True Detective
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In part three,Night Countrystarts to resemble a classic police procedural, at least structurally.
Autopsies (well, kind of) and interrogations; manhunts and working sources.
Theres even a rivalry brewing between Pete Priors computer-reliant investigations and Evangeline Navarros beat policing.
Ennis isnt a place; its a set of preoccupations that mostly boil down to the same one thing.
The old versus the new.We were here before.
Were back on the tundra again, only this time were looking for one guy instead of eight.
But later, when she throws it into the night, it boomerangs back in her direction.
Did someone throw it back?
Did it hit something real or rebound off the edge of the universe?
But when she calls in Navarro for help, Pete grows suspicious.
Maybe hes just curious or maybe he senses his place as teachers pet is under threat.
Except, as we see in flashback, thats not what happened.
When Danvers and Navarro arrived at the murder scene, a remorseless Wheeler was whistling a little ditty.
So who shot him?
And Pete, for his part, suspects hes being fed half the truth.
They were happy together.
Liz deduces from a T-shirt that theyd been together since 2016, since Ari droppedDangerous Woman.
Who took the one candid photo in Rays stack?
The one stained blue with hair dye.
Enter Susan, Annies bestieslashhair colorist.
Susie gave haircuts at Tsalal and Annie tagged along and met Ray, who was crazy about her.
Susan did phone in an anonymous tip to the Ennis PD.
Can you guess who took the call?
Like Annies tongue resurfacing at Tsalal.
Liz isnt convinced, but she also doesnt share Narvarros belief in the cases spectral dimension.
And yet, Liz and Evangeline clearly like each other.
Theyre more open and curious in each others company than anyone elses.
When shes lonely, she prays.
Not to tell God what she needs, but to hear what the world is trying to say back.
Doesnt Liz feel it, too, sometimes?
The compulsion to disappear.
Hank stops by to make amends for slugging Pete by offering to take his grandson out skating.
Navarro happens by at the same time and threatens Hanks life for withholding evidence.
Pete, who looks way younger that Benjamin Braddock did inThe Graduate, asks who Mrs. Robinson is.
The showdown is a little comical but also menacing.
The four people tasked with keeping Ennis safe all cant stand each other to varying degrees.
Eves mother was ill; like Julia again this week, she heard voices and had episodes.
And then, one day, she just didnt come home again.
Their mother died before ever telling her girls their Inupiat names.
Cultural exploration and cultural curiosity are part threes most salient themes.
Oh, you forgot, didnt you?
Oliver says when she cant answer, his tone taunting.
This is where people go to live when they dont want to be within reach.
To be a cop, to burst into his home uninvited?
Hes accusing Evangeline of forgetting much more than a name.
Another line of inquiry thats run dry.
Part three opens with a flashback to Annie K. working as a midwife at the areas last birthing center.
Evangeline turns up to arrest her for destroying mine property but ends up assisting with a water birth.
Evangeline looks genuinely terrified, like maybe she wasnt entirely sure where babies come from.
Though it takes Annie a minute to resuscitate her, the baby is fine.
Evangeline pours hot water into the bath; shes invited into a circle of women she feels connected to.
Its the same journey of self-discovery that Leahs on.
Take that, Liz.
Despite all your best efforts at neglect, youre raising a civic-minded young woman who cares about the community.
(Kind of like a cop should, come to think of it.)
It turns out that the harrowing birth that opened the episode foreshadowed something terrible to come.
Theres been another stillbirth in the villages, no doubt connected to the toxic runoff at Silver Sky.
Does it have something to do with whatever happened to Jake?
And at work, shes running out of time.
The vet tells Liz and Pete that these men didnt die of cold.
Cold sedates big animals, and they die peacefully.
If he had to guess, the Tsalal scientists died of cardiac arrest before they froze.
And hes seen it before, he tells them.
Everything he says makes perfect and little sense.
We woke her, he says.
Shes awake same as Ray, same as the whispers that Liz and Navarro have heard.
She came for us.
But who is he talking about?
The obvious guess is Annie, but how or why or what the fuck?
Shes waiting for you, he adds before crashing and, I assume, dying.
Then, of course, there are more literal ways for the dead to reanimate.
Pete shows up at the hospital, having finally cracked Annie K.s cell phone.
Theres a video that Annies taken of herself, talking in the same confusing short sentences as Lund.
I found it, she says, maybe from an ice cave or an igloo.
We were here before.
Its the rallying cry that the activists repeat at the protest Leah sneaks off to with her girlfriend.
They mean they were here before the mines.
They mean a culture older than the white colonialists who came in search of land and resources.
This is not our first time here.
Even the dead dont leave souls bound to this place.
But maybe something more is starting to coalesce a theory of existence that connects the separate stories.
Maybe time really is a flat circle, or a spiral pressed into the skin.
