This week’s episode of True Detective: Night Country leans further into the supernatural elements of Ennis, Alaska, or what Chief Liz Danvers would describe as that “voodoo, E.T., cosmic, choompa-loompa bullshit.â€
“Part 3â€Â is all about that bullshit. It has mysterious visions, ominous symbolism, severely injured scientists suddenly becoming possessed by a demon (I guess?), and whispers and white noise evocative of the thin veil that separates the living from other realms. Whispers aren’t what bookends this episode, though. It’s a pair of screams, first from a mother giving birth, with help from Annie K, in that flashback to seven years earlier, and again from Annie herself in that newly discovered Blair Witch–y cell-phone video of her final seconds alive. Those jarring moments function like alarm clocks, reminding us to remain on high alert for details that might help us understand what caused the deaths of those Tsalal guys (no relation to those Halal Guys) and, possibly, the never-solved murder of Annie K. Let’s examine a few of those details more closely.
.
So, those oranges seem ominous, right?
If you’ve seen The Godfather — or even sat and politely nodded while someone else described The Godfather — you are likely aware that it features oranges as symbols that foreshadow death. This imagery has been so imprinted on the mainstream consciousness that the prominent placement of this delightful citrus fruit in any film or television scene immediately demands further scrutiny.
Oranges make a couple of cameos in “Part 3,†first when Navarro picks up one in the opening sequence following the flashback, and later, when trudging across the tundra, she throws that orange and it immediately rolls back to her. That latter scene, in particular, suggests an almost magnetic pull between her and the oranges that, per the above, suggests death is coming for her. Or at the very least that she has strong ties to the spirit realm, an idea confirmed by the elaborate vision she has after falling on the ice and briefly blacking out. (More on that below.) The oranges may not serve as a signal that Navarro is destined for death so much as a hint that entities from the beyond are especially present out in the snowy expanse of Ennis — which would explain why Rose was able to see Travis Cohle out in the snow too.
Do all these oranges add up to a real theory, or are they just eerie? Right now they are mostly just eerie, vitamin C-loaded symbols.
.
What to make of William Wheeler?
After Peter Prior pushes Danvers to reveal what caused the bad blood between her and Navarro, she explains that years ago, she and Navarro were trying to protect a young woman who was being abused by her partner, a known sex abuser and committer of assault. When responding to yet another domestic disturbance at their house, they find that he’s killed her, and Navarro blames Danvers for letting it get to that point. (Is that the whole story, though? Doesn’t seem like it.) The name of that killer and serial abuser is William Wheeler, which may sound familiar if you’ve either read The Changeling or watched the adaptation of it on Apple TV+. (If you haven’t and want to remain spoiler-free, scroll past the next paragraph.)
In that series, a new mother becomes unraveled following the birth of her son and allegedly kills the infant, then disappears. Her husband, Apollo (Lakeith Stanfield), goes searching for her and befriends a guy named William Wheeler who is an IT expert and seems to want to help him. But eventually William reveals himself to be Kinder Garten, part of a network of evil men tied together by their Norwegian roots and focus on killing babies on behalf of a monstrous creature that seems to have control over their behavior.
The William Wheeler of Night Country is similarly awful. In the sequence where Danvers and Navarro confront him, he seems to be possessed by something inhuman, just like William Wheeler in The Changeling. Both also prey on the innocent and seemingly cannot be stopped, no matter how many women try to do so.
Does the William Wheeler connection add up to a real theory, or is it just eerie? Like the oranges, I think this is another eerie but potentially meaningful pop-cultural reference. Knowing about The Changeling’s William Wheeler doesn’t help us understand how the scientists or Annie K died, but it is another symbol that may become more meaningful as we get more information.
.
Dreams and visions and spiral tattoos, oh my
There’s a lot of talk about weird dreams and visions in this episode. Susan, hairstylist and friend of Annie’s, tells Danvers and Navarro that Annie was having weird, upsetting dreams that only stopped when she got the tattoo of the spiral symbol. We don’t get a lot of detail about those dreams, but if we assume the symbol is associated with something bad, as it has been in previous seasons, it almost sounds like Annie was possessed by some entity that wouldn’t let her rest until she embraced that iconography. Perhaps that same influence also persuaded her to keep her relationship with Raymond Clark a secret?
