Tag: down

After four years away, True Detective returns for a new season with a sinistrous subtitle. We’re in Night Country now, and we’ll be following along each week to try to piece together, with the help of police chief Liz Danvers and detective Evangeline Navarro, who perpetrated those gruesome crimes in Ennis, Alaska. Read along for a breakdown of Episode 5.

Who Done It?

Throughout this season, Pete Prior has been a rare—perhaps the only—bit of purity and innocence in Ennis. He alone seems to have dodged the town’s darkness, projecting a sincerity and conventionality that are absent from any other character we’ve encountered. All he wants, it seems, is to be a good husband, a good dad, a good son, and—even as it increasingly conflicts with the other roles—a good cop. Ennis isn’t a place that fosters kindness, yet Pete has spent his life with a purehearted dedication to doing right by others. Indeed, we learned this week that Pete’s wife, Kayla, first fell for the former high school hockey star when he uncharacteristically blew a game—after which she learned that, without so much as a word about it to anyone, he’d done it to cheer up a player on the opposing team whose dad had just died.

This week, Pete’s innocence was finally shattered. All season long, he’s followed at chief of police Liz Danvers’s heels, palpably straining to learn from his professional hero. At long last, his questions about what caused the rift between Danvers and onetime protégée Evangeline Navarro led to the realization that she and Navarro murdered serial abuser William Wheeler years ago and covered it up. Wheeler was left-handed, Pete figures out, meaning that his right-handed fatal shot to the head couldn’t have been self-inflicted. Danvers might be a good detective, but she’s no hero.

She’s not the only one. Pete has tried throughout the season to make the best of his difficult and sometimes abusive relationship with his father, Hank. Amid a mounting pile of evidence that Hank isn’t the well-meaning cop that he has pretended to be, Pete bursts into Danvers’s home at the episode’s climax to find that his dad is just as willing to brush the law aside for his own ends. On orders from Kate McKittrick—more on her in just a moment—Hank fatally shoots the former engineer Otis Heiss. Pete responds with his own irrevocable sin, shooting and killing his father. His days of looking for the good in people are over.

Before the shoot-out, Danvers comes close to throwing in the towel on the Tsalal Arctic Research Station case: McKittrick and Ted Connelly call her into the Silver Spring Mining offices to inform her that the scientists’ deaths have been ruled not a murder but a tragic accident resulting from a slab avalanche. (Holy Dyatlov Pass, Batman.) A conversation with Leah changes her mind when her daughter asks whether she knows how bad the pollution has gotten in the Indigenous villages around Ennis—does she have any idea how many stillbirths there have been? Danvers visits the Ennis cemetery, where tiny coffins sit waiting for the ground to thaw so that they can be buried—and then she decides to keep looking for answers.

Last week, Heiss told Danvers that still-missing Tsalal researcher Raymond Clark was “hiding in the night country.” This time around, Danvers finally learns that “the night country”—all together with me now, boys and girls: Night Country!—is a term for Ennis’s subterranean ice caves. And those spirals that keep turning up? They’re markers left by hunters to warn others about thin ice above the caves.

Night Country’s answers sure seem to be in those caves. Clark, so far as we know, is still down there. And we know that Annie Kowtok was murdered somewhere inside: The recovered video of her final moments shows her telling the camera, “I found it. It’s here.” Finally, we know that McKittrick and Silver Sky Mining really, really don’t want Danvers and Navarro going in. Next week, that’s just what they’ll do, but until then it’s time for one last look at the suspects.

1. Kate McKittrick and Silver Sky Mining

A hearty welcome to the top of the suspect list goes to local mogul and Silver Sky exec Kate McKittrick.

McKittrick’s power in Ennis has thrummed beneath the surface throughout the season in ways both large and small, from her ownership of the ice rink—the town’s de facto community center turned morgue—to the fact that she holds Leah’s fate in the balance after the teen graffitied “MURDERERS” on Silver Sky’s offices.

