REVIEW: ‘True Detective: Night Country’ Episode 3 — “Part 3”

At the end of the last episode, Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and her team make a shocking discovery in Clark’s (Owen McDonnell) trailer. Ritualistic in nature, it’s clear that whatever happened to the Tsalal researchers wasn’t unintentional. In True Detective: Night Country Season 4 Episode 3, “Part 3,” the audience learns more about Danvers and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), and the danger for women in the town comes into focus.

Directed by showrunner Issa López, True Detective Season 4 Episode 3 features a teleplay by López and Alan Page Arriaga. After sifting through the remnants of Clark’s trailer, Navarro and Danvers find clues about his relationship with Annie K (Nivi Pedersen) and the hairdresser, who may be the only person who knew about them. As they close in on potential motives behind Annie’s death, the duo learns about an ex-researcher and attempts to find him.

The most important part of True Detective Season 4 Episode 3 is how much it centers on the life of indigenous women in Ennis. The process of giving birth and the process of grieving a child. Their safety is repeatedly highlighted as never guaranteed, whether they’re a newborn baby or an adult. Last episode, Danvers and her stepdaughter Leah (Isabella Star LaBlanc) butted heads directly. With racist remarks flying, Danvers is immediately unlikable as she instructs Leah to remove her kakiniit, the cultural tattoo worn by Inuit women.

The scene is repeated again in this episode with a new edge. As the mystery around Annie’s death begins to unravel, one thing becomes crystal clear: Bad things are happening to the indigenous people, women, who are vandalizing and protesting the mine that acts as the Ennis’s economic lifeblood. When Leah comes from a meeting, Danvers finds her and says, “Do you know what happens to those people?!”

After demanding that Leah remove her kakiniit one more time and watching her stepdaughter as she wiped her heritage away, the scene transitions into a picture of a dead Annie K. She’s on the morgue table. Her kakiniit visitle. There is no defending Danvers and her approach to ridiculing and vilifying the indigeneity of her daughter. But True Detective Season 4 Episode 3 offers context.

As a cop, seeing dead indigenous women, beaten indigenous women, that is all that Danvers can see. The kakiniit is a sign calling for attack, and she wants to protect her daughter from it. “Do you know what happens to those people?!”

Smart editing choices and transitions drive this point home. While Danvers may pretend to not recognize the high rate at which Inuit women are being murdered or go missing in front of Navarro, she knows the reality. This makes her character more of a coward than complex, but it works as the rest of the mystery hurdles forward with increasing intensity.

Danvers’ refusal to connect to the Inuit women throughout the episode and the series so far has put that unbearable weight on Navarro. She has to navigate the police station, where Hank Prior (John Hawkes) doesn’t respect her or respond to her. She has to put herself in line to find missing people like the ex-researcher turned hunter. Navarros has to interrupt a doula delivering a child. Constantly, Navarro has to disrupt spaces and people who mean so much to her just to find out how to help. But she wears that exhaustion in detail, especially when she realizes how much her station has thrown her out to dry.

However, while the specter of violence hangs heavy on the Inuit women of Ennis, this is the first episode where we get to see them existing together. They feel joy in this episode; they support each other, and the women are more than their pain. It’s a contrast to how we’ve seen them in the previous episodes, especially since they are so focused on Annie’s brutal murder.

True Detective Season 4 Episode 3 also gives the audience insight into Danvers and Navarro’s relationship. When Peter Prior (Finn Bennett) asks why the two women drifted apart into hatred of one another, the answer he gets is not a truthful one. When Prior asks Danvers about the murder-suicide case that drove a wedge between her and Navarro, he and the audience get two different answers.

Danvers explains the situation, saying that they found both people dead. Only the audience is shown the truth, and that’s not what happened. This moment carries a lot of weight. Despite Danvers’ cold demeanor, there is still something there between her and Navarro, enough that she feels the need to protect her former partner. As the episode continues, there is animosity and hostility between the two detectives. They disagree constantly and grate against each other’s nerves constantly.

But that kind of discomfort with someone only comes from caring deeply for them. At the very least, Danvers cares, and somewhere under the surface, it looks like Navarro may care, too. Closer than they are apart, True Detective Season 4 Episode 3 does a lot to build out the women individually but also as a pair. As they finally work together, everything begins to quicken.

As the case begins to come together, True Detective Season 4 Episode 3 also marks a sharp shift in tone. While the corpsicle and the score have done a lot of work to embrace the horror genre in this detective story, the final five minutes of this episode take everything to a new level. The supernatural emerged as a viable option for what’s happening in Ennis since Rose (Fiona Shaw) saw a dead man instruct her on where to find the missing Tslal researchers. Now, as the reality that the workers died before they became joined in the ice, fleeing in fear,

That said, True Detective: Night Country has solidified itself on fantastic cliffhanger endings that shock the audience into anticipating what is coming next. In this episode, we finally get to see Anders in the hospital. He has had multiple limbs amputated, frostbite has taken hold of his fingers and face, his eyes have nearly exploded, and he is monstrous. As he mumbles and grasps the air, the audience and the detectives aren’t sure how he is alive or even if he is. The shocking detail that the creative team has played in decaying this living man’s body is astonishing. Everything about him looks as if it’s shattering.

But with the fear in his eyes, the episode chooses to complicate itself even more and finally reference what happened in Episode 1. Someone is awake, and the men of Tslal have left her buried in the ice. After he delivers a line just to Navarro, the plot thickens, and it gets darker.

Where True Detective Season 4 Episode 3 ends is different from everything we’ve seen up until this point, but it still pulls in the horror that engrossed me in Episode 1. As a whole, the episode is just too good. It bridges gaps between characters, pulls Ennis into context, and takes a hard left into the weird in the best chilling way.

True Detective: Night Country is streaming now on MAX (formerly HBO MAX).