‘True Detective: Night Country’ Somehow Made ‘Ferris Bueller’ Terrifying

When the first season of Nic Pizzolatto’s crime anthology series True Detective premiered in 2014, the semi-surreal procedural immediately drew comparisons to David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks for its brazenly auteurist sensibilities. Strange things go bump in the night, bodies are found alongside mysterious paraphernalia, and the low hum of a vague spirituality keeps everyone related to the murders on edge at all times. But the following two seasons of True Detective were less successful in drawing such an immense comparison to one of the most revered crime shows—and television shows, period—of all time. They lacked the eccentricity and the singular, eerie oddness of the first season.

Happily, that’s very much not the case in the highly anticipated fourth season, True Detective: Night Country, something you’ll know very well if you watched this week’s premiere. After a lengthy, six-year hiatus, the series is back and more bizarre than ever. And, much like another prestige mystery that aired after an extended break (cough, Twin Peaks: The Return, cough), there’s a unique air of humor to all of this darkness.

The first episode of Season 4 brings us back into small-town life, this time in the fictional Ennis, Alaska, where local detective Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and her misfit police cohorts are sent to investigate the disappearance of eight men at a nearby research station. Puzzled by what she finds, Liz brings in her old colleague (and foil), fellow detective Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), who suspects there’s more to the case. Those suspicions are quickly confirmed by a series of haunting scenes throughout the episode, making the desolate darkness of the Alaskan tundra feel inescapably cold, but certainly not icy enough to deter our intrigue over what the hell just happened.

The premiere kicks off with a scene at the Tsalal Arctic Research Station, where eight scientists are collecting samples of ancient Alaskan ice to test—for what, we don’t yet know. Alaska, which experiences around 60 days of consistent darkness between December and January, has just had its final sunset of the year. The researchers are going about their business, kicking back after a hard day’s work by doing chores and watching Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Suddenly, one of the men finds his colleague experiencing a short, standing seizure. When the man stops shaking, and his comrade asks if he’s alright, the seizing man fearfully replies, “She’s awake,” before the power cuts out.

Three days later, amid the omnipresent night, a supply stockist finds the station empty, with the Ferris Bueller parade scene playing on a loop in the common room. As he looks around to see who else might be there, something walks through a corridor, out of his sight. The only sign of human life is a severed tongue beneath a table in the station’s kitchen. Not long after, Danvers arrives at the scene, joining fellow officers Hank and Peter Prior (John Hawkes and Finn Bennett), a father-and-son detective duo. This twisted family dynamic gives True Detective: Night Country a tightly knit feel, conveying the familiarity that small-town residents have with their community.

Danvers tells Peter that she can tell by the indents on the tongue that it’s that of an Alaskan Native woman. “Repetitive behavior–it comes from licking the thread while fixing the fishing nets,” Danvers says. Back at the station, Danvers finds Navarro waiting in her office. “It’s not her tongue,” Danvers says, knowing exactly what conversation she’s about to have. Navarro suspects that this had something to do with a cold case she was bounced from six years prior, involving a murdered Native woman named Anne Masu Kowtok. Kowtok’s body was found brutalized and missing her tongue. But Danvers shuts Navarro down, leaving to go pick up her adopted daughter Leah (Isabella Star LeBlanc) from a friend’s house.

On their way home, Danvers and Leah get into an accident with a drunk driver, another local resident named Stacy. It’s a dark and dramatic scene, mangled into something stranger after Danvers throws Stacy into the drunk tank. Stacy pounds on the door and makes inhuman wailing noises that fill the entire building. When Hank tries to let her out to put everyone at the station out of their misery, Danvers tells them both, “I’m not letting a still-drunk DUI out just because sometimes she blows you.” When Stacy starts screaming and pounding all over again, the scene ends on a comically peculiar note. It’s an unsettling, hilarious sequence that feels reminiscent of a similarly chaotic car pile-up scene in Twin Peaks: The Return; while Pizzolatto serves only as executive producer this season, writer-director Issa López appears to be working from the same Lynchian cloth the series’ creator was at its start.

Danvers asks Peter to retrieve Anne Masu Kowtowk’s cold case file from Hank’s house, which he’s only able to do under the quick cover of grabbing an old photo to show his son. With the files safely in their hands, Danvers tells Peter that Anne was stabbed 32 times, and her body found outside of the Native villages. Anne was an activist and a protestor, someone who made a lot of enemies in her time. Navarro became obsessed with the case and started pestering powerful local officials, leading Danvers to take Navarro off the case and make her a patrol trooper.

Later that night, Danvers has a dream that a hand appears on her shoulder while she’s sleeping, and a child whispers the utterance the man at the Tsalal Station did just before the disappearance: “She’s awake.” When she wakes up, she finds a stuffed polar bear plush on her floor, with one of its black bead eyes plucked off. Elsewhere, while on patrol, Navarro is reaching out to old contacts from the Kowtok case, asking them if they have any familiarity with the Tsalal Station. At the mention of the station name, she too hears a voice say “she’s awake” through her car radio, just before seeing an actual polar bear with one eye, traipsing through the town’s streets.

Just outside of town, Rose Aguineau (Fiona Shaw) is working on gutting a deer in front of her home when her radio goes on the fritz. Looking around, she discovers the figment of a dead acquaintance named Travis, who beckons Rose to follow him through the snow. Closer to the Arctic Circle, Travis stops and violently moves his body before pointing in the direction he wants Rose to follow. Soon after, Danvers receives a call that the eight missing Tsalal Station scientists have been found. When she and Navarro reach the crime scene, they find Rose, who tells them that Travis showed her the way to the bodies. When Navarro replies that Travis is dead, Rose answers her by simply saying, “I know.”

The bodies are found buried up to their necks in the snow and ice, frozen with an expression of screaming terror across their faces. How they got there is a complete mystery, one of the many yet to be solved throughout this season. And while we’re working with an incredibly dense set of gnarled, intersecting plotlines, True Detective: Night Country is, so far, keeping them from becoming too tangled to follow. With the introduction of an undeniable supernatural element afoot, López’s intriguing new story—paired with her drolly offbeat writing—is primed to put this much-missed anthology back on track.