Is True Detective: North Country the return of the True Detective series?

True Detective is finally back with Season 4, five years after the 3rd. Seasons 2 and 3 never reached the prestige or excellence of Season 1, but diehard fans of the show never gave up hope. While True Detective: North Country doesn’t match up to the level of the first one, it is enjoyable and suspenseful on its own merit.

Turning a new leaf, this season features two female cops in the desolate Alaskan landscape, in a town called Ennis. Chief Danvers (Jodie Foster) appears at the scene of the crime, a research facility where eight scientists have eerily disappeared without leaving a note. Wait, that’s not entirely true. Someone wrote on a whiteboard ‘We are all dead’ with the Caps lock on. Her two deputies, the father and son duo of Hank and Peter Prior, respectively, lack Danvers’ shrewd observational skills, and this one’s a real puzzler. Along with the absence of the scientists, the facility also contains a chopped-off human tongue.

Trooper Navarro (Kali Reis) questions Danvers about the tongue suspecting it belongs to a young Native American woman named Annie K, whom she found brutally murdered a while back. Annie K’s murder was before Danvers arrived at Ennis but she is well-versed with the details of the case. The mystery deepens when the missing scientists are found frozen and dead by Rose (Fionna Shaw), who sees dead people.

Ennis is a town wrought with problems even without the murders, with the mines that leak poison in the running water claiming the lives of unborn Native American children, and with the emptiness being a hallow ground for fantasies, loneliness and alcoholism. The sense of time is off-kilter because there hasn’t been a ray of sunshine for days as is customary in this part of the world. It makes the editing look harsh with even the timestamps sprinkled across the show being of little help.

Since the two cases are inexplicably connected, Navarro and Danvers team up to get to the bottom of things. The last case they worked together on didn’t go well as a man murdered his wife leaving both women scarred. But they make a good team, having each other’s backs and filling in for the other’s blind spots.

Danvers is an outsider in Ennis; a lady version of Rod Steiger’s character from In the Heat of the Night. She doesn’t give monologues about her prejudices but you see them in her attitude. In the past, dominant and complex roles like Danvers would be written for men and with Foster at the helm, you get the screen presence and likeability of a star and a refreshing take given she’s a tiny, elderly lady. Just Reis’s towering frame against the frail Foster makes for a captivating image on screen. Reis holds her own against Foster with the build of a professional boxer (which she is), dealing with familial challenges and struggling to commit to her relationship with the local pub owner, Qavvik (Joel D. Montgrand).

The younger Prior, played by Finn Bennett, is in awe of his boss, letting her walk all over him at the price of his marriage. Danvers cares for the boy but there is an element of abuse of power that’s off-putting. His father, Hank Prior’s (an excellent John Hawkes) attempts in guiding the boy to straighten out his priorities fall on deaf ears since the admiration he has for Danvers seems all-consuming.

The many subplots tend to convolute the central mystery but Issa Lopez’s writing builds the suspense enough to keep one intrigued. It’s a modern-day Holmesean mystery mired with ominous symbols and supernatural happenings trying to evade us from the cold hard facts of the case. What should keep you hooked though are the rich characters, a fine mystery and a setting that’s truly spooky.

Danvers – ‘They live here all year long? All alone, just like monks? What are they looking for, digging that ice up?’

Peter Prior – ‘I think…the origin of life?’

Danvers- ‘Ah, that thing.’

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