Night Country: Part 6

I only watched this because Jodie Foster was in it, believing she was a guarantee of quality. I was wrong. Oh, she was good, as were most of the cast. But the whole thing was a disappointment. First, it's really not a detective story - there was hardly any detecting going on. Second, there was way too much mumbo jumbo throughout, with the inevitable deep and meaningful spirituality of indigenous peoples dominating the thin plot. Third, the thing dragged on endlessly because there were way too many subplots and back stories going on. Fourth, more bad miners aided by dumb and bad men, being taken on by good and smart women, yadda yadda. And finally the resolution was ridiculous - with even more mumbo jumbo added for good measure. And then the ending never seemed to end, with subplots being rounded off and, yes, still more mumbo jumbo. I should have taken my wife's advice and given up after the first two episodes, but Jodie Foster was in it, so I was sure it would get better. But it didn't.

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.

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.

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.

I didn't love this season, but it was interesting enough to watch to the end. The final episode was quite poor. Not everything was resolved, and the major plot points resolved in a highly unsatisfactory way.

I cut it some slack throughout the slow-developing season, banking on an interesting resolution. I received just the opposite. It sort of left me feeling like a sucker.

I certainly don't demand that every season stand up to the excellent Season One, but if you're going to put the True Detective name on something, you shouldn't drag it down with mediocre efforts like this one. Overall, a disappointment.