This week, we see her summon—summon!—Danvers to Silver Sky, where the chief is shocked to find Ted Connelly waiting. (Poor Connelly catching strays: “Connelly is a political animal,” McKittrick says later on. “He’s weak, and he’s fucking her.”) First, McKittrick dresses Danvers down for an early effort to get into the ice caves with Navarro “on Silver Sky property”; then, she and Connelly present the extraordinarily dubious news that Tsalal’s scientists perished in what Connelly dubs “a weather event.” McKittrick seems positively thrilled, giddily telling Danvers, “I know it’s a relief for all of us that there’s not some killer out there on the loose.” Nothing fishy here!

As Danvers notes, it’s awfully convenient. It’s also particularly suspicious given some new evidence that Pete dug up in the tax records of the multinational conglomerate that runs Silver Sky Mining: Turns out that the LLC behind Tsalal is a partner of Silver Sky, which funds the center at least in part as a greenwashing initiative. “That means the mine bankrolls Tsalal and then Tsalal pushes out bullshit pollution numbers for them,” Danvers says. Given what we know about the rampant pollution around Ennis and its devastating human toll, the revelation raises new questions about the mine’s, and McKittrick’s, possible involvement in what happened at Tsalal, to say nothing of the murder of Annie, who was a vocal anti-mine activist before her death.

There’s not a lot of ambiguity in what comes next. Danvers tells McKittrick that she has a lead on Clark courtesy of Heiss, whom she’s secretly stashed at The Lighthouse and whom McKittrick doubtless knows has extensive knowledge of the caves. McKittrick immediately arranges a sneaky meeting with Hank Prior, telling him that if he kills Heiss, she’ll have him named as the new chief of police in Danvers’s stead. “She’s looking for the location of the Kowtok murder,” McKittrick tells Hank. “She can’t find that cave.” At minimum, this means she has intimate knowledge of Annie’s murder and that, in her capacity at Silver Sky, she wants it hidden from the police.

What is McKittrick trying to cover up by offing Heiss: the truth about Annie’s death, what really happened at Tsalal, whatever it was that Annie found under the ice, or some combination of all three? There’s just no universe in which McKittrick isn’t involved in some—or all—of the murders (let alone the pollution poisoning Ennis).

2. … Ghosts?

Just kidding—kind of. Your mileage may vary on whether you view this season’s spooky spiritual accompaniments—the jump scares, the flashes of dead-eyed zombies, the mysterious caribou stampede off a cliff, Travis’s spirit’s season premiere dance party, the reappearing orange, and so on—as an enhancement to the story or a major mark against it. Anyone who’s read Agatha Christie knows that a mystery’s seemingly supernatural explanation will be punctured in short order by the very human truth beneath the caper at hand. This late in the season, it seems clear that we’re close to the kind of culprit or culprits who can be put in handcuffs—a conclusion that Danvers has hewed to throughout the investigation.

But there’s still something going on. Many different people in and around Ennis have witnessed seemingly inexplicable phenomena. Those caribou really did run off that cliff. And just last week, Navarro had her own otherworldly moment in the dredge, leaving her with an apparently ruptured eardrum (an incident that bizarrely did not come up this week at all).

It all has me thinking a lot about another show set in a remote, icy town, where—just as in Night Country—an A-list detective comes in to solve a ghastly crime. In Fortitude, which premiered back in 2015, it’s Stanley Tucci who finds himself wading through the snow in search of the truth in a troubled town. Without spoiling too much of that series, the investigation takes a sharp turn when it becomes clear that something—something neither human nor supernatural—is affecting the townsfolk with increasingly violent results.

In Night Country, we know that the mine is polluting water for a significant portion of the Ennis area. We also know that Tsalal was hunting deep in the ice for as-yet-unknown organisms in the name of scientific discovery. What if one or the other or both of these have led to mass poisoning- or infection-induced hallucinations—or worse? Something really did make all those scientists run out onto the ice partially clothed, after all, and the people of Ennis really are seeing things that seem to defy explanation.

What if there is an explanation, and all that sinister stuff that’s been haunting the town—and the series—can be explained as the neurological aftereffects of the shady business at the mine and Tsalal?

3. Raymond Clark

After an entire season of mentions in the Who Done It? column of Ringer recaps, Clark has plummeted down the list of suspects.

That’s not to say he’s not involved—he’s still the clearest link between his onetime flame Annie and the Tsalal deaths, and it is distinctly suspicious that Clark would be the sole survivor from the research center, even before considering that he’s been on the run for the show’s duration. And Clark specialized in paleomicrobiology during his nearly two decades working at Tsalal. If one of the center’s discoveries is behind the murd—er, tragic avalanche event—he’s likely the one who found it.

