(Gucci Mane)

You betta not lose no load

You betta not lose no load

You betta not lose no load

You betta not lose no load

(Chief Keef)

Ayy

I ain’t gonna lie, I lost the load

– “Don’t Lose No Load” by Gucci Mane & Chief Keef

I’m going to paraphrase Rust Cohle here: “Time really is a flat circle. Every bad trope we’ve ever done or will do in a TV show, we’re gonna do over and over and over again.” This is certainly true of “Night Country,” the finale of which aired on Sunday night. If you know me, you know I’ve soured on this show since the beginning – what started out with promise and intrigue turned into a showcase of mediocre writing, an hour-long struggle session; and worst of all, a weekly chore for me, the Landmine’s long-suffering TV writer.

Issa Lopez shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near another television camera. There’s a director’s jail somewhere, I’m sure of it – whether it’s in the big Warner Brothers water tower or in some abandoned studio lot on the Discovery/HBO Max studio site, or wherever they keep Walt Disney’s frozen head. There’s a spot in there with Lopez’s name on it – and if there isn’t, there ought to be.

They keep all the bad directors there, the ones who make shitty one-off miniseries, the ones who direct forgettable musician biopics, the guy who made that awful Pepsi commercial with Kendall Jenner. They lock them all up in there, force them to subsist on Doordashed In’n Out or Erewhon or Gwyneth Paltrow’s line of health foods, and make them watch their directorial failures on loop until they repent of their sins. Very few do. But I’m getting ahead of myself, so furious am I with the absolute destruction of a once-incredible franchise.

Danvers and Navarro, when last we left them, were heading to the ice caves, and episode six starts off with them breaking in. (It’s worth noting that I couldn’t see shit for half this scene, until they turn the lights on. The lighting in the caves is horrendous.) Navarro, guided by whispers in her head, squeezes through a tunnel and finds that the way forward is blocked – until she and Danvers fall through the floor and spot Clark, the missing Tsalal scientist. Following him through the cave, they find an underground lab, with machines and equipment and ice core samples – and a ladder leading up to (what else?) the Tsalal lab! The cave system leads directly to the lab (but it seems like that would have shown up on the cave map that Danvers and Navarro were looking at with Otis in the last episode.)

Clark gets the drop on both detectives, but Navarro manages to overpower him and knock him out. Tying him to a chair, Danvers and Navarro interrogate him and force him to watch the video of Annie’s death – at which point he confesses everything. The lab was studying microorganisms in the permafrost, and the mine’s pollution melted the permafrost and made it easier for the lab to extract DNA samples of the organism that Clark says would “save the world.” Tsalal faked toxicity reports and encouraged the mine to keep polluting to make their job easier, but Annie (who was dating Clark) discovered the evidence. Enraged, she destroyed the ice lab, and the scientists stabbed her with a screwdriver in an act of revenge. Clark, seeing how much pain she was in, put her out of her misery, and called the mine, who sent Hank Prior to remove the body. The scientists didn’t remove her tongue, however – and neither did Hank, which leaves another mystery to be solved. (It never is – just saving you the time.)

(It’s worth pointing out here that this entire subplot of how Annie got killed is a direct ripoff of the 2017 Taylor Sheridan film “Wind River” – a much better written, acted, and directed film that manages to be a tight little crime thriller and also address the plight of missing and murdered indigenous women at the same time, while cutting out five hours of slop. In “Wind River,” a Native woman is killed by a group of oil workers, and her frozen body is found in town – only to be discovered by an FBI agent. If you haven’t seen it, it’s an impeccable film, and you’d be better served watching that than sitting through this, hoping for some kind of closure. The Alaska Landmine officially endorses “Wind River” as a Good-Ass Movie where the villains get theirs at the end.)

In a conversation out in the hall, Danvers and Navarro discuss killing Clark (never mind that he’s the ONLY FUCKING WITNESS to the crime they’ve been trying to solve for this entire show!) They don’t, in a really stunning piece of police decision making.

Clark then says that Annie killed the scientists – claiming that he kept seeing her ghost, and that she was going to come back for revenge. In a flashback, we see the lights in the lab shut off and Clark hiding in the underground lab, holding the hatch shut as something kills the rest of the scientists. He asks Navarro to put him out of his misery, saying that her death has been weighing on him. Danvers goes to bed, and wakes up to the power off and the door open. Navarro forced Clark out into the winter storm and let him freeze to death – Danvers is mad, because he was their only witness in the case. (Some police work there, lady – why would you go to bed and let your key witness sit there, guarded only by a demonstrably unstable State Trooper? Also, at one point in the conversation, Clark moans that “Time is a flat circle,” prompting me to yell at my laptop and startle my girlfriend, who has no idea how deep my obsession with Season 1 goes. Where once a reference to McConaughey’s coked-out existential ramblings would have filled me with delight and glee, now all it does is remind me that I could be watching a far better show. What a difference a few episodes makes. That Tuttle reference makes me furious.)

Navarro keeps seeing ghosts in the lab, including the recently deceased Clark, as she tries to get the power back on. Meanwhile, Peter knocks on Rose’s door, and tells her that he needs to dump a body where she buried Julia, Navarro’s sister. (Rose, for all the faults of this stupid, stupid show, is a very funny character – albeit unintentionally. Why is this octogenarian, who looks as if she might get blown over in a strong breeze, the town’s unofficial body disposal, weed saleswoman, and ghost whisperer?)

