True Detective: Night County Is Bad and Eventually Everyone Will Agree With Me

It's finally time to get something off my chest. I did not care for True Detective: Night Country for some very simple reasons. Night Country was made by someone who doesn't understand True Detective, and it was made by dumb people.

I understand that Night Country wasn't originally a True Detective story and was retooled. I get that. However, it's in the name. It's right there. Since it is, it must be viewed with the same lens, and it comes up wanting. SPOILERS BELOW.

TD has some nuanced ideas. There are three big ones.

1. There is nothing supernatural about evil. We like to think of evil as something that exists outside of us, but it's actually IN all of us. That doesn't make us all evil, though, just complicated.
   
2. In real life, the real bad guys almost always get away with it. You have to be OK with that in order to live.
3. If you fight the system, the system fights back and will ruin you rather than let go of what it has made.

Some examples:

Season 1: Marty thinks he's a "good man". It blinds him to so many things that he misses, and he remains an officer because he thinks that's what a "good man" would do. That blinds him to fact that higher-ups don't want the crime solved, never wanted it solved. They wanted a patsy for it, and he was all too willing to deliver it up. Meanwhile, Rust recognizes his own capacity for violence and distrusts those who look for a supernatural or Satanic explanation.

Rust gets discredited and tossed out of the force for continuing to investigate. It gets so bad that they think he actually committed the crimes. Marty is more or less fine. He did his job, and while he's not rich, he's doing OK. Rust is the better detective.

Ultimately, while there are a few arrests and the main villain dies, the main crux of the ending is that the bad guys are still around. They're so ingrained into everything that they're not all going to face justice, no matter how awful the crime. Yes, they got the one bad guy, but there's so much more.

Season 2: While it's a convoluted mess, Season 2 is saying much the same thing. Colin Farrell's character thinks he's a bad person who's made an awful mistake and blames himself for it. Taylor Kitsch's character thinks he's a bad person because he's gay. Rachel McAdams' character thinks she's bad because she was violated. They all, inversely, have to come to terms with the fact that they contain both good and evil in order to live.

In Season 2, there IS a shadowy cabal running things... the ruthless capitalists that use religion and dabble in the "occult" to give themselves cover. Ultimately, while some meet violent ends, the system continues on unabated. The real villains are never punished, and that has to be good enough for the last people left standing.

Season 3: It appears that the children were murdered and kidnapped in some strange religious ritual. However, it was all a misunderstanding orchestrated by someone with more money than sense. They found a patsy among the underclass that they could pin it on, and everyone moved on.

Because Mahershala Ali's character couldn't let it go, he was shoved in a basement. Ultimately, the villians are never punished, and that has to be good enough for everyone.

In Night Country, though, ghosts are real? I guess? And the bad guys get what they deserve? And for solving the crime and getting the bad guys imprisoned, everyone lives happily ever after?

That's just the first part of my argument. The second part is the actual "crime" makes no sense.

So, the crime is that there are a bunch of people who mysteriously vanish from a research facility and then turn up dead on the ice with screams frozen on their faces. They have very few clues, but they think it's connected to the murder of someone else that Kali Reis' character couldn't solve.

It seems like the government and the local mining company wants to take the whole case and sweep it under the rug quickly, which leads everyone to believe that it's part of something much bigger. It also appears that the old murder might be related to the mining company somehow.

It turns out that, no. None of it is related. The lady who got murdered years ago was the boyfriend of a researcher, and she found out the mine was polluting the water. The researchers stabbed her to death. Some cleaning women found out about it and chased the men out onto the ice, where it's surmised that the murdered woman's spirit killed them. That's it. Case is closed, mine closes, and every lives happily ever after except for Kali Reis who like, walks out onto the ice and dies maybe but is OK with it?

In the meantime, another character kills his own dad and seems mostly OK with it.

There are a lot of feints in different directions to make you think the story is deeper and more literary, but there's really nothing there. They keep wanting you to see something extra, and every time that you do the writers say, "Haha! You thought that was important, but it wasn't! You must feel like a real dum-dum!"

I recognize this kind of writing from BBC's Sherlock. They did this stuff all the time. That's because when a smart person writes smart people (like, say, Deadwood or the first season of The Terror) they know that you're not trying to trick the audience. All you're trying to do is tell a story well. When dumb people write smart people, like BBC's Sherlock or Night Country, they try and trick the audience in order to show the audience that the smart people are smarter than you. I hate it.

Look, I'm not going to deny that the show is stylish. Jodie Foster is great. Kali Reis is a revelation. It's good to see John Hawkes getting work. But while TD is a complicated look at morality and the grey area that we all live in, Night Country isn't.

I can almost guarantee what's going to happen in a few years: There will be a new season of True Detective, and everyone will hate it. Then they'll look back at Night Country and finally notice the flaws. I'm on the vanguard here.