‘True Detective: Night Country’ Finale Preview: Eight Crucial Questions

The running bit in True Detective: Night Country has been Liz Danvers repeatedly telling her protégé Pete Prior to ask the right questions if they’re going to solve the case. (“ASK ME QUESTIONS. QUESTION ME. ASK ME QUESTIONS. YOU WANTED TO KNOW. ASK ME THE FUCKING QUESTIONS. ASK THE QUESTIONS, PRIOR.”) Well, I’ll do my best with that. Here are eight crucial questions to ask ahead of the Night Country finale.

If Kate McKittrick and Silver Sky Mining are behind the killings, why are they so gruesome?

We are first introduced to Kate McKittrick as “mine bitch” in Episode 2, when Danvers asks McKittrick to thaw the corpsicle of naked Tsalal scientists stashed at the Ennis hockey rink (which is owned by McKittrick’s company, Silver Sky Mining). McKittrick doesn’t make many appearances beyond that until Episode 5, when she very conveniently spins the story that the root cause for the Tsalal scientists’ deaths was a “weather event.” She then tells Hank Prior to kill Ennis drifter Otis Heiss to keep him from leading Danvers and her partner, Evangeline Navarro, to Ennis’s subterranean ice caves—dubbed “night country” by the locals. It’s a bit of an awkwardly sudden reveal, but it’s still a reveal, which forces us to ask: If McKittrick is the kingpin behind all of this, why is she stabbing people—or at least ordering these stabbings—32-plus times, cutting out tongues, and stripping scientists naked in the freezing cold? Does she have an even darker side that will be revealed to us in a snappy conversation between her and Captain Connelly in the cold open of the finale?

(It just can’t be Kate McKittrick who killed all these people. We’ll get to more on this later.)

Will Pete Prior, the epitome of innocence, be able to rally after killing his own dad (and then cleaning up the body)?

It’s over, Petey. The story about you blowing a hockey game for a kid whose father just suffered a stroke is cute and all, but the knight-in-shining-armor schtick wears thin when you kill your own father and agree to dispose of his body without much hesitation.

Look at the positioning of Hank’s gun when Pete fired a bullet square into his dad’s temple at point-blank range:

Screenshots via HBO

That’s a little too quick and a bit too accurate for my taste. Yes, Hank was raising his gun to shoot Danvers minutes after shooting and killing Heiss, but convince me Pete can’t adjust the aim just a tad to rock his dad with a shoulder or even a chest shot. Is there some risk that middle-aged Hank takes either of those gunshots in stride and still shoots Danvers? Maybe! But even if he does, he’s hitting her in the hip or thigh at best with that gun positioning. I know a killer when I see one. (Hank literally said he wasn’t one, even if that’s technically no longer true.) Even if Pete was a choirboy before all of this, the soft, pillowy exterior propped up by his youth and relatable juggling of an overdemanding boss, a marriage, and a child died with Hank that night. I’m not saying the next installment of True Detective—let’s call it Day Country—will have an Episode 5 reveal that Pete is a serial killer who targets anyone that reminds him of his dad, but I’m not not saying it.

Kidding aside, the arc of Pete trying his best to not be Danvers just to end up in a worse place than she ever could be is a nice touch from the show’s creators. In the same episode in which Pete scolds Liz for covering up the William Wheeler murder, Pete in turn murders his dad and jumps at the opportunity to cover it up. Do I think this would realistically have some pretty gnarly permanent effects on my boy’s psyche beyond the occasional one-eyed polar bear flashback? Yes. Do I also think the show will tie it up a bit prettier than that to the point that killing his dad actually somehow throws him back into a healthy marriage and work-life balance? Probably.

Will Navarro survive? If so, will Mr. SpongeBob Toothbrush (Qavvik) ever have a healthy relationship?

With her haunting visions growing in frequency, I realize Navarro is getting dangerously close to following her sister’s literal path into the frozen sea. Still, I’m going to venture to guess that Eve comes out of this alive. Navarro at times feels like the true protagonist of the show, and her arc is destined for a much softer landing, one that pushes her away from continually throwing fists at the world and instead into the arms of her sweetheart, Qavvik.

The first time we see Navarro and Qavvik together is when she physically submits him into having an orgasm and subsequently steals his SpongeBob toothbrush. Not even the best couples therapist in the world will be able to handle that kind of power dynamic. Cracking this case—and finally knowing who killed Annie Kowtok—has to distance Navarro enough from her demons to pursue a healthy relationship with our boy Qavvik. (And it better! He’s a good-looking dude with a legit job in a tiny rural town. Ask Danvers how Tinder is going in Bumfuck, Alaska; I don’t think we’ve heard a notification pop up since the first couple of episodes.)

What’s the deal with the oranges and the one-eyed polar bears? Do they actually matter?

