Television

This week’s episode finally answers some questions that have been teased out for a long time.This week’s recap is posting earlier than usual because the episode premiered Friday on Max.Season 4, Episode 5: Part 5She’s awake. The show, that is.After last week’s episode spend too much time fussing over underdeveloped subplots and supernatural occurrences, this week’s hour snaps to attention like a procrastinating student who had been putting off a term paper. There have been stretches where “Night Country” has left the case untended, letting it thaw away in the background like the corpsicle at center ice. Too often, the show’s rich ambience has slipped into abstraction, leaving the detectives to wrestle with ghosts and lingering personal traumas while the more compelling tensions within Ennis are addressed in fits and starts. The forensics report on the scientists’ bodies only just came back this week!There are few ruminative moments in this penultimate episode and the excitement of the premiere comes rushing back, because there are finally some answers to the questions that have been teased out for so long. Danvers and Navarro are getting closer to the truth of what happened to the scientists and Annie K., which triggers the conspiratorial forces within the town and presents them with a race-against-the-clock scenario that not only reignites the show, but deepens its themes. In the classic noir tradition, the procedural elements are telling a larger story about the powers-that-be, like Jack Nicholson following a routine infidelity case into a web of municipal corruption in “Chinatown.”The mine has been the black heart of “Night Country,” pumping poison through the city’s water taps and government institutions. It remains to be seen what kind of threat Annie K. might have represented for the business, but Danvers and Navarro are more convinced than ever that the network of ice caves outside town hold the answer. Getting access to the caves, however, is no small matter. Their only feasible guide is Otis, a cagey German heroin addict with scorched eyeballs who once mapped the caves. They manage to get to base of the cave, but it is on mine company property and the entrance has been blown to pieces. Should they find another way in, they have to worry about the glass-like instability of the ice, to say nothing of Raymond Clark and other potential dangers.Meanwhile, Danvers’s young protégé, Peter, has something else to show for all the hard work that has finally gotten him kicked out of his house. After delivering information on Otis last week, Peter offers another file definitively connecting the mine to the Tsalal Research Station, which had been receiving funding in exchange for dubiously rosy pollution data. When Danvers gets called to a meeting at the mine offices with its owner, Kate McKittrick (Dervia Kirwan), and Ted, Danvers’s overseer and third-rate occasional sex partner, she assumes it is going to be a dressing-down about a protest that had turned violent, even though policing the scene was not her responsibility. She tucks the file away like a gun in an ankle holster.Danvers was right to expect an ambush. First, Kate presents surveillance footage of Danvers and Navarro scoping out the mine entrance and pumps her for information on why they were there. Then she cheerily offers the good news that the forensics team in Anchorage determined that the scientists had died en masse because of a freak weather event that kicked up when they were perhaps catching the last sunset before the long night. Danvers knows enough about the case by now to roll her eyes at this explanation, and she confronts Kate with the incriminating file, but Kate and Ted have another card to play. Ted knows the Wheeler case wasn’t a murder-suicide and suggests that Danvers and Navarro would be wise to stop snooping.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Danvers wrestles with her demons. Navarro does, too, but hers appear to be of a different sort.Season 4, Episode 4: ‘Part 4’There’s a classic bit on “The Simpsons” where a panel of children are seated as a focus group for “The Itchy & Scratchy Show” and asked what they want to see from the long-running cartoon, which has started to flag in the ratings. After an exasperating series of responses, the moderator sums up his findings: “So you want a realistic, down-to-earth show that’s completely off the wall and swarming with magic robots?”That’s what “Night Country” is starting to feel like as it heads down the backstretch. It is a realistic, down-to-earth police procedural that’s swarming with supernatural beings and lots of storytelling bric-a-brac. To an extent, that’s part of the “True Detective” brand, to flood the zone with enough symbols, Easter eggs and plot tributaries to keep the Subreddits humming all season with theories about which ones will pay off and which ones will wriggle off with the other red herrings. As the season’s showrunner, Issa López, and her writers start to bring the season to a close, there’s already some evidence that the show has spread itself too thin, despite an abundance of laudable elements.Take the fate of Navarro’s sister, Julia (Aka Niviana). The image of this lonely, troubled young woman spending her last moments among the icebound wreckage before walking naked into the dark is a haunting one. One of the great strengths of “Night Country” — and the three Nic Pizzolatto seasons of “True Detective” before it — is how beautifully it can conjure these modern noir images from distinct locales.And yet, so little narrative real estate was given over to Julia until this final episode that her death feels more like a device than an emotional payoff. In a pre-credits scene, we witness Danvers’s compassion in scooping her off the streets and bringing into the station, which brings her closer to Navarro. As for Navarro herself, the heaviness of this loss is a family curse that now threatens to swallow her, too.The most touching moment in the episode is a much smaller one. When Navarro gets the call from the Coast Guard about Julia, she and Peter have just finished a harrowing mission back to the nomad encampment on Christmas Eve. She suppresses her devastation when Peter asks if everything’s OK and sends him off to be with a family that is still intact. Her emotional generosity is a subtle payoff to a relationship that has been building around these two interconnected cases; the further “Night Country” strays from the grit-and-grind of police work, the less resonant it becomes. The mysteries around Annie’s murder and the frozen scientists link up so beautifully to the tensions within Ennis that the continued sprinkling of specters, flashbacks and various uncanny events has gotten distracting. There are many questions still to answer and only two episodes left.To that end, this week’s episode does address some of the business at hand. The “Blair Witch”-style video on Annie’s phone, presumably documenting the last moments of her life, includes whale bones frozen in the ice behind her, indicating an ice cave system the detectives are keen to locate. A team from Anchorage finally arrives to take the bodies away, despite Danvers’s desire to poke around them a little more for clues. (In sharing the news that the men were dead before they froze to Captain Ted, Danvers admits to doing “an independent pre-forensic evaluation,” which sounds better than saying that Peter’s veterinarian cousin looked at them.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More