“He’s crazy as shit, man,” Heiss tells Danvers early in Episode 5. “Creepy motherfucker.”

But Clark increasingly seems like a fall guy. We know he loved Annie; if Silver Sky conspired to have her killed or cover it up (or both), surely he wouldn’t have been on board. If anything, he seems like another victim of the mine’s and/or research center’s collateral damage.

4. Hank Prior

So long, Hank.

Hank has graced the list of suspects in each of The Ringer’s weekly recaps this season for good reason. His bitterness that Danvers was named chief, a need for money to woo the con artist formerly known as Alina, an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, instability in his relationship with his son (and, before that, Hank’s now-ex-wife), his relentless, wiry anxiety—none of it paints a pretty picture for Hank.

This week, we learned that Hank had been on Silver Sky’s payroll and was involved in Annie’s murder—though he insists to Danvers shortly before Pete shoots him that he only moved her body out of the cave where she was killed and had nothing to do with the murder itself. I’m inclined to believe him: “I’m not a killer,” Prior tells McKittrick after she tells him to take out Heiss—seeming confirmation that he really wasn’t behind Annie’s murder, or any others that McKittrick is aware of.

At that point, anyway: It’s not long before he shoots Heiss. (Good for Heiss, I guess, that he got one last go-around with his beloved heroin, courtesy of Danvers, who squirrels him away from The Lighthouse in a joint intel-smack excursion. “Don’t leave a mess,” she instructs him as he slips into her bathroom. Standard police technique, am I right?) Prior Sr. is hardly heading into the great beyond with a clean conscience, but it at least doesn’t look like he harmed Annie or the Tsalal group.

Galaxy-Brained Theory of the Week

“She’s awake!” the various creeps and creepies of Ennis have told us repeatedly. While I’m tempted to write off the warning as mass delusion (see: ghosts), the fact that we keep hearing about this evidently fearsome “she”—whose awakening seems to have portended all the horror we’ve witnessed this season—seems significant.

I think we can rule out mortals for this particular role. Could she be the one-eyed polar bear—some protective, and perhaps freshly vengeful, spirit that has long lain dormant beneath Ennis? Speaking of beneath—well, I guess we’ll find out next week.

Vikram’s Alaska Corner

True Detective: Night Country takes place in the cold fringes of the Last Frontier, otherwise known as Alaska. (Never mind that the season was filmed in Iceland.) The Ringer’s own Vikram Patel is a former resident of the state who still spends his winters there. Each week, we’ll pose a question to Vikram about his second home as we look to learn more about the local geography and culture.

Claire: This week’s episode dealt with a whole lot of ice—most of it perilous. We see Rose Aguineau and Evangeline Navarro use an ax to hack a hole through thick ice so that Eve can scatter her sister’s ashes, only for her to wander a few steps too far and have the ice crack beneath her and nearly give way. And we finally learn what the “night country” refers to: a network of subterranean ice caves that we’re told are wildly dangerous and filled with jagged ice that cuts like glass (but that, teens being what they are, still draw out the kids to mess around and explore from time to time). Ice now feels less like a backdrop and more like a direct threat to the Night Country crew. While I recognize that Ennis’s anthill of spooky ice tunnels is probably not the norm, what can you tell me about living with the realities of ice in Alaska?

Vikram: I’ve had only one encounter with an ice cave. And after I tell you about it, I think you’ll understand why.

Many years ago, when I was new to Alaska, I went on a summertime hike up to Raven Glacier with a few friends. It’s a few miles off the Seward Highway, just outside Anchorage. (Some locals like to say that one of the best things about Anchorage is that it’s only a short drive from Alaska.)

The glacier was huge—a thick, jagged layer of ice crawling over the mountain we had just hiked up. It looked still, but it was talking to us. We heard little cracking sounds in the distance, regular reminders that glaciers aren’t frozen in place, but rather a slow-moving river of ice.

As we got closer, the air became measurably cooler. It’s a remarkable effect, the kind of moment in nature that reminds you how helpless you are. This chunk of ice was changing the weather. It was powerful.

