Night Country: Part 6

Foster is one of the greatest actors of all time and doesn't know how to give a bad performance. Reid is a revelation and I can't wait to see what she does next. But the screen writers are the BIG problem.

Fortitude and The Thing are great, but they don't need a 2024 remix. True Detective is a mixed bag. Season 1 is peerless, season 2 was seriously underwhelming, season 3 was great but with the original creatives gone season 4 suffers the same issues as 2. It's not fundamentally bad, but it's too derivative and also doesn't know quite what it wants to be.

Season 1 and 3 had the slightest injection of magical realism. Are these hallucinations? Exaggerations? Everything can be explained rationally but there is just the subtlest question marks. Here the whole season has leaned out right into the supernatural. True Detective is not supernatural horror. The solution shouldn't be ghosts, it's rarely satisfying in a detective story and it isn't here. Also the fate of one person makes no sense at all and counts on a group of people not acting in anyway like actual humans. It's not "spur of the moment" it's terrible writing. Unbelievable revelation is stacked on irrational behaviour in this episode. Plus people are freezing to death with no hope only to not be in the next scene- what? Just profoundly disappointing.

An average horror movie stretched over a season of TV that thinks it's much smarter than it is.

It is obvious that the director doesn't have much experience directing mystery/thriller work.

A good thriller not only needs a good story and characters but also a creative cinematography and a director with style and vision things that this show doesn't have.

It tries badly to imitate a bit Twin Peaks and Lost and fails miserably.

This show could have really used David Fincher, Kubric, David Lynch or John Carpenter at the helm.

There was a good story somewhere there. The script was undercooked and needed more revisions.

The story given was poorly constructed and edited.

The supernatural elements were poorly developed and displayed.

Characters were poorly developed. I did not care for any of the characters specially for the secondary ones.

This could have had been a great whodunnit mystery/supernatural/scifi/horror/thriller but it landed in amateurish hands.

"True Detective Season 4 was a letdown, especially its concluding half. What started with promise veered into drawn-out, dark, and somewhat tedious territory. The supernatural elements introduced failed to enhance the narrative, instead contributing to a sense of confusion and detachment from the core story. The final three episodes were particularly disappointing, lacking the tight pacing and engaging storytelling that defined the series' earlier success. While the series has always flirted with darkness, this season's foray felt unnecessary and unearned, leaving a lingering sense of dissatisfaction. In the end, the relief that it's over speaks volumes about its departure from what made 'True Detective' compelling."

Night Country sputters to a bland and unsatisfying conclusion. The entire season was comprised of tedious conversations between unlikeable characters interspersed with random creepy images. The show spent an inordinate amount of time on its protagonists' personal lives but their behavior and interactions were so repetitive that they felt underdeveloped. There was little in the way of backstory or character development to justify why any of them did the things they did. The modicum of detective work undertaken by the two leads was largely the product of happenstance. The season finale is more of the same. Danvers and Navarro have the fifth version of the same conversation they've been having since episode two, then they stumble onto a trite resolution of the central mystery. Most of the other inconsistencies, plot holes and contradictions remain unexplained. I guess the screenwriters were going for thought-provoking and ambiguous but it comes across as incoherent and inane.

I had never watched True Detective before this Night Country season four campaign. It was Jodie Foster--and pretty much Jodie Foster alone--that brought me into the fold. It seems as if I stumbled into the party at exactly the wrong time.

For a very basic overview, Night Country tells the story of a mass disappearance of a group of scientists working at a research lab in Ennis, Alaska. Police chief Liz Danvers (Foster) and deputy Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) investigate the odd circumstances (a human tongue laying on the floor, for instance) and are pulled into a tangled web of intrigue both personal and mystical.

Simply put, Night Country is a rare major misfire form the HBO prestige TV department. Usually renowned for their hallowed Sunday night fare, this True Detective slate ends up an extreme disappointment. Though the production values are high enough to render each episode baseline watchable, this is a series that struggles to incubate a single coherent or interesting plot/character angle over its six episodes.

The first two installments aren't all bad--teasing an intriguing mystery and introducing all the interrelated personal connections in Ennis. But the next three episodes really go off the rails, setting up a finale that means well but by that point has lost almost all hope of mattering in any meaningful way.

The biggest problem here is that the six Night Country episodes are obscenely overstuffed--bursting at the seams with too many characters and hairpin plot zig-zags. Those impossible expectations aside, show runner Issa Lopez clearly wants Night Country to be a nuanced look at Inuit culture while also adding a mystical aspect to the proceedings. Add it all up and you get a giant mess of dead ends and false starts.

What Night Country needed was either 2-3 more episodes to let the content breathe, or a large pair of garden shears to prune away some of the storylines (however well-intentioned they might have been). As it stands, however, viewers got six episodes of irregular plot mechanics, far too many characters to handle, and a mysticism that belies the True Detective moniker. It's a shame to see such acting talent as Foster, Finn Bennett, Isabella LaBlanc, John Hawkes, and even Christopher Eccleston wasted in such a poor overall effort.