Tag: jodie foster

With Raymond Clark still officially at large, Hank Prior (John Hawkes) enlists a team of men whom Danvers less than affectionately calls his “hillbillies” to find the scientist. Hank may have more information about the disappearance of Annie K then he’s letting on, as it’s revealed that he got a call about Raymond and Annie before her death but kept the information to himself. Murphy believes that Hank is “hiding something” about Annie K’s death to protect the miners. “It’s becoming clear that it’s white people versus indigenous people in terms of the mine—who wants it and who doesn’t. Obviously, Hank’s on the miner’s side,” he says. 

While Hank and his hillbillies are searching for the Tsalal scientists, Navarro is dealing with issues both professional and personal. She gets a call that her sister, Julia, is having another episode, and checks her into the town’s mental hospital, The Lighthouse, against her will.  At the end of the episode, Navarro visits one of the surviving scientists, Lund, at the hospital, and he rises from his bed to deliver an ominous message. Could Navarro be the next person to succumb to her family’s hereditary mental illness? ”This is a town where people see ghosts, maybe because they’re crazy from the darkness. But that moment, that is pure Exorcist, Emily Rose kind of thing,” says Lawson. “If Navarro is hallucinating that, she has worse problems than I thought.”

While the episode ends on a pretty grim note, it’s not all horror. The opening features a flashback of Annie K and a group of indigenous women helping a fellow native woman give birth, and is refreshing in its non-traumatic depiction of childbirth. “All of the birth scenes that we’ve seen on prestige TV in the past two years especially have been dramatic, and traumatic, and horrible, and scarring,” says Busis—prompting Murphy to name check Prime Video’s Dead Ringers, FX’s Fleischman Is in Trouble, and HBO’s House of the Dragons as examples. 

“I was so thrilled to see a scene like that where it’s intense, but then the baby is fine and the woman is also fine,” continues Busis. “There’s been this overcorrection because for too long, we skated past the nasty parts of womanhood and the female body. So now we’re gonna lean way hard in the other direction. We’re gonna show how awful it is all the time.” Night Country, though, goes against that grain.

The birth scene is also important because it showcases Annie K’s importance to her community, making her loss all the more painful and Navarro’s urge to avenge her that much stronger. “This was a really great way to meet Annie K in her element,” says Lawson. “We’d heard about her as being this kind of antagonizer, a troublemaker. To have her doing this work behind literal closed doors that is so vital, I think, really establishes her as someone who was trying to do good in a place that seems very allergic to good.”

After some quick thinking by Danvers, the “corpsicle” has been moved to the town’s ice hockey rink as they await forensics. As the frozen Tsalal scientists thaw, it’s clear that showrunner Issa Lopez is unafraid to lean into horror with True Detective: Night Country, going so far as to have black sludge pour out of a frozen scientist’s mouth. “If we had any doubt that this was leaning on horror tropes this season, they were quickly gone after this moment,” says Lawson. “It’s terrifying.” To make matters even more terrifying, once “the corpsicle” has thawed, it’s clear that scientist Raymond Clark is missing from the group and remains at large.

While no one knows Clark’s whereabouts, Danvers and Navarro do discover something very important to Clark: the love hut where he’d retreat with Annie K. Although we were led to believe the scientists were completely removed from the townspeople of Ennis, Danvers and Navarro discover by way of a local hairdresser that the scientists did, in fact, interact with the townspeople—and some, like Raymond and Annie K developed quite a fondness for one another. Their secret relationship mostly played out in a trailer Clark owned on the outskirts of town—“his fuck trailer,” as Lawson eloquently put it—which happened to be covered in the spiral symbol that Finn Bennett warned the Still Watching hosts to keep an eye on last week. To make matters creepier, both Annie and Clark have matching tattoos of the spiral as well.

“Not to be the season one police, but we should note that this spiral also has a history in the franchise,” notes Busis. “It’s the symbol of the pedophile cult.”

Clark and Annie are not the only couple to have a secret love connection this episode. Christopher Eccleston makes his first appearance on the series as chief Ted Corsaro, Danvers’s former boss—who is responsible for her transfer from Fairbanks to Ennis, and wants to transfer “the corpsicle” case to his unit. But after Danvers pays a visit to Ted’s hotel room, it’s quickly clear that there’s more to their relationship than boss and employee.

“The relationship has gone on for a good few years, so there’s obviously some deep feelings there,” says Eccleston. “Danvers tells herself she’s there purely for the sex. And only Jodie would know the answer to that, but I suspect that he’s in love with her. I think he’s in love with her, and I think he covers it.”

Eccleston says that he had no trouble baring his backside for his sex scene with Foster, particularly because he and Foster were on the same page. “Fortunately for me, Jodie and myself are exactly the same generation,” says Eccleston. “We came up doing sex scenes before #MeToo, before the advent of intimacy coaches—we’d gone the same route, albeit in different genders. So, we were very versed in how to behave towards another actor.”  

According to Eccleston, a happy accident also helped ease the tension of filming the scene. “It was very funny. The first day I met Jodie and Issa in person, we were discussing the sex scene, we were discussing the relationship, and I leant on a rehearsal table and it smashed in two and I fell on my back which made Issa and Jodie hysterical with laughter,” he says. “Then me and Jodie lay down in the debris of this smashed table and to be honest that that did the job for us. That gave us the shorthand because we realized we had exactly the same sense of humor and same approach–You know, take the work seriously, but don’t take yourself seriously at all which really helps in a sex scene.”