Once at the edge of the glacier, we scoped out what seemed to be a small opening under a brim of overhanging ice.

Courtesy of Dave McGee

After a few minutes, we got curious and squeezed through, into a cave about the size of a one-bedroom apartment, tucked under many tons of glacier ice. Inside, it was stunning; the blue was deep, the air even chillier. The inside of an ice cube. We had never done anything like this before.

Courtesy of Dave McGee

We spent the next 10 or 15 minutes inside our frozen hideaway and probably would have stayed much longer, but we had to head back soon—a friend was waiting for us on a nearby ridge. But as we made our way to the entrance of the ice cave, we heard a crack—this time, a little louder and a lot closer—just overhead. Oh shit. We walked faster. Then another crack, even louder. Run. The entrance to the cave was collapsing.

In my memory, the next few things happened almost instantaneously. We shot out the entrance. Me first, then Rob, then Dave. I tripped a few feet outside the entrance and fell to the ground. Rob, at full speed, passed by me. I looked over my shoulder and saw a chunk of glacier ice—probably two-thirds the size of a Subaru—falling from about 30 feet above Dave’s head as he lunged out of the mouth of the cave. I couldn’t tell whether he was clear of the ice or about to be crushed by it.

For a moment, I thought Dave was a goner.

Today, 17 years later, it’s still the scariest moment of my life. His too.

“I remember the feeling that things were falling behind me. I could feel the force of something hitting the ground just behind my feet. I’ve probably never moved as fast in my entire life, even though it was over wet rocks.”

Courtesy of Dave McGee

I called Dave recently to help confirm my memory. We hadn’t talked about that day at Raven Glacier in a long time. I told him I wanted to talk about True Detective: Night Country and how Episode 5 involves a network of ice caves. I tried to keep explaining the context, but he interrupted me. “Just hearing that—ice caves—makes my body shiver.”

We compared memories. Dave remembers seeing me fall and look back at him. I sure hope he can’t remember the look on my face.

“It was literally fractions of a second between life and death. Tons of ice falling right on top of me. Even if I had survived the initial blow, it would have been impossible to recover a body under there.”

After Dave scrambled away, the three of us came together. “We all looked around, at the ice, at each other. Someone said, ‘Holy shit.’”

I remember hugging—desperate hugging.

A few minutes later, we turned to leave. “We had a long, solemn walk down that hill, having a lot of thoughts about mortality.”

During that walk so many years ago, and again this week on the phone, we wondered aloud whether we had caused the collapse. “It had to be us, right? The odds seem too incredible that that piece of ice happened to fall right then. I mean, how many years does it take for a cavern like that to form? And then it collapsed … right then?”

The moment has stayed with Dave, who now lives in Chicago with his wife and their three children. “I think about it still, usually when I look at my kids’ faces. They wouldn’t exist if I had been a step slower—or if I had slipped on a wet rock. My wife would have had a different life. My kids wouldn’t be here.”

Dave doesn’t tell this story much anymore. But before he moved away from Alaska, it came up a lot. Especially with newcomers. “It obviously changed the way I look at glaciers, especially as a place of recreation. After that, I would tell anyone new to Alaska to stay away from them.

“But people ignored me. They went exploring still.” That’s the power of the ice.

Iconic True Detective Looks of the Week

Underneath the true crime mysteries at the forefront of each season, True Detective is admirably devoted to capturing the aesthetics that define each of its many eras. With that comes some pretty incredible costume and makeup work, which we’ll be highlighting throughout the season.

HBO

Right out of the gate, we have the woman in charge of cremating Julia Navarro—a somber duty that nevertheless seems to require some funk.

HBO

Could there be a clearer representation of Pete’s attempt and failure to hold on to the last shreds of his innocence than his decision to rock his old high school hockey sweater as Kayla is kicking him out of their home?

HBO

Leah doubles down on her activism against Silver Sky Mining, culminating in her arrest. “Coop! Book me, will you?” Has a teen ever said anything more metal?

HBO

It’s about time that we got a refresh of “heroin chic.”

After four years away, True Detective returns for a new season with a sinistrous subtitle. We’re in Night Country now, and we’ll be following along each week to try to piece together, with the help of police chief Liz Danvers and detective Evangeline Navarro, who perpetrated those gruesome crimes in Ennis, Alaska. Read along for a breakdown of Episode 4.

