(Warning: this article contains spoilers about season four of HBO’s True Detective)

“For we do not know what beasts the night dreams when its hours grow too long for even God to be awake.”

– Hildred Castaigne

Ten years ago, Nic Pizzolatto crafted one of the finest works of contemporary American fiction, bringing together the laconic drawl of Matthew McConaughey, the scumbag charm of Woody Harrelson, and the creeping, humid dread of the Louisiana bayou to create a whole infinitely better than the sum of its parts. That, of course, was the first season of HBO’s “True Detective,” a TV show that drew from H.P. Lovecraft, Thomas Ligotti, and Townes Van Zandt in equal measure. Over the span of several decades, Pizzolatto unfurled the story of kidnapped children, drug dealing biker gangs, occult ceremonies, and corruption that went to the highest echelons of government, all set against the interplay between two detectives and their dysfunctional personal lives. Nothing like it has ever been created since – not even by Pizzolatto himself, who was seemingly unable to recapture the lightning in a bottle he’d harnessed with the McConaughey/Harrelson team up.

The second season of “True Detective,” focusing on political corruption and scandal in California’s industrial sector, drew mixed reviews from critics. The plot was too entangled, the characters less compelling, and the overall atmosphere of the show didn’t hold up to the high bar Pizzolatto had set for himself with the first season’s success. It improves significantly, in my experience, upon a rewatch – but even standout performances by Vince Vaughn and Colin Farrell don’t evoke the same glee as watching Matt and Woody go to work.

Season three was more of a return to form, starring Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff, featuring the decades long investigation of a missing-persons case. Set in Arkansas, season three featured many of the elements that had been hallmarks of Pizzolatto’s debut – a case gone cold, a story told over several decades, interpersonal drama between two detectives, and links to the occult. While it didn’t exactly recapture what made season one so impeccable, it got pretty close.

Now, five years after the third season’s finale, True Detective is back, and the setting has moved from Louisiana, to industrial California, to backwoods Arkansas – to the perpetual dark of Alaska’s North Slope. Written and directed by Issa Lopez, the latest season (titled “Night Country”) features Jodie Foster and Kali Reis as the latest iteration of the detective duo.

“Night Country” opens with a herd of caribou on the tundra, watched from a distance by a Native man in a parka, shouldering a bolt action hunting rifle. The sun is going down, 150 miles north of the Arctic circle, and we’re informed that it’s December 17. As the man raises his gun to shoot, something spooks the herd in a major way, and they take off towards a cliff.

What’s scared them, we don’t find out, because the camera jumps to the James-Bond-villain headquarters of the Tsalal Arctic Research Station, where a motley crew of scientists are going about their day. “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” is on the television, and just as the Beatles’ “Twist and Shout” is about to play during the Chicago parade scene, one of the scientists stands bolt upright, begins to seize and twitch, and whispers “She is awake.” The lights in the facility flicker and go black, and we are left to wonder.

Three days later, a trucker, listening to reggae, pulls up to the facility and grumpily asks for some help unloading goods for the lab team. “Twist and Shout” is still playing, echoing eerily throughout the deserted lab. An open can of Lone Star beer, a reference to McConaughey’s character’s favorite drink in season one, sits abandoned on the table. (After I watched the first season, I tried to find Lone Star in several Anchorage liquor stores. No luck). Still looking for the science team, the trucker nervously calls out, but no one’s there. The only thing left, the camera pans down to show us, is a severed human tongue on the floor.

The opening credits (which kick in just after the tongue reveal) are set to Billie Eilish’s “Bury A Friend,” and the images which float by on the screen are equally in line with the song’s creepy, morose tone – a one-eyed polar bear, a caribou skull. In seasons past, the songs from the opening credit sequences, from artists like Leonard Cohen and The Handsome Family, have become synonymous with the show itself. If you’ve seen season one or two, odds are the first thing you start whistling is the first few bars from THF’s “Far From Any Road,” or Cohen’s “Nevermind.” “Bury A Friend,” it seems, is destined for that same treatment, if this season is equally successful.

We are first introduced to Kali Reis’s Evangeline Navarro, a former soldier and current detective with the State Troopers, handling an assault case at a local seafood packing plant in Ennis, Alaska. (The show gets the Troopers emblem and insignia exactly right, as far as I could tell, which is just one way that “Night Country” succeeds at being accurate to its setting). Navarro holds her own against a drunk who’s attacked a woman working at the plant, pinning him to the ground with a wrestling move, and gets a call from one of her superiors. The disappearance of the lab scientists is now news.