Navarro is having weird dreams of her own, specifically the one she has after she slips and falls. But was it a dream or did she briefly move to some other plane and receive a message from the dead? First, she sees a child running across the ice holding a stuffed polar bear; when she attempts to chase the figure, that’s when she falls and has a more intense vision in which presumably the same small child, whose face we do not see, places a hand on Navarro’s shoulder and tells her, “Get my mommy.†This has got to be Danvers’s son — the polar bear he’s holding when he speaks to Navarro is the same one we saw in Liz’s memory last week — who seemingly died under circumstances the show has not explained yet. One of Navarro’s first flashes was of that polar bear with one eye who appeared in the middle of the road in “Part 1,†which could also be interpreted as a message from Liz’s son. It seems that Liz’s child is now more directly communicating the message that Navarro needs Liz in order to find out what happened to the scientists and Annie K. Given the other things we learn about Navarro in this episode — that her mother, also a native Alaskan, had visions just like her sister, Julia, does — it seems that Navarro’s ability to see beyond the regular world is tied to her family history, which is also tied directly to Ennis.
Julia is having a hard time with that ability, though, and has to be tracked down by Navarro after she freaks out at the bar and shouts that someone is coming. “I see stuff, bad stuff,†Julia tells her sister. She seems to be convinced that there’s a threat looming over her and maybe the whole town. Is it just the threat posed by the water? Or is it something else? Based on Julia’s insistence that “someone is coming,†it sounds like the threat may be an actual person.
That phrasing is echoed by what Anders Lund says when he emerges from his coma: “She woke up,†he tells Danvers when she asks what happened to him and his colleagues. “She’s out there in the ice. She came for us in the dark.†But who is she? Is she someone Julia also is seeing? And did all of the scientists see the same “she,†which is what scared them to literal death? Remember what Vince the Vet, Peter’s cousin and an occasional forensic analyst, told Danvers: that the Tsalal gang probably died before they froze to death, possibly of cardiac arrest.
“I’ve seen caribou die of plain fright, running, terrified,†he says in a callback to the caribou death stampede that opened the season. “These scientists look the same.†Was it “she†who terrified them, and possibly Annie K?
Do all these visions and references to a hypothetically scary woman add up to a real theory, or are they just eerie? There’s a lot of evidence to support the idea of a supernatural element being involved in the murders and the visions that Navarro, Julia, and maybe the scientists are/were having. It’s possible that the contaminated drinking water could be causing them to hallucinate, a tendency exacerbated by the tricks that diminished daylight can play on the mind. But I don’t think that explains why Rose has also seen Travis. Something Rose told Navarro in last week’s episode also seems important: “The thing about the dead is that some of them come and visit because they miss you. Some come because they need to tell you something that you need to hear. And some of them just wanna take you with them.†In Navarro’s case, at least, it seems like they are telling her something she needs to hear.
.
Speaking of Anders Lund, let’s talk about this scary-ass medical miracle
There are a number of things about Lund that I find puzzling. The biggest: the fact that he came back to life after one of Danvers’s officers broke off his frozen arm, prompting him to scream a lot louder than you would think for someone who was dead two seconds ago. (Horrible screams: this show’s specialty!) I can’t speak for anyone else, but if I had witnessed the resurrection of a frozen naked man, it is all I would be talking about for, like, weeks. Yet in the previous episode, everyone is pretty blasé about it; aside from a phone call to the hospital, Lund’s ability to survive after being out in subzero temperatures for several days is not even discussed.
When Danvers and Navarro finally get the call that he’s awake and go to the hospital, at no point do they ask the question How is this motherfucker still alive?? The answer seems to be that he’s been possessed by some sort of spirit. At least True Detective seems to want us to believe that, since no one even tries to explain the scientific logic behind this. (Another idea: Perhaps Lund benefited from the cellular life-extending properties that he and his team have been researching.)