Who Done It?

If endless darkness in the Arctic Circle didn’t sound isolating enough, try spending that time alone on Christmas. Episode 4 of True Detective: Night Country sees pretty much every resident of Ennis spending the holiday solo or reckoning with some form of personal turmoil—but it wouldn’t be True Detective without festering psychological trauma and existential dread, would it? But hey, it’s still Christmas—sit down, relax, and let your favorite Warner Bros. Discovery crime drama promote your favorite Warner Bros. Discovery Christmas movie.

Screenshots via HBO

Episode 4 presents some significant progress in the Tsalal murder case. Last episode, Liz Danvers and Co. discovered a chilling video of Annie Kowtok that she took of herself just before her death. It shows Annie in an ice cave with unidentified bones embedded in the wall, which leads the crew to deduce that Annie’s body was moved from that location into town to make some sort of statement to the locals.

Meanwhile, when tasked with tracking down anyone who had suffered similar injuries to the Tsalal scientists, Pete discovers the record of Otis Heiss, a seemingly crucial piece of the Night Country puzzle. After surviving the injuries—which included burned corneas and self-inflicted bites, with no reported cause—Heiss went off the grid. (He’s traceable only through his police record of disorderly conduct.) When Danvers and Evangeline Navarro seek out Ennis High School teacher Adam Bryce for assistance in locating the cave Annie was likely killed in, he suggests tracking down whoever mapped out the dangerous tunnels. A quick Google search reveals none other than Heiss as the man responsible.

This episode also has no shortage of flirtations with the spirit realm—which probably shouldn’t even be described as flirtations anymore. We just flat out saw multiple Conjuring-ass ghosts. Night Country has been very clear about the possibility of the supernatural at play; True Detective Season 1 never went far beyond merely hinting at it. I still don’t believe the killer will end up being a wholly supernatural force, but visions of the dead have been shown so frequently and assuredly by multiple characters that the existence of the paranormal doesn’t seem to be just speculation at this point.

Heartbreakingly, these visions lead to the death of Julia, Eve’s tormented sister whose persistent encounters with the dead drove her to walk into the freezing ocean. In Episode 3, we discovered that Eve and Julia’s mother was also driven mad by hearing voices, and she eventually left home and was murdered by someone who was never found. With her sister now gone too, Eve fears she’s next in line to be targeted by these specters, though it wouldn’t be her first brush with the supernatural. Episode 3 showed us that Danvers and Navarro’s last case involved a man named William Wheeler who abused and killed his girlfriend—it’s suggested that either Danvers or Navarro killed him upon arriving at the crime scene and covered it up by falsely reporting his death as a suicide. Episode 4 reveals that Navarro saw the dead girlfriend’s ghost in the room before one of the cops likely pulled the trigger on Wheeler.

The episode culminates with the spotting of a man wearing Annie’s pink jacket—the same one Raymond Clark was seen wearing in a Tsalal video—near the town dredges. Navarro and Danvers go to scope it out and basically find themselves in a game of Silent Hill. They quickly locate the mysterious figure, and Danvers chases him up the ladders of a dredge, only to discover the man is actually Heiss rather than Clark. So where is Clark? “He went back down to hide,” Heiss says. “He’s hiding in the night country. We’re all in the night country now.” Hey, that’s the name of the show! As Danvers races after Heiss, Navarro starts hearing voices calling her name and follows a trail of footsteps to an ominous Christmas tree. There, she stumbles upon an apparition resembling Julia—Eve’s haunted by another woman she couldn’t save. Danvers comes down to find Eve in a catatonic state with blood dripping from her ear (akin to the ruptured eardrums the scientists suffered, perhaps?) after the encounter.

Oh yeah, this episode also treated us to more oranges and one-eyed polar bears, plus Billie Eilish songs. Are we any closer to solving the Tsalal mystery? Let’s round up the suspects.

