‘True Detective: Night Country’ Showrunner Issa López Experienced Best & Worst Of Working With HBO Amid Iceland Shoot In “Eternal Darkness”
15.01.2024 - 03:25
/ deadline.com
SPOILER ALERT: The following story contains details from the season premiere of True Detective: Night Country.
The night is dark and full of terrors in Ennis, Alaska, the fictional setting for the fourth season of acclaimed crime anthology True Detective, which premiered tonight on HBO.
This is the Night Country of the show’s subtitle, where eight scientists from the Tsalal Arctic Research Station suddenly, one day in mid-December, disappear. Stepping in to investigate, at a time of year that sees constant darkness in the Arctic, are Detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), women of quite different backgrounds and life philosophies. A highly inquisitive career cop, the former has lived in Alaska her whole life. Better relating to the largely Iñupiaq local community is the latter, a woman of Indigenous heritage with an ex-military background and a deeper sense of connection to the spiritual world. Whereas Liz has a strained relationship with her adoptive daughter Leah (Isabella Star LaBlanc), Evangeline spends much of her personal time caring for her troubled younger sister, Julia (Aka Niviâna).
When our detectives stop by the research station to begin their investigation, they stumble on a severed tongue leading them to make a surprising connection between this case and that of Annie K, an Indigenous midwife and activist who fell off the map a number of years ago.
Also introduced in the premiere are Peter (Finn Bennett) and Hank Prior (John Hawkes), a young police officer and his oddball father, whose relationship comes under tension given Peter’s work under Liz. Then, there’s local resident Rose (Fiona Shaw), who is led out into the icy dark by the spirit of a man named Travis, there