If there were ever a series that could afford to take a massive swing in its finale, it’s True Detective: Night Country. After all, the fourth season of HBO’s True Detective series’ central mystery involved a group of scientists that were all killed at the same time, their frozen bodies discovered together in the tundra. And those same scientists remained frozen, their giant ice block kept cool in the town’s community center. They called it a “corpsicle!” That’s wild in the best way—absurd, eerie, and spine-chilling.
For six weeks, Night Country made us wonder what on Earth could have created this terror on such a mass scale. That’s why it’s incredibly disappointing that the reveal of the scientists’ fate felt like the easiest possible solution, lacking all the creative verve that infused the first five episodes.
What’s especially frustrating is that, in Sunday’s 75-minute finale, it felt like Night Country was building to something spectacular. Revelations came thick and fast as detectives Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) and Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) try to get to the bottom of what happened to the scientists while trying to uncover the truth behind the grisly death of Annie K., an Indigenous woman whose murder was never solved. They discovered the truth about Annie—she was killed by the scientists after she started attacking their research. But what the hell happened to the scientists?