1. Raymond Clark

The Nikola Jokic of murder suspects, our boy Raymond remains atop the list. His whereabouts are still unknown (unless “hiding in the night country” counts as a location), but that Danvers found Heiss in the state he was in, in the same Annie jacket that was last seen on Clark, indicates that something went down there. Speaking of “down there,” what exactly did Heiss mean by saying Clark “went down” to hide? Last week in this column, my colleague Ben Lindbergh introduced the Inuit goddess of the sea and ruler of the Adlivun underworld, Sedna, as a potential suspect. It doesn’t get much more “down” than the underworld, and “night country” seems like an apt description of a frozen wasteland where souls are imprisoned. Could Clark be posing as, or possessed by, Sedna?

Clark has been built up to be such a prime suspect over the course of these four episodes that it seems almost too obvious for him to be the sole perpetrator. But the mounting evidence shows he is clearly involved in the murders somehow. That he’s been missing for so long also seems to be foreshadowing a big showdown for when Danvers and Navarro do eventually track him down.

2. Oliver Tagaq

Even though Tagaq wasn’t seen in this episode, he was still key in an important scene. As Danvers obsessively rewatches the Annie Kowtok video, she notices that it ends with the lights getting cut in the same way they do at the end of the Raymond Clark Tsalal video. Danvers surmises that there was some sort of power outage at the end of both videos, but Annie’s video was evidently taken in an ice cave—how could there have been power in there in the first place? Danvers remembers that Tagaq was an equipment engineer at Tsalal and would likely have access to the lab’s emergency generators. She sends Eve and Pete back to Tagaq’s place to investigate and, what do you know, he’s vanished. Tagaq left right after Danvers and Navarro confronted him in the previous episode, according to the others at his camp. Eve and Pete find a spiral symbol drawn on the ground and carved into a stone, and when they ask Oliver’s former neighbors if they know what the symbol is, they don’t answer—their dogs start barking, and they kind of just … stare menacingly.

My hunch is that Tagaq is a red herring who’s just very distrusting of authority. (Understandably so, after how the Indigenous population has been treated.) But he obviously knows something, and his connection to the spirals can’t be meaningless.

3. Kate McKittrick

Even if Kate didn’t actually murder the Tsalal scientists with her own two hands, she’s still evil as hell and guilty of something. Actually, we already know she’s complicit in polluting Ennis’s water supply as an executive of the Silver Sky mining company, which Annie had been protesting against before her death. Plus, we know Kate is close with Hank from their interaction at the ice rink in Episode 2, and he’s the one who hid Annie’s case files and failed to report some key evidence in her investigation.

In Episode 4, we see a brief scene with Kate after Danvers’s daughter, Leah, was caught vandalizing the mining offices, spray-painting the word “MURDERERS” across the front door (badass!). If Leah becomes a target next, that would further heighten my suspicion that Kate is involved somehow, but even if not, Kate seems very unhappy with the reputation of her company. Unhappy enough to commit murder? I’m not sure. She does have a potential motive for killing Annie, but theorizing why she would kill the Tsalal scientists is just conjecture—maybe they discovered something in their research that would be detrimental to Silver Sky if made public? And since Night Country takes so much inspiration from Season 1, Kate could ultimately serve as a Billy Lee Tuttle figure in a web of corruption.

4. Sedna

Not to copy Ben’s homework from last week, but the supernatural is still a huge possibility in unlocking the Tsalal mystery, and Sedna is still the best explanation. And Heiss’s description of Clark’s location wasn’t the only clue we got in this episode that could lead to Sedna.

Listen to the way Eve describes her family’s relationship with spirits to Danvers: “It’s a curse,” she says. “Something calls us, and we follow.” It’s been said that Sedna can imprison the souls of the living, and Julia’s death was due to walking into the ocean, which happens to be Sedna’s domain. As Julia marched in, it did seem as though she was being led somewhere—could it have been Sedna calling to her?

The prevalence of these visions makes it seem like the paranormal will play a part in solving this mystery in a way that it didn’t in past seasons of True Detective. I still believe a human will ultimately be found responsible for the murders, but there were simply too many ghosts in this episode to ignore.

