True Detective’s Issa López on Her Inspiration for ‘Night Country’ and What Season 5 Might Bring

López revealed that she took inspiration from antiquity and an infamous figure from the more recent past when figuring out who the various murderers would be for her installment of True Detective. “I’m very, very fond of Greek tragedy,” she said.  “The undoing of the hero is always ambition and sometimes generosity. The tragic mistake is more interesting when it comes from an ambition to do good. I conceived this around the deepest end of the pandemic. I remember that I was watching [an] Elizabeth Holmes documentary, and interestingly, they had a philosopher as one of the talking heads, which I had never seen in a true crime thing. The guy was saying, ‘It’s kind of a disease—the feeling that you have a mission to do good.’ When you have a mission for the greater good, nothing will stop you from doing horrible things.”

And thus López came up with the Tsalal research scientists, wholly dedicated to their research that they believed had the potential to change the world for good, but are simultaneously responsible for the murder of Annie K. “I knew that justice had to come to them,” she said of the scientists. “In my initial three pages that I always write to myself, I knew exactly who had done it.” Enter the indigenous female community of Ennis, Alaska, who avenged Annie K’s death by leaving the Tsalal scientists in the frozen tundra. “The fact is we don’t pay attention to certain people, and that’s exactly what the series is about,” López said. She name checks the receptionist at the mine, the woman that washes the dishes at the police station, the woman that cleans at the hospital—women who appear throughout the series but many would never have expected to be involved with the central mystery. “That’s exactly the cardinal sin that hopefully the audience will make… all of these women that we don’t pay attention to, as happens with the victims of these crimes, are the ones that had enough and decide to change the story.”

Although López constructed an airtight narrative to explain the murders of Annie K and the Tsalal scientists, she quite enjoyed the various fan theories that emerged as the season progressed. “What I find super entertaining is the obsession that people are developing with the color blue,” she said. “There’s a lot of blue in the art and the photography style that [director of photography] Florian Holtmeister went for and what [production designer] Daniel Taylor, the production designer did comes together pretty blue. It makes sense because the first season was very yellow and very ochre and there was a yellow king in it, and this is very blue.” While the color yellow ended up playing an important part of the first season, the color blue was not, in fact, an easter egg in Night Country. “The crab factory is called The Blue King,” López says. “There is nothing beyond that.”

Another color—or fruit, rather—had a bit more significance in the story. “I love the idea of the orange,” López said. “The orange comes from a scene that I wrote in one of the earlier passes of Drafts where Navarro was sent to do a super pedestrian thing in the middle of all of this. Because of ice in the roads, a truck of oranges had toppled and there were oranges all over the road. [Navarro] was super bored, picked up an orange. She throws the orange into the darkness, gets a call, and then the orange comes back. Then the orange started to move into the story.” The significance  of the oranges was slightly influenced by The Godfather and Navarro’s supernatural connection with the deceased. “I did think of The Godfather because it is the announcement of death coming to us,” she says. “At the very end in episode six, [Navarro] says, ‘My mother loved oranges.’ So it does feel that she’s sending them back as part of her call of her visitation of ‘Don’t forget who’s on this side.’