López, who has worked mostly in Mexican film and television, is new to the show and has said that she first proposed Night Country as a series without having the True Detective framework in mind until HBO suggested it. She did a brilliant job of retrofitting the idea. Night Country has the DNA of the original, with Liz and Navarro echoing the fraught-but-tight relationship between the detectives who Harrelson and McConaughey played, and with the first season’s supernatural tinge.
But cultish ideas in season one were held by murder suspects. In Night Country the entire town and culture is imbued with spirituality and the belief that inexplicable things can have otherworldly causes, beliefs often but not only held by the Native people in Ennis. The series is filled with symbols and images. A dead man, either imagined or an actual apparition, points toward the location of corpses. A spiral symbol is tattooed on some people’s heads and on a rock. In the first episode, before the men vanish, one of them says cryptically, frightened, “She’s awake.”
As the darkness drags on, the characters become more and more out of control. Episode five ends with a real shocker, and the sixth and final episode includes a claustrophobic crawl through an ice tunnel under the frozen surface of the land, all effectively sending shivers. The final episode also includes a blunt call back to True Detective season one that will tickle anyone with even a vague memory of the original.
In that last episode, it may be hard to buy what caused the men’s vanishing act, an explanation that leaves you thinking, Really? Despite that, Lopez has taken inspiration from True Detective, and created a fierce, absorbing, richly imagined new show of her own.
★★★★★
True Detective: Night Country is released on Max in the US on 14 January and on Sky Atlantic/NOW in the UK on 15 January.
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