here. Sure, it's uneven, yep. It's uneven. And I think that's what Reese, who's a known activist as well, in this scene,

[01:15:00] I felt like she wasn't only playing the character Navarro

[01:15:03] and talking to Mosley in this way,

[01:15:06] but she was saying to us in the audience Lina while listening to I Love You Love You by Johnny Cash. And then he finds that the NEK file box is missing. So I guess I was wrong. I think, I think you asked me last time, do you think he knew that his son took it?

[01:16:23] And I guess I was wrong cause I thought, I thought no, but I guess,

[01:16:24] I guess he did get it over on him the first time. I thought you said yes. I said no, I thought.

[01:16:28]