Don't know how many peeps here have seen the latest season of True Detective called "Night Country", but so far I've really enjoyed it. However strolling over to lovely has a lot of blubbering manchildren upset about the new season which just so happens to have two female leads, focuses upon abuses of Native Alaskans and women in general (domestic abuse, murder, etc), and also has native empowerment over exploitation as a theme. Well I just watched the final episode and I fuckin' loved it, so here's kinda a short tldr of it marked as a spoiler as I encourage y'all to see the show first if you haven't (it's an anthology so really only Seasons 1, 3 and this one are worth it).
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Alright so the season began with a murder/suicide of a bunch of research scientists digging up ice cores to find microbes for eternal life or whatever (they had been found naked dead on the ice), however while checking the crime scene a human tongue is found and connected with the murder of a Alaskan Native woman several years ago by the name of Annie K (a woman that protested the activities of the local mining corp that was poisoning the town leading to stillbirths and other horrible stuff). Annie was a central figure to the town's native population being one of the younger upcoming midwives and spiritualist (don't know the proper term). She had been found stabbed and dumped over by the mine and her murder buried by the police and local politicians in cooperation with the mine to avoid public backlash.
Welp turns out she was murdered by the Tsalal scientists when she found out they were the ones responsible for the pollution in a bid to thaw the permafrost and ice to get to harder to reach ice core samples. This would later be found out by the local circle of Native Women who performed a lot of the menial labor in town (maids and so had access to a lot of areas such as the police station, the mining office and the Tsalal station), so in revenge the women staged a faked suicide on to the ice, forcing the men at gunpoint to strip and wander into a blizzard for the sins they committed (all the men were responsible for stabbing Annie K to death Agustus Ceasar style when she tried sneaking into Tsalal many years ago to find info on the pollution). Anyway the season ends with the current cop duo covering for the Native women and letting the murder go unsolved as well as resolving issues of mother hood and sisterhood (similar to how season 1 was about the lacking of fathers and brothers/comrades as a secondary theme).
So yeah gonna be a lot of in response to the show being turned into "Woke Detective". Anyway it's a pretty good season and is worth a try even though it does drag sometimes (but is thankfully only 6 episodes something I think was wisely chosen by the show lead).
I didn't particularly like this season, and knowing that the story wasn't written as a "True Detective" season goes a long way to explaining why it is the way it is. I think there's probably a very good story in it, but it was damaged by trying to shoehorn True Detective tie-ins and themes to a story that didn't fit them. The acting was pretty good, but I think it would have been better as a movie without any awkward True Detective stuff tacked on.
Like, its fine. The big distinction between this season and prior seasons
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does feel like they needed to give it a happy-ish ending. Rather than our gumshoes coming upon a dread behemoth of human horror operating at the edge of our perception, we've got a conspiracy of the underclass revolting against elites. Which is... fine on its face. But it seems to cut across the actual events of the show, in which supporting caste are actively in conflict with the organizations that were presumably already defeated by the conspiracy's acts.
There's also this pseudo-scientific "we cracked the secret of life! we just had to destroy the local ecology to do it!" bit at the end, that never really has a coherent consequence. Its a motive for what was going on, but it stumbles out as a definitive in a show that works best when it keeps the really weird shit on the edge.
I was hoping for a bit of Reanimator by the final episode, but all I really got was The Proletariat as the guy under the mask at the end of an episode of Scooby Do.
One of the more recent TrueAnon Epsidoes breaks it down better than I could. But Season 4 feels more like a True Detective themed show than a proper season.
Yeah, so much of it seemed rushed or hacked together to please the execs who wanted a fourth season.
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The spiral was just slapped on top, the scientists encouraging pollution to soften the ice instead of just heat powered by the grid their station is hooked up to. The blizzard was also badly done, if that research station truck was there the whole time why not get in it and run the motor and heater when the station lost power. For that matter, if they were able to keep going outside and standing in it, why couldn't they drive in it?
I'd rate it on par with season 3 and much better than season 2 (that one was incoherent as all get out), nothing however tops season 1 just for how well crafted the timeline skips and callbacks to previous individuals is (was a very well done mystery). I feel that this season had some good themes on female alienation similar to male alienation of season 1 (refusal to properly address the demands of fatherhood versus the grief of a woman stopping her from fully embracing motherhood again towards others). The overall narrative was also pretty nice to see but did stumble at times even with the short episode count (something I'm thankful for as 10 eps would have dragged on for way too long).