Warning! Contains major spoilers for True Detective season 4.
True Detective: Night Country has a hidden connection with a hit Mike Flanagan series, which might offer the answer to the show’s biggest mystery. Serving as the fourth installment of the HBO series, True Detective: Night Country presents a compelling hook in its opening episode, where it highlights how a group of researchers has suddenly disappeared. Although the episode’s end reveals that the researchers were buried in ice by something or someone, the show’s biggest mystery remains unsolved: What happened to the researchers at Tsalal?
Since it is True Detective: Night Country‘s central overarching mystery, many theories surrounding it have already emerged. While some connect it with the show season 1, others point toward Alaskan myths and climate change themes. Only time will tell what happened to the researchers at Tsalal, but one connection between True Detective: Night Country and a Mike Flanagan Netflix show might have some answers.
What Happened To Annie In True Detective: Night Country?
Although True Detective season 4’s episode 1 does not reveal everything about Annie’s mysterious death, it hints at what might have happened to her.
The Fall Of The House Of Usher & True Detective: Night Country Draw References To An Edgar Allan Poe Novel
True Detective: Night Country‘s central mystery revolves around a group of missing scientists who worked at an Alaskan research facility called TSALAL. Tsalal is also the name of a remote island in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, where the titular character, Arthur Gordon Pym, and his fellow explorers arrive during their expedition. Although Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of the Usher does not directly adapt The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, it subtly refers to the book and the island by revealing that Mike Hamill’s Gordon Pym had been on a bizarre global expedition and explored obscure parts of the world.
True Detective: Night Country’s Tsalal Reference Might Answer What Happened To The Researchers
Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket dabbles with themes of survival, isolation, and intercultural conflicts. The story also explores cosmic ideas surrounding humanity’s fear of the unknown and, in many ways, serves as an allegory for moral degradation in the name of exploration. While Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher only brushes over the Edgar Allan Poe tale to highlight how Pym became so calloused, True Detective: Night Country seems to be presenting a closer reimagining of the novel’s ideas.
In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket‘s Tsalal arc, the central explorers get ambushed by the indigenous people of Tsalal, and many of them even get murdered. The story uses this clash between the explorers and the locals as a narrative device to highlight the darker aspects of the explorers’ unchecked quest for discovery. Something similar seems to be happening in True Detective: Night Country. The researchers at Tsalal were looking for the “origins of life,” but likely took their scientific endeavors a little too far and gradually descended into a moral quicksand.
As the researchers did more and more immoral things in the name of scientific exploration, the locals of Ennis grew suspicious of their activities. They were also likely responsible for Annie K’s murder, which further encouraged the suspicious locals to kill them. As convincing as this may seem, however, it does not explain True Detective: Night Country‘s seemingly supernatural elements.
True Detective
In this anthology series, each season follows a different detective or set of detectives as they forced to confront some horrific truths about their town and themselves. No matter the setting and characters, each detective must unravel lies and clues to solve the chilling mysteries around them.
- Release Date
- January 12, 2014
- Cast
- Matthew McConaughey , Woody Harrelson , Colin Farrell , Rachel McAdams , Taylor Kitsch , Mahershala Ali , Carmen Ejogo , Michelle Monaghan , Michael Potts , Ray Fisher , Jodie Foster
- Seasons
- 3
- Story By
- NIC PIZZOLATTO
- Writers
- Nic Pizzolatto
- Network
- HBO Max
- Streaming Service(s)
- Hulu , HBO Max
- Directors
- Cary Fukunaga
- Showrunner
- Nic Pizzolatto
