Vrai Detective Night Country, saison 4, semble inclure un élément fortement surnaturel, au moins selon son premier épisode.
There is perhaps no more confounding TV series that True Detective, where season 1 gave us one of the best televised detective stories ever, while seasons 2 and 3 not only didn’t quite live up, but it’s taken us a decade to get to season 4 here, now subtitled Night Country.
On Sunday, True Detective season 4 premiered, showing a new case unfolding with Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kail Reis) investigating a bizarre mass murder, perhaps connected with an old case.
While the setting is eerie, it’s great to see Jodie Foster again and Reis is promising, I was not expecting…well, most of what went on last night. And despite great reviews, I’m a little skeptical of what’s to come. Namely, after three seasons and a new writer, True Detective appears to be fully leaning into the supernatural. How? Well, even in this first episode, a bunch of ways (spoilers follow):
In the opening scene we see a bunch of (kind of badly CGI-ed) caribou run off a cliff as soon as the last sunset of the season occurs.
In the scientific facility, a man is frozen, shaking in place, then says “she’s awake” in the last scene we see from the facility before all the men disappear.
Later, Jodie Foster awakes from an apparent dream, possibly about a dead child, and sees a stuffed polar bear on the floor with an eye missing. Again we hear “She’s awake.”
At around the same moment we see Navarro driving who is literally stopped by a giant (CGI) Polar Bear with one eye, and she hears “She’s awake.”
Then, an old woman is led to the frozen-in-the-ground corpses of the missing scientists after what appears to be the ghost of her dead husband leads her to them.
So…w-what?
It’s true that True Detective has at least dipped its toe in supernatural elements, but that was mainly things that could actually be explained like Rust’s hallucinations in season 1. I don’t really get how you explain away the “She’s awake” whispering across multiple characters, and things like the ghost leading the woman around without admitting that yes, we are getting a heavy supernatural element this season.
I don’t know how I feel about that. I suppose I’m not fully opposed to supernatural elements in a mystery like this, though for True Detective specifically, previously rooted in reality, it feels weird. But I would be a little upset if the main killer ends up being some mystical spirit rising in the night to get revenge or something instead of…an actual killer. That’s just not really why you watch a show like True Detective?
Granted, this is only the initial episode, and I know critics have seen more to issue these high scores. But it certainly was quite a strange start to the season, and I’m not sure how heavily it’s going to keep leaning on the supernatural from here.
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