5. Hank Prior

I almost feel bad including Prior here because my guy had a horrendous outing in Episode 4. He was supposed to finally meet his Russian fiancée, Alina, at the airport, but, alas, she never showed. Well, he might have seen her briefly get off the plane, make eye contact with him, and get right back on, which is an

extreme case of getting curved. But in all likelihood, Alina is probably just some dude with an internet connection catfishing Prior into sending him money. Still, Prior does a terrible job of pretending to brush off the whole situation to his son, saying that Alina’s cell service is probably just out (a classic rationale for victims of ghosting). As we see Prior sulk in front of a bottle of champagne and a rose-petal-adorned bedspread intended for a romantic night with Alina, we know he’s pretty heartbroken.

But that we get such a sympathetic portrayal of Hank in this episode doesn’t necessarily absolve him of culpability in the murders. He obviously tried to cover something up with Annie’s case, and he’s overall been a pretty big asshole to Danvers, Navarro, and his own son. But the Alina situation shows how naive Hank is, and that probably makes him a pretty terrible cop. With the Annie case, it seems possible that Hank is doing the bidding for some powerful person—maybe Kate?—while being kind of oblivious, or even willfully ignorant, about the severity of these cases. Which, again … really shoddy stuff for a cop to do. But it probably means he’s not the one committing the murders himself.

6. Captain Connelly

Let me cook for a second. The thing that raised my eyebrows this week was the way Captain Connelly responded when Danvers asked if he’d seen the Annie Kowtok video she’d sent him: a short nod and then, “You keep that on a need-to-know basis.” Yes, he’s a police captain who probably doesn’t want evidence leaking to the public, but it just struck me as a bizarre reaction to the uncovering of a crucial and traumatic clue in a years-old murder case. Plus, he’s been trying to wrangle control of the Tsalal case ever since it opened.

Danvers has made a lot of comments about how Connelly wants to look good for his future mayoral campaign (which Connelly himself has never really responded to), and that might be true—and that could certainly include ensuring that any skeletons in his closet never come out. Prior is, in all probability, compromised by his connections to Silver Sky one way or another, so why couldn’t Connelly be too? True Detective Season 1’s Errol Childress murders had connections all the way up to the Louisiana governor. A powerful and ambitious man like Connelly could easily get his hands dirty, too.

Galaxy-Brained Theory of the Week

Now let me really cook for a second. There have been multiple visions of a of one-eyed polar bear throughout Night Country so far (which have been presented in a sort of dreamlike manner but could be a real sighting in an Alaskan town). Both Navarro and Danvers have experienced these visions in the same way: by almost crashing into the bear in Episodes 1 and 4, respectively. A plush one-eyed polar bear that once belonged to Danvers’s son, Holden, has been a recurring image as well. It almost reminds me of another polar bear sighting …

Look, I realize it’s probably a different experience running into a polar bear in the Alaskan tundra than it is on a deserted island. But the polar bear sightings on Lost, surprisingly enough, actually had an explanation: They were brought to the island by the DHARMA Initiative for studies in electromagnetic research. So those polar bears had to come from somewhere. Who’s to say that the DHARMA Initiative never had a study-abroad program at the Tsalal research station specializing in polar bear recruitment? I don’t know, man, I’ll just take any opportunity I can to bring up Lost again. What a program.

Vikram’s Alaska Corner

True Detective: Night Country takes place in the cold fringes of the Last Frontier, otherwise known as Alaska. (Never mind that the season was filmed in Iceland.) The Ringer’s own Vikram Patel is a former resident of the state who still spends his winters there. Each week, we’ll pose a question to Vikram about his second home as we look to learn more about the local geography and culture.

Julianna: I have to be honest with you, Vikram—I’m four episodes into True Detective: Night Country and my California mind is still unable to comprehend just how cold Alaska is. I’ve lived in the Golden State my entire life and am currently typing this from Los Angeles, where it’s a lovely 73 degrees in January, and I still saw jackets and beanies outside. I could count the number of times I’ve seen snow in my life on one hand, and at least a couple of those times I’ve foolishly worn jeans and sneakers that quickly got sopping wet.

So my question is: How do you adapt to extreme cold? Do you ever get used to it? What are the wardrobe essentials for an Alaskan winter? Is an Andy Reid frozen mustache a common sighting? I realize that was multiple questions, but this is truly a world that boggles my mind.