Just before dying, Lund sits up in bed and says, “Hello, Evangeline. Your mother says hello. She’s waiting for you,†and then points at Navarro (or … something else) the same way Travis Cohle pointed at the corpsicle. That moment, which is incredibly creepy, supports the idea that some other entity may be communicating through him. It’s interesting, though, that the actual content of Lund’s message to Navarro is comforting, or would be if it hadn’t been said by a guy with gangrene and frosted-over eyeballs. And it fits with the idea that the dead are talking to Navarro to tell her something she needs to hear, if only to affirm that those who are gone still exist somewhere.
Speaking of Lund’s eyeballs, the fact that he has lost his sight seems significant. Impaired vision is a motif that runs through all of True Detective and may be aligned with people who possess important information, as I noted last week. Lund certainly seems to know things — about what happened at Tsalal and about Navarro’s late mother. That polar bear with one eye seems more important by the moment.
Does the blindness theme add up to a theory, or is it just eerie? It’s definitely eerie, but while it does not explain who is responsible for the show’s multiple murders, it also suggests that we should believe what Lund says. A lack of one or both eyes in True Detective seems to indicate the presence of a metaphorical third eye.
.
And now the part where I briefly bring Ariana Grande into this
While once again laying out a bunch of evidence in the form of a circle — time is a flat one of those, in case you haven’t heard — Danvers determines that Annie must have been seeing Clark at least as early as May 2016 because of a photograph of Annie in an Ariana Grande T-shirt. Liz remembers exactly when the album and song it’s associated with, “Dangerous Woman,†was released because Leia, her stepdaughter, played it nonstop.
“Dangerous Woman†seems like a deliberately thought-provoking reference here. Is this another signal that the woman who “woke up†was indeed someone dangerous? Or is the reference simply evocative of the sense of danger that seems to exist for so many of the women in Ennis, particularly in sexual relationships — see William Wheeler’s partner; Blair, that cleaning woman who was beaten by her boyfriend; and possibly Annie K herself.
Does the Ariana tie-in add up to a real theory, or is it just eerie? It’s less a theory and more of a reference that underlines something about the women who populate Ennis, or perhaps one who used to. It also clues in the audience about how much Danvers actually cares for Leia — enough that she immediately remembers exactly when Ariana dropped her third studio album.
.
Water, water everywhere
When Navarro discovers that Susan tried to call the police to share what she knew about Annie’s relationship with Clark, she immediately concludes that the mine is somehow involved in an attempt to bury Annie’s case. (Her theory: that Hank Prior took the call and did nothing with the information because he’s in cahoots with the mine. Hank’s response to the accusation doesn’t exactly suggest he just made an innocent mistake.) Danvers is dismissive of this — she doesn’t feel like kicking that hornet’s nest based on just a hunch — but surely the story line about the mine poisoning the water wouldn’t exist if it didn’t connect somehow to the deaths.
From a thematic standpoint, this plotline magnifies the divide between Ennis’s Native and non-Native communities. At the protest Leia attends, the crowd’s chant — “We were here before†— refers to the fact that the residents lived in Ennis before the mine was built. But it also speaks to the feeling the Natives have toward white people — like Danvers, for instance — trying to wipe away their traditions. What if the poisoned water is an intentional attempt to suppress the Native population?
For the record, water also serves as a threatening force in season one of True Detective; the damage caused by hurricanes is mentioned in every period of the story’s timeline. Hurricane Katrina, in particular, leads to such chaos and disarray that the Yellow King killer is able to become more active, practically in plain sight. In Ennis, babies are dying because of the water, and the frozen form of water, ice, has ominous connotations as well. If it didn’t cause the scientists’ deaths, it certainly contributed. And what is that Lund says about the mysterious “sheâ€? “She’s out there in the ice.â€
Does the poisoned water add up to an actual theory, or is it just eerie? There is absolutely something in the water in Ennis, on multiple levels. It’s not clear yet whether that helps explain what happened at Tsalal or to Annie, but it certainly merits further consideration. Just before Julia tells Navarro she sees “bad stuff,†she also gestures toward a pool of water and says, “You see that? That’s the water. That’s the sea.†She seems drawn to it. Yet she also seems to know, instinctively, that it could hurt her. Seems wise to pay attention to that instinct.
More From This Series
- True Detective Crawls Back From the Void
- Night Country’s Kali Reis Claims Another Victory
- Time Is a Flat Circle After All