True Detective: Night Country - Ending, Explained

Quick Links

• What Happens In The Ending Of True Detective: Night Country?

• Were The Murders Of Annie K. And The Tsalal Scientists In Any Way Supernatural?

• Navarro's Fate, Explained

• Burning Questions The True Detective: Night Country Finale Leaves Unanswered

And just like that, the fourth season of True Detective wrapped up and put another thrilling TV mystery down in HBO's history books. While it was the most suspenseful since the original and came with many interesting turns, it also fell short on a laundry list of things, leaving lots to explain.

Which True Detective Seasons Are Connected?

Is True Detective finally returning to its surreal Lovecraftian roots?

True Detective: Night Country features the dual investigative narrative of a six-year-old cold case of Annie K. and the seemingly unnatural murders of the scientists conducting research at the Arctic station known as Tsalal. As you piece together the puzzle and see the ending for yourself, you'll certainly be left with some questions.

You don't have to be a true detective to find out that major spoilers for Night Country are ahead.

What Happens In The Ending Of True Detective: Night Country?

Episode 6 kicks things off right from where the fifth one ended. Danvers and Navarro are already at the entrance to the ice cave and going inside, while Peter is cleaning the crime scene at Liz's house, where he shot and killed his father.

After reaching a dead end in the tunnel, Liz decides the duo should go back right before Navarro and Liz fall through into the cave's sublevel.

They end up coming across the murder site of Annie K., an ominous prehistoric fossil frozen in the ice ceiling above just as in the video she recorded before her death, and the room is seemingly where the scientists were extracting their data on the ice cores.

Soon after, Raymond Clark shows up, and quickly climbs back up a ladder that leads to a room inside Tsalal Station. Danvers and Navarro are in pursuit, but he locks Danvers in a freezer and knocks Navarro out.

Danvers is able to escape and Navarro manages to get free of Raymond and is seen beating him to a pulp, before Danvers stops her and gets her to help carry him and restrain Raymond to a chair.

After going through the torture of having the final recorded words and screams of Annie K. playing on a loop duct-taped to his ears, Raymond becomes ready to talk and he spills the truth about what happened to Annie.

It turns out that the climate scientists needed excessive quantities of pollution from the mine to help with extracting the cores to conduct their research (a little counterintuitive). Annie Kowtok, Raymond's then-girlfriend, found out, tried documenting it, and was killed for it.

A flashback plays showing what really happened. Annie destroyed all the cores and research the team worked on, which triggered the anger of one of the scientists, Anders Lund, to repeatedly stab her. Soon, the other Tsalal scientists joined him and gruesomely took turns stabbing her to death.

Raymond claims to Navarro and Liz that he wouldn't touch Annie and that he loved her, but the truth reveals that he suffocated her to put her out of her misery and speed up her death rather than leave the station with her and get her medical help.

You also find out Peter's dad, Hank Prior, was the one behind the cover-up of Annie K.'s murder, under the orders of Silver Sky Mining.

Eventually, Raymond Clark commits suicide and dies on the ice in the same way the Tsalal scientists went out, before Liz and Danvers get a chance to question him further.

Raymond remains under the impression that Annie's spirit took vengeance on the scientists, and that he was alive only because he went down to the sublevel and held the hatch closed, keeping the rest from escaping with him.

Meanwhile, Peter drives Liz's daughter to his wife, so she'd have some company on New Year's, and then takes the bodies of his father and Otis Heiss to Rose Aguineau who has the location of the dumping spot in the lake.

Back at Tsalal, Liz follows Evangeline Navarro's trail onto the ice following a heated argument they had about her deceased son, which leads to Danvers seeing him underneath the ice and falling into the freezing depths.

Navarro comes to her senses and quickly rushes to get Danvers safely out of the water. After they rest, warm up, and get on better terms, Danvers gets an idea to check for fingerprints and handprints on the hatch, only to find Blair Hartman's set (the domestic violence victim from the season opener!).

The Best Detective Games On PS4 & PS5

These detective games will make you drop your DualShocks and DualSenses for a fedora and notepad.

Next comes the finale's biggest revelation and twist that will make your jaw drop. Who murdered the scientists? The answer is Tsalal's cleaning lady, Beatrice, or 'Bee,' along with Blair and a few friends.

Bee discovered what happened to Annie K. and turned to vigilante justice. Bee and Blair, together with their armed group of Indigenous women, cut the power, rounded up all the men to transport them in a truck to the middle of nowhere in the ice, and forced them to strip naked and run to their deaths.

Seeing it is a fitting end and a more than reasonable punishment for Annie K.'s murderers, and with Silver Sky already having closed the case as natural causes due to an extreme weather event, Navarro and Danvers can now put it all behind them.

One final ending twist shows that Raymond went on record to detail everything about the mine, Tsalal, and the extremely harmful pollution they were causing, thus shutting the doors of the mine for good.

Were The Murders Of Annie K. And The Tsalal Scientists In Any Way Supernatural?

Whether or not the murders were surpernatural has all been purposefully left to the audience's interpretation by the writer and creator, Issa López, and this might be most disappointing to a lot of audiences anticipating a more Lovecraftian turn.

In the case of Annie, it wasn't a supernatural murder, but rather she was the victim of a heinous and brutal stabbing by the suddenly violent climate researchers wanting to cover up pollution.