At the Tsalal Station are a few detectives with the local police: Jodie Foster’s Liz Danvers, “Deadwood” alumnus John Hawkes’ Hank Prior, and Prior’s son Peter. Hank explains that the scientists were drilling into the Arctic ice, getting core samples, and doing studies on the “origins of life itself.” Scrawled on a lab whiteboard, covering some equations, are the words “We Are All Dead,” which doesn’t imply much hope for the science team. Danvers determines, based on repetitive marks on the severed tongue from licking the coarse fibers of a fishing net while mending it, that it belongs to an Native woman. This seems to remind Navarro of something – what, we aren’t yet sure. The tongue, meanwhile, needs to be sent to a lab in Anchorage. (That’s where I live!)

Examining the station for clues, Danvers idly thumbs through a copy of Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” laying one of the scientists’ beds. I thought it might have been a reference to man’s innate cruelty and lust for violence, a signature theme of the “True Detective” series’ generally grim view on mankind. A copy of John Carpenter’s “The Thing” on VHS is also readily visible next to the TV (which is still playing “Ferris Bueller” before Danvers turns it off) – another story of polar researchers in a remote research base in a different kind of trouble.

Away from the lab, skinning out what looks to be a wolf, an old woman at the edge of the tundra is disturbed to see a man, dressed lightly, standing a few paces away from her house. One of our missing scientists?

A tanker truck drives into Ennis (“Welcome to the End of The World,” the road sign reads) and we get our first real look at the town, which is sort of an amalgamation of Nome, Kotzebue, and Barrow, with a little Deadhorse and Dutch Harbor thrown in for good measure – a decently sized Bush Alaska town with a large mining operation as its industrial center.

Danvers and Navarro have a heated conversation about the tongue, in which Navarro insists it’s the missing tongue from a cold case from six years ago, involving an Inupiat woman named Anne Kowtok. Danvers isn’t sure.

Called away on a emergency, Danvers is forced to pick up her adolescent stepdaughter from school, where she’s gotten in trouble for filming a sex tape with one of her classmates. While scolding her, Danvers narrowly avoids getting t-boned by a drunk driver in a 90s Toyota RAV4, who hits a light pole instead. As she gets out to cuff the driver, she has a flashback, and we’re shown a glimpse of her in another car accident, years ago. The moment passes, and Danvers detains Stacy Chalmers, the driver, who’s upset that one of her children refuses to talk to her.

Across town, Navarro talks to Ryan, the brother of Anne Kowtok, who works at the mine in Ennis. She wants to know if Anne ever had any connection with the lab, and Ryan says she didn’t. He also says that the water in town has gone bad, “about three days ago,” which seems to line up with the disappearance of the scientists. Anne, Ryan reminisces, was an outspoken activist against the construction of the mine – which made her a fair number of enemies in town. Ryan asks if Navarro believes in God, to which she responds in the affirmative. “Must be nice,” he says. “Knowing we’re not alone.”

“We’re alone,” she responds. “God too.”

Meanwhile, Peter’s toddler son is drawing strange things in crayon – “local legends,” his Native mother explains. (A sure way to up the creepy factor in any thriller or horror series is to have a kid start drawing weird shit. Works every time). Peter is interrupted mid-coitus by Danvers, asking him to get the case files on Anne Kowtok from his father, who moved them to his house after a flood in the police station.

The wolf-skinning old woman from earlier is now following the stranger out into a snowstorm, guided only by a flashlight.

Back at Danvers’ house, she’s explaining the possible connection between the Tsalal disappearances and Anne’s murder, which happened six years ago. Kowtok was stabbed 32 times with an unknown object, and dumped at the edge of town – and her tongue was removed. It’s revealed that Navarro was the officer who investigated the murder, and her detective work made her unpopular with the mine workers, forcing her off the case – hence her obsession with finding the killer.

“Ennis killed Annie,” Danvers opines. “This fucking place. No killer was ever going to be found.”

After a quick rendezvous with her boyfriend in town, Navarro heads to the liquor store, and overhears the seafood plant drunk from earlier plotting to get even with the woman he assaulted. By way of payback, she dumps a bottle of Bailey’s into his gas tank and walks away, chuckling.