Vikram: Like you, Julianna, I am from California. When I first moved to Alaska, I hadn’t had much exposure to cold weather, and it showed. The first winter I spent in Anchorage, my “coat” was a thin corduroy jacket, and I mostly wore a lot of sweatshirts and jeans. As many locals warned me, cotton kills. But I was too stubborn to buy myself a puffy jacket or the stretchy technical clothing that my friends wore to exercise in the cold. I was neither warm nor fashionable.

Fortunately, despite my inadequate wardrobe, my body did adjust. Exposure to cold weather activates something in our bodies called “brown fat,” which helps keep our bodies warmer, a sort of internal layer of long underwear. I noticed this effect most when I would visit my family in Los Angeles during the winter; they wore sweaters and jackets all day, while I could wear shorts and T-shirts without a shiver. It felt like a superpower.

But there’s a limit to what our bodies can withstand.

The coldest temperature I have ever been in is negative 35 degrees Fahrenheit, near Fairbanks, Alaska. It was a whole different kind of cold than I had grown accustomed to in Anchorage, where the temperature rarely drops below zero. The layer of ice covering the road in Fairbanks was a few inches thick but not as slippery as warmer ice (the thin layer of melting water on the surface of the ice is what makes your car slide around on the road). Taking a deep breath at negative 35 is an adventure—air that cold tends to cause an instant coughing fit. We visited some hot springs on that trip; I remember dunking my head in the water, coming up for air, and feeling my hair freeze in seconds. Extreme cold can be delightful.

But does Ennis get that cold? It’s hard to say—there isn’t a weather almanac to consult for fictional Alaskan villages. But we can make an educated guess. Night Country creator Issa López described Ennis as a “fictionalized amalgam of northern villages Kotzebue, Utqiagvik, and Nome.” These villages are further north than Fairbanks, but they are located on the water, which can help keep temperatures relatively mild—the brown fat of meteorology.

Stuck in weather-estimating hell, I reached out to Brian Brettschneider, Alaska’s leading climatologist. Brian told me that Ennis is likely “not as cold as Fairbanks, but notably colder than Anchorage. Nome, Kotzebue, and Utqiagvik are also quite windy places and are in the tundra,” where, he reminded me, trees cannot grow. Brian also sent me this handy dynamic temperature map. By my estimation, Ennis likely sees temps as low as negative 15 or negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit in the depths of winter. In a word: brrrrr!

If you are planning to visit a northern Alaska community next winter, here are some items you will want to bring along, courtesy of my Real Alaskan Advisory Committee (Tara, Emily, Zach, and Barry):

• A wool hat that covers your ears
• A thick neck gaiter that you can pull up to protect your face
• Heavyweight thermal underwear—this is your second skin
• Mittens (not gloves!), preferably with a long gauntlet—covering your wrist and lower forearm—to keep the warmth in and the snow out
• A down parka, ideally 600 fill or above, that goes down to at least your thighs and has a proper fur ruff (synthetics don’t cut it when snow is blowing sideways)
• Wool socks
• Bunny boots, which are cartoonish snow-white boots that keep your feet warm by trapping air and leaving room for thick socks—if you can’t find any, a pair of Bogs or Muck boots (cold-weather boots all seem to have exceptional names) will also do
• Hand and foot warmers to tuck into your mittens and boots—get the foot warmers with adhesives, or you’ll end up with a crumpled mass far away from your toes

Julianna, now that you’re prepared, I hope you’ll decide to visit Alaska in the winter sometime. I can’t guarantee you’ll see anything supernatural, but a snowy, dark Alaskan winter is magical all the same. The juice is worth the squeeze, even if it’s a little bit frozen.

Iconic True Detective Looks of the Week

Underneath the true crime mysteries at the forefront of each season, True Detective is admirably devoted to capturing the aesthetics that define each of its many eras. With that comes some pretty incredible costume and makeup work, which we’ll be highlighting throughout the season.

Rose Aguineau’s little Christmas party (and dress!) looked lovely. She seems like a great hang. Other than the fact that she has to deal with, as she says, “all the fuckin’ dead.”

Bro put on his best turtleneck and brought along a well-dressed stuffed animal only to leave the airport alone thinking he got stood up on sight. It’s so sad it almost makes me forget he’s a terrible person.

You ever look so good you cause a stranger to spiral into an abyss of loneliness and heartbreak?