What happened to the scientists is more uncertain. Did they see something before they died? Was it natural that they froze in such a way? Was it hallucinations from their intense hypothermia, or was there a being?

Beatrice keeps telling Navarro that it was "She" who would ultimately decide the scientists' fates, referring to the same entity that Navarro kept hearing in the multiple premonitions telling her "She's awake."

Certain analysis suggests that "She" might be a reference to Sedna, goddess of the sea and the underworld in Inuit mythology, which would explain the superstitions of Raymond and the Inuit women led by Bee, and the paranormal phenomena happening around Ennis.

Darwin's drawing of a woman bleeding from her hands as a result of missing fingers relates to the legend of Sedna and is described by his mother as "a local legend." In an Instagram post, creator Issa López also confirmed it was indeed Darwin's childlike interpretation of Sedna.

It's safe to assume that the scientists probably saw the goddess Sedna before their deaths and died in such a state after looking at a higher being, who also enacted her own judgment upon them for what they did to her land and indigenous women. (Again, this is pure speculation).

There is an underlying supernatural element in Night Country throughout the season, with Navarro entering in and out of a spirit plane like Marianne in The Medium and seeing Danvers' son Holden, as well as Rose getting visits from Rust Cohle's father, Travis Cohle, which quickly loses any significance it had.

The Lovecraftian element and anything related to sci-fi seemed to be a giant red herring for a more logical and reasonable outcome. The sinister spirals and straw figures tied to the Tuttle cult from Season 1, Cthulhu-like graffiti, and the ancient fossil of the organism went completely ignored by the end.

The 19 Best Detective Games, Ranked

Video games revolving around being a detective are few and far between, and these ten are the absolute best when it comes to this underrated genre.

This calls back to the season one finale, where Rust and Marty confront Errol Childress and the Yellow King, who wasn't actually Hastur from Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, and Carcosa was never shown, only a cosmic portal seen by Rust and also left ambiguous as to whether it was real or not.

Therefore, True Detective plays with ideas of cosmic horror, sci-fi, and Lovecraft mythos, only to be like Scooby-Doo and give you a perfectly logical conclusion and still leave things up to you.

Navarro's Fate, Explained

This is something that's also left to the audience's interpretation. Everyone will draw different conclusions as to how Navarro's story ends or where it goes after the final episode.

The whole season, Navarro was grappling with the mental illness in her family, visions of a spirit world beyond and her belief in it, her sister's suicide, and some pretty destructive behavior in the aftermath.

Then comes this impactful moment in the finale when Navarro is lured to the ice and the voice of her mother's ghost finally comes through, where she tells Navarro her Iñupiaq name is Siqinnaatchiaq, which translates to "the return of the sun after the long darkness."

All the spirit manifestations come full circle to give Navarro a new sense of identity and hope and allow her to help her partner Liz Danvers heal by opening up about how her son Holden is saying that he sees her.

Some might think Navarro went to reunite with her sister Julia and her mom in the spirit realm, and some might think she just disappeared while still occasionally keeping in touch with Danvers, as agreed.

An orange rolls out in front of Navarro when she opens the fridge at Tsalal, and her sister Julia also sees an orange roll out in front of her before she decides to kill herself.

While you learn from Navarro that oranges are her mother's favorite fruit, the rolling of an orange is also a storytelling technique and Easter egg to foreshadow death, stemming from The Godfather, where oranges almost certainly guarantee death.

One thing is certain, however. Liz Danvers assures the audience that they won't ever find Evangeline Navarro out in the ice (a telltale sign that she's out there somewhere and still alive).

Burning Questions The True Detective: Night Country Finale Leaves Unanswered

Even though True Detective: Night Country provides closure on the Annie Kowtok case and the murders of the Tslal scientists, as well as the fate of the mine and Liz Danvers' relationship with her adoptive daughter, so many things remain unresolved.

Here are some lingering 'right' questions we still have to ask:

• What is the "Night Country," and is Ennis, Alaska a bridge to the spirit world?
• What exactly led to the car accident that claimed the lives of Danvers' son and husband? Did Liz cause it?
• Is Navarro dead or alive when she visits Danvers on her porch?
• Why do eardrums rupture when seeing the dead, and why the weird pointing?
• What does the recurring song 'Twist and Shout' by The Beatles have to do with anything?
• What happened to the baby after Navarro and Danvers killed Wheeler for murdering his wife?
• Was the polluted water the cause of the visions from spirits the people of Ennis were experiencing?
• Who severed Annie K.'s tongue and left it at Tsalal six years later?
• Was the woman heading the Silver Sky mine, Kate McKittrick, related to the Tuttles?
• What was wrong with the deer at the beginning to make them commit suicide by running off a cliff?
• What was the deal with Raymond's obsession with the spiral and making dolls and figurines like Errol Childress, especially at the Tsalal site?
• What was the purpose and significance of the spiral in Night Country's story?
• Was Hank Prior involved with the Tuttle's child trafficking pedophile ring, since it was implied he was expecting a child bride?
• What was Oliver Tagaq so afraid of and why did he flee in the wind?
• What happened to Danvers' superior Ted Connelly after the political fallout from the mine?
• What was that graffiti depicting a tentacle creature and prehistoric fossil all about?

10 Best A24 TV Shows

A24 is mostly known for its genre-bending films, but they've also been behind some of the best TV shows of the last few years.