In the night, Danvers is awoken by a disembodied child’s voice saying “She’s awake,” which was the same line from the beginning of the episode before the scientists went AWOL. Simultaneously, Navarro hears the same phrase before her car radio shuts down, and a one-eyed polar bear crosses her path and growls at her. Whether this is real or some kind of hallucination isn’t clear, but someone, obviously, is awake. (I’ll be real here – the CGI on some of these Arctic animals is less than stellar; think PS3 graphics, but it’s easy enough to ignore).

Danvers starts investigating the disappearances in earnest. Pictures are printed, charts are drawn, and at one point, the shot of her from overhead shows the evidence laid out in a large spiral. Season one revolved around the significance of spirals and time being a “flat circle,” and this is another callback to McConaughey’s obsessive detective work as Louisiana State Detective Rust Cohle. Towards the end of her research, Danvers matches up a jacket that one of the scientists is wearing in a publicity snapshot, to a jacket that Annie has on in another picture. There’s at least some kind of tangible connection.

Far out into the tundra, the stranger and the old woman have stopped. Convulsing in a weird, fluid dance, he points, and the woman follows his gaze with the flashlight.

Danvers and Navarro run into each other back at the lab, and discuss Anne’s disappearance. Danvers reveals the information she’s discovered about the coat, which is absent from the station. They’re interrupted by a call from the station – “they found something on the ice.”

That something is three of the scientists frozen neck-deep in the ice, with terrified expressions on their faces, reaching for something. The old woman – Rose – found them and alerted the police. When Danvers asks how she knew where to look, Rose responds, “Travis showed me.” Travis, Navarro responds, is dead, to which Rose says, “I know.” Panning down, we see the scientists frozen together in sort of a three-person icicle.

There’s a lot of things that season four does right – the depiction of Alaska, even if the show was shot in Iceland, is really accurate in terms of the little things. Carhartt hats, Crowley Gas signs, Klim snowmobile gear stickers, the use of the word “borough” – there are tiny details that could only be gleaned from a discerning visit to this state. Obviously, some things aren’t entirely there, but that’s Hollywood. It’s nice to see a depiction of this state in media that tries to get it right.

The atmosphere and vibes are in line, so far, with the aesthetic that’s been established in past seasons of “True Detective.” The general pervasive dread that slowly creeps up as the episode progresses; the rich inner lives of each of Ennis’s characters (no matter how fucked-up they might be); the pacing of the episode, counterbalancing dialogue and interpersonal drama with bursts of well-written dialogue, expository without being hacky – it’s all there.

The underlying social message, about missing and murdered indigenous women, is something that any crime media franchise set in the North is probably going to have to address if it wants to maintain relevance. As more statistics come to light, showing that Native women are subject to higher rates of violence, any self-respecting crime writer is going to have to keep that in mind if he or she wants to write a show (or book, or movie) that claims to be grounded in reality. “True Detective” is addressing this, and doing it well, as far as I can tell.

The more overt references to the supernatural in this season are, in a way, a breach of form – but this early on, I don’t know whether the route Lopez is taking is one of straight horror or not. The first season’s cosmic horror influences, paired with some trippy visuals and oblique references to ritual sacrifice and “The King in Yellow,” were mostly explained as the ravings of methed out biker gangs and strange religious cults in the Louisiana backwoods.

Rust Cohle’s visions of flocks of birds forming into cosmic spirals were attributed to his time as a confidential undercover informant for the DEA, his brain fried by street drugs and experimental philosophy. But “Night Country,” with its depictions of one-eyed polar bears, staticky whispers, and ghosts leading the way to frozen buried scientists, may take the show into uncharted territories and deeper, creepier, waters. It remains to be seen.

Finally, “True Detective” has always been an anthology series. None of the characters from season two make an appearance in season three, and so on. But the references, however subtle, to season one in this episode (the spiral in Danvers’ detective work, for one; and the Lone Star beer, for another) may indicate a closer connection between Rust Cohle and Liz Danvers than previously thought. Incidentally, this isn’t the first time Alaska has been mentioned in the “True Detective” canon; Cohle mentions moving from Louisiana to Alaska in the latter half of season one, and having a father there named Travis. Is it the same Travis that guided Rose to the scientists frozen in ice, or is that just speculation? Once again, it remains to be seen.

The references to Alaska are always fun, and this storyline should prove to be interesting. I look forward to more interplay between Danvers and Navarro, and more of an explanation of Ennis’s relationship with the mine. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of Alaskan environmental politics make it into the show – Willow, or Pebble, or any of the large-scale resource extraction projects have given writers ample material.