Does Jodie Foster Make ‘True Detective’ Worth Watching Again?

True Detective may never recapture the original highs that turned it into a zeitgeisty phenomenon with the power to rejuvenate the career of a bona fide A-lister à la the McConaissance. Still, over its subsequent seasons (including its unfairly derided sophomore run), HBO’s crime series has continued to tap an appealingly anguished vein, using homicide investigations as vehicles for exploring an existential brand of loneliness, fury, and great inconsolable despair. No matter its stories’ nominal focuses, it’s an anthology swathed in a noir-ish shroud of misery and malevolence, and at its finest, it plumbs the bleakest recesses of the soul, as well as the terrifying ancient evils that refuse to die and endlessly corrupt us.

Five years after its underrated third go-round starring Mahershala Ali, the show returns with True Detective: Night Country on Jan. 14, a six-episode iteration most notable for being spearheaded not by creator Nic Pizzolatto but, instead, by Tigers Are Not Afraid director Issa López—and, also, for setting aside its trademark brooding machismo to fixate on a pair of female cops played by Jodie Foster and Kali Reis. Despite those twists, however, this new saga is in various ways an extension of its predecessors, in particular its sensational maiden season, including with regards to the baffling and horrific crime at its epicenter. Trying to bite off more than it can chew to the detriment of its own strengths, this multifaceted descent into a chilly abyss doesn’t completely come together. Even so, it never completely unravels, courtesy of the unshakeable pain and desolation that wraps around its every character like a noose.

In fictional Ennis, Alaska (“Welcome to the End of the World”), located 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle, the last December sunset of the year has arrived, heralding the start of a perpetually dark winter. This remote enclave consists of a meager main street with a few shops, a bar, and a police station, whose chief Liz Danvers (Foster) does her best to rub everyone the wrong way, especially Evangeline Navarro (Reis), a colleague whom she demoted—due to a prior, secretive case—to trooper, much to Navarro’s lingering anger. Danvers cares for her former Native boyfriend’s teen Leah (Isabella Star LaBlanc) as her own daughter, and their relationship is rife with tension that only escalates once troublemaking Leah begins joining protests against the Silver Sky Mining operation that employs most locals and is under fire for pollution that’s turned the area’s water supply black.

True Detective: Night Country is awash in personal dramas, be it Navarro’s struggles with her sister Julia (Aka Niviâna), whose mental-health challenges make her a constant threat to suicidally wander off into the frozen tundra as their mother did, and rookie cop Peter Prior’s (Finn Bennett) acclimation to his job at the same time that he deals with friction between Danvers and his dad Hank (John Hawkes), who coveted her job. There’s plenty more where that came from, as López’s story introduces myriad facets—Navarro’s bond with bar owner Eddie Qavvik (Joel D. Montgrand), whom she sleeps with but keeps at a safe remove; Peter’s strained home life with Native wife Kayla (Anna Lambe) and toddler son—that ably flesh out her scenario, if sometimes feel like half-formed theme-punctuating asides that distract attention away from the primary tale.

If things were messy to begin with in Ennis, they become downright unstable thanks to a grisly discovery: a collection of frozen scientists, nude and petrified in tormented positions, outside the enigmatic Tsalal research base at which they lived and worked. The premiere’s prologue sequence introduces us to this high-tech outpost, and to one of its inhabitants shuddering violently and announcing, “She’s awake!” before the power is cut and things go to unholy hell. Upon arriving on the scene, Liz discerns that the place was abruptly deserted, with food left half-eaten and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off playing on a loop. She additionally finds a severed tongue that, it’s later determined, belonged to Annie Masu Kowtok, a midwife and fiery activist who was viciously murdered and discarded years earlier—a slaying that Navarro remains consumed with solving, thereby exacerbating her rift with Danvers. The two cases appear connected, although in a manner neither initially grasps.

True Detective: Night Country is a whodunit laced with perplexing questions and haunted locales and specters. The dead are everywhere in Ennis, as is violence against women and stressed mother-daughter relations, and López weaves a tangled web out of those concerns while simultaneously channeling past True Detective outings and The Thing’s frosty supernatural terror. It’s not clear whether this calamity was caused by a human or out-of-this-world fiend, and as with Danvers—who’s always pressing herself and others to ask the correct (rather than obvious) queries—the series scrutinizes things from numerous angles. What’s not in doubt, however, is that Danvers and Navarro can barely stand each other, that both are intensely damaged individuals, and that Ennis is a hotbed of barely suppressed brutality, most of it directed toward its female population.

López fashions True Detective: Night Country as a ghost story, a murder mystery, and a portrait of ingrained misogyny, indigenous marginalization and persecution, and the dangerous primal forces that lay buried deep in the ground. Throw in a handful of recurring motifs (one-eyed polar bears; oranges; spiral symbols), and that’s a lot for any show to shoulder. While the writer/director crafts a suitably frigid mood of ominous dread and despondency, her plotting is burdened by so many intertwined and/or competing interests that momentum and depth are sabotaged. Foster and Reis are equally great as cops turned hard and sour by traumatic losses, and yet incapable of sitting idly by in the face of their own and others’ suffering. Nonetheless, their dynamic never wholly clicks, in large part because López is juggling too many balls at once, some of which take unwarranted precedence despite being less than totally captivating.

“Time is a flat circle,” says someone near the end of True Detective: Night Country, whose conclusion features multiple nods to the show’s debut season and which balances the good (leaning into the most obvious answer to its mystery, and then misdirecting at the last second) with the bad (its answers are, let’s say, underwhelming and unbelievable). Bolstered by its leads and a potent air of gloom and doom—which is offset by a strain of ambiguous hope regarding the possibility of healing and attaining justice—the series is intermittently unnerving. At once overstuffed and underdeveloped, though, it ultimately fails to cohere into something truly memorable.