All this transpires against the backdrop of Ennis itself, a community of intimate familial bonds and suffocating closeness. There’s the malevolent mining company that both poisons the town’s water supply and employs half of its residents; there’s the local Inupiat community, all seeking to triangulate their identities in a town largely ruled by whites; there’s the robust Alaska Native protest movement against the mine, which used to be led by Annie K. and now has attracted Danvers’s Inupiat stepdaughter; there’s Navarro’s beloved sister, fighting against hospitalization for mental illness; there are a variety of romantic entanglements that complicate nearly every interaction; there are corrupt cops and scuzzy politicians and militant nomads and village madwomen and secrets upon secrets buried beneath the ice.
But beyond all that, there are ghosts. From the very beginning, we hear from characters of all stripes that life at the edge of the world is frequently populated by the dead. Sometimes the specters are merely chatty, other times they are potentially murderous. Danvers remains a skeptic, but she’s pretty much alone in that. In fact, it is Night Country’s most pivotal intervention as part of the True Detective universe that its supernatural subplots are pointedly not red herrings. Part of what sustained so much fan obsession in the original series was the notion that, beneath these visible crimes, there was some invisible force at work. Maybe God, maybe the devil, maybe an earthly manifestation of one or the other—we, along with Rust and Marty, got distracted by all this mythology that would eventually slough away in the end.
Night Country is considerably more committed to its cosmic overtones, and in the process reveals something about the original show. It portrays a community that believes in spirits: In a pragmatic sense, then, there are ghosts in Ennis, Alaska. In this setting, they are simply a part of the ensemble. “Rejoice,” an old woman tells Rust in the first season. “Death is not the end.” True Detective was about crafting a world in which such a revelation might alternately bring mortal terror and relief. I’m not sure I fully realized the truth of that until I saw López’s take on the franchise here. She watched the same show we did, and she found something we missed.