OK, this probably doesn’t fit in as the right question to ask; Danvers would not approve. We know the oranges following Navarro around throughout the series and the consistent run-ins she and Danvers have with one-eyed polar bears are both heavy-handed, inescapable symbols for our troubled duo. Surely, what they represent is infinitely more important than their potential connection to the murders of Annie Kowtok and the Tsalal scientists.

The oranges are a recurring symbol of the connection between Navarro, the living, and the dead. We don’t need anything more than the scene where Navarro throws an orange into the darkness and something dead or alive (or made-up) throws it right back.

The one-eyed polar bear stuffed animal is probably just a real-life reminder of Danvers’s son, Holden, who we know is dead due to context clues from recurring flashbacks. (But we also still don’t fully know that story … who was Holden’s dad? How did they both die? Are these the right questions, Danvers?!) However, when Navarro gets a visit from a real-life one-eyed polar bear in Episode 1, it suggests that there’s a connection between it and each of the detectives’ haunted pasts. That, and the one eye could represent that the pair might not be seeing the full picture or might be seeing only one half of the story.

I can hear Danvers screaming “WRONG QUESTION” already. But I don’t care. You can’t vehemently mix in citrus, real and stuffed one-eyed polar bears, the Carcosa spiral, a Rust Cohle family tree, and a potpourri of dead people walking around town and then expect people not to ask questions. When every inch of detail could be used as evidence in a murder case, it’s important to know whether any of this is real or not.

Where does Liz’s boy toy Ted Connelly fit into everything?

I know McKittrick has a low opinion of Connelly. She calls him a “political animal” and “weak” during her conversation with Hank right before the two form a plan to kill Heiss. But does that mean he’s completely innocent? Does he actually believe the very coincidental report that the cause of death for the Tsalal scientists was just a freak weather event? Or is McKittrick also greasing Connelly to pay him off or move him up the ladder as part of the cover-up? Navarro was pretty adamant in the closing scenes of Episode 5 that roping in Connelly would “bury” them all, but I guess it doesn’t matter to Danvers. She said the last time she and Connelly hooked up was the last time (actually this time), and her Tinder notifications are bound to heat up after she cracks the case.

How does Raymond Clark actually fit into all of this?

The leading suspect for most of the series, Raymond Clark, simply has to play a role in all of this, right? We know he’s the only living Tsalal scientist hiding in the “night country.” We also know he was the one convulsing in the opening scene of Episode 1 and who uttered the first mention of “she’s awake.” And we know that he had a “let’s get matching tattoos”–level relationship with Annie Kowtok. But when Danvers and Navarro eventually confront Clark in the caves Hank died trying to keep hidden from them, what will they learn?

My guess is Clark somehow escaped whatever killed his colleagues and has been too afraid to venture out of the caves ever since. If he was actually one of the bad guys in all of this, Clark would have run to McKittrick for protection a long time ago rather than freeze his ass off in the night country. Instead, Danvers and Navarro will find Clark in the caves scared shitless, and he’ll deliver the long-awaited “aha” moment of the series. I don’t want it to be a late-game spill of nearly all the relevant information to the case from a single source, but I think that’s what this is shaping up to be. (I blame all the time we spent chasing flat subplots!)

Have Night Country’s creators laid enough crumbs for a satisfying final twist?

OK, I’ll say it again: It can’t be McKittrick. If the series’ big reveal was actually in the penultimate episode when McKittrick and Hank talked in the car about wanting to hide the caves from Navarro and Danvers, I will riot in the streets of Ennis. We know McKittrick and Silver Sky funded the Tsalal station. We know McKittrick paid Hank to move Annie’s body and asked him to kill Heiss to help hide the cave entrance’s whereabouts. If that also means McKittrick was the ringleader in killing the scientists and Kowtok, I will be baffled in the worst way.

It just can’t happen. Someone, anyone else had to have killed them. Such an early reveal would run counter to everything True Detective diehards loved about previous seasons. That said, we must have missed something. McKittrick, Connelly, and Hank all played a part, but none of them killed anybody (outside of Heiss). They probably know who killed Kowtok and/or the scientists, but they didn’t make the order or deliver the final blow(s). There are enough loose ends (e.g., Sedna, Oliver Tagaq, Ryan Kowtok) for there to be a big reveal, but whether or not it’s satisfying comes down to whether it’s a key piece of evidence we all overlooked in the moment—like the kid’s drawing of the green-eared spaghetti monster in the first season of True Detective—or simply new information spilled out during one of the final conversations with Clark or McKittrick. (We’re all hoping for the former.)

For the final time, who done it?

It’s her. Whoever this scary woman Pete’s kid drew in the first episode is the killer. No, I’m not saying Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the sea and ruler of the underworld (though my colleague Ben Lindbergh’s deep dive into her lore is spectacular). I’m saying someone who looks like this!

Whoever killed Kowtok and/or the Tsalal scientists looked like this, which admittedly brings McKittrick into the fold again, but I’m ruling her out anyway. It could be Pete’s wife or her grandma or one of the women at the protests with Leah. I don’t know who she is exactly, but I know she’s awake.