Hank Prior is a piece of … well, yeah, that’s my initial takeaway from the third episode of True Detective: Night Country. We already knew he was an abusive father and gave that odd spiel about “blood is blood.” Come to find out in the third episode, he was the police officer who took the call about Anne Kowtok being in a relationship with Raymond Clark, and did nothing about it because he basically viewed Anne as a whore. Despicable. On top of that, he brings in a bunch of hillbillies (as Danvers calls them) to help track down the missing (or deliberately hiding) Raymond Clark, and quips to Navarro that we don’t need him brought in alive. Again, piece of …
Meanwhile, Peter’s struggling in his right-hand man duties because his wife is annoyed at him always running off to do Danvers’ bidding as a police officer, another man was at the Tsalal Research Station before everything went down (and he’s a bit on edge, to say the least, when Danvers and Navarro visit him), and a veterinarian friend of Peter’s thinks the frosted corpses didn’t die from cold exposure but from fright like the caribou we saw at the start of the season running off the cliff. We also finally learn more about the Wheeler case that drove a wedge between Navarro and Danvers; it was a murder-suicide: a domestic abuser finally killed his wife, but when they arrived on the scene, the man was … “alive” and whistling. That was unnerving. Oh, and we see a flashback of Anne from seven years ago to open the episode acting as a midwife, and about to be arrested by Navarro until she realizes what Anne’s doing. What was she going to be arrested for? We don’t know.
Then, in the biggest part of the episode at the end naturally, the Tsalal researcher who was in the coma wakes up just long enough to tell Danvers someone was out there on the ice with them, coming after them, and then when Danvers disappears (to deal with the hillbillies going wild in the lobby, for some reason), the researcher in a spooky, supernatural voice tells Navarro that her dead mother says hello, “She’s waiting for you.” That was genuinely chilling. That’s followed up by Peter (somehow) breaking into Anne’s phone, where her last video was her saying she’s “found it; it’s here” before screaming her head off, presumably after being attacked. cue ominous music
There’s also something in the water, and not in the idiom sense: The water of Ennis is legitimately disgusting, and probably linked to what’s going on in the mine, and why the natives, including Anne, were and still are protesting its existence.
And of course, Danvers and Navarro still debate whether what’s happening has a rational reason (Danvers’ position) or a supernatural explanation (Navarro’s position). Navarro says she prays, and when Danvers pushes her on what that means, Navarro responds that she “listens.” Now, is Navarro losing her marbles the way her sister and apparently mother did, or is she tapping into the supernatural element taking over Ennis? Or is Danvers right and there will be a rational explanation for everything? Time will time, as this season continues to … thaw out. Heh.
Milam's Musings 