True Detective Season 4

 

Episode 6 Recap: Stories Are Stories

The season ended with a finale that provided plenty of answers while clinging to a bit of mystery.

One of the tricky parts of a ghost story like “True Detective: Night Country” is the banal, inevitable business of having to explain events that were once teasingly inexplicable. It is more haunting, for example, to imagine a supernatural force turning terrified scientists into an Arctic “corpsicle” than to learn that they were commandeered by a vigilante band of Indigenous women taking justice into their own hands.

This is the risk the creator Issa López has courted all season, as the show’s procedural elements have been intermingled with obscure symbols, hidden traumas and outright ghostly hallucinations. In order to solve the practical mysteries facing Danvers and Navarro, it would have to come crashing back to earth.

Yet the achievement of this flawed but compelling finale is that López succeeds in having her cake and eating it, too. The important whodunit questions about the deaths of Annie K. and the scientists have concrete answers, but she’s unwilling to sell out the spiritual and psychological unrest that’s unique to this locale.

From the beginning, the strongest element of “Night Country” has been its evocation of Ennis, Alaska, as this northernmost outpost of humanity, a border town to oblivion. There have been several moments, including a few in the finale, where a character is one step away from disappearing into nothingness, like Werner Herzog’s deranged penguin in “Encounters at the End of the World.”