Navarro and Danvers have another discussion about whatever out there is “calling” Navarro. (You can skip this conversation – it’s more of the same half-assed dialogue about Danvers’ deceased son and Navarro’s sister. No one’s every really gone, Ennis has ghosts, et cetera, et cetera. As far as the show ever tells us, Danvers was in a car crash and her son died. Nothing is ever done with that info.) Danvers has a freakout when Navarro references her kid, saying that he’s gone and if Navarro claims to see him, she can walk out onto the ice and die, for all she cares.

Which is exactly what ends up happening. Danvers goes to bed and wakes up to an empty lab. Navarro took a hike out into the storm, guided by some vision. (I swear to everything I hold dear, if I have to watch another drawn-out dream sequence where Navarro sees her sister or goes back to Iraq or imagines her dead mother out on the middle of the ice, I will stop being so polite. I haven’t kept track, but that particular storytelling quirk has got to make up at least a solid 20% of the show so far.) Danvers falls through the sea ice chasing her, and flashes back to her car crash and dead son. Navarro pulls her to safety, and gets her back to the lab. (Awesome stuff. 25 minutes left in this parade of hits.)

Rose and Prior dump Hank in the ice hole, and Pete sort of reckons with what he’s done. (Poor bastard – all in service of what, a couple of the world’s most incompetent detectives who just killed their prime witness?)

Back at the lab, Danvers has an idea, and dusts for fingerprints on the hatch where Clark hid. She comes up with a whole hand print, missing two fingers – and immediately knows who it is. It’s the lady from the first episode at the fish processing plant, who was getting beat up by her boyfriend, when we were first introduced to Navarro. So it’s off to Rando Extra #3’s house to see what’s going on. (At one point, Navarro turns to Danvers and delivers this absolute clunker of a line – “We weren’t asking the right questions. The question isn’t who killed Annie K. The question is who knows who killed her.” I mean – come on, now.)

At the suspect’s house, Danvers and Navarro are confronted with a whole posse of Native women, all staring the two cops down. Beatrice, the older woman, who was a janitor at Tsalal, reveals that she figured out the scientists killed Annie after discovering the ice lab and the hatch in the floor. Knowing that if she went to the cops, nothing would happen, she got a group of women together, raided the lab, put the scientists at gunpoint into a trailer, and drove them out onto the ice. Stripping the team naked and drawing spirals on their foreheads, the women forced them onto the ice, where the ice presumably broke and the scientists died of exposure.

Navarro and Danvers, upon learning this, say that the case is closed and that the lab in Anchorage’s “slab avalanche” theory is the official story.

And that’s it. Navarro leaves Ennis for parts unknown (or walks out onto the ice, we aren’t ever fully told what happened). It’s revealed that Navarro videoed Clark’s confession to the lab’s malfeasance, which shuts the mine down for environmental reasons. Danvers gets a lake house and reconciles with her daughter, Prior spends more time with his son, and that’s the end of the show. Happy ending for all concerned – except for me, and presumably thousands of other disgruntled viewers.

What a stinker. What a disgrace to the good name of “True Detective.” What can I say about it that I haven’t angrily typed out in previous reviews?

The supernatural elements were universally mishandled. The orange rolling out to Navarro’s feet, her ghost sightings, Travis Cohle – none of it could stick the landing. The show wanted it to seem as if there was something deeper, more spectral behind the death of the scientists and the return of Annie K – but it all chalked up to bad writing and worse organization. In Season 1, there was an excuse – Cohle’s drug problem made him a prime unreliable narrator that was prone to strange visions, and his pessimistic worldview was at least informed by down-to-earth nihilism. In this season, the weird imagery and strange events were lamely explained away by Rose as Ennis’s propensity for ghosts. The only ghost here was the ghost of a plot permeating the whole messy affair.

The ending felt rushed – and moreover, it felt disrespectful, and plagiarized from a far superior movie. It was #girlpower at its worst – something cribbed from an Emerald Fennell movie, or some 2016 era Hillary Clinton ad. Women can do vigilante justice too, forcing scientists out onto the ice and leaving them for whatever dimly defined amalgamation of Native religious iconography the showrunners thought necessary to incorporate. Some kind of ice spirit? The ghost of Annie K? Save it.

But the real let-down was how much of a waste of good material this show turned out to be. When it was pitched early on in 2022, the combination of arctic Alaska + eternal winter + Jodie Foster was bulletproof. The first episode was taut and rippling with drama and intrigue, and just enough references to Season 1 to capture even the most skeptical viewer. Too bad, then, that the rest of “Night Country” went over like a fart in an elevator, leaving a bad taste in the mouths of everyone who caught a subsequent episode.

Issa Lopez thinks she can direct “The Thing,” and in a way, she can, but not in the way she intends. Like the titular monster, her rendition of “True Detective” is a malformed, gibbering, slimy mess, trying to transform itself by making references to a far better season. Thing-like, it sneaks up to viewers wearing the skin of Rust Cohle and Marty Hart, and tries to convince you that it’s 2014 again and you’re enthralled watching spirals, murder victims, and flat circles. But it’s 2024, and the wind bites bitter against your face, and on the news, Biden stutters about the president of Mexico and troops roll into the Gaza strip. This is all that’s on – this, or “Night Country.” And when those are your only two options, readers, you might as well turn the TV off and pick up a copy of “Blood Meridian,” garishly referenced in the first episode of this lumbering piece of crap.

Drink an officially licensed True Detective Brand Lone Star Beer, paint a spiral on your forehead, and light up a Marlboro Red. Be just like your hero, Rust, and watch “Night Country.” There’s nothing else on, and it promises to be a long night.

For the Landmine, I have been, as always, your humble TV reviewer, Jacob Hersh.