Spoiler alert:
An international team of scientists is working at a station in Alaska far north of the Arctic Circle. The scientists have unlocked a "microbe in the perma-frost that can save the world." There's only one catch: to activate and isolate this microbe, the scientists must use a process that contaminates the water in the nearby Inupiaq communities, resulting in cancers and still-births. A group of Native women work as janitors at the secret laboratory; one of them discovers that the pollution destroying her people originates at the high-tech ultra-modern station. The scientists, including her boyfriend, murder her and, apparently, conceal her corpse in an ice-cave connected to the laboratory by a hidden passageway. The dead woman apparently comes to life again in the ice-cave and manages to record her second, or possibly third, death on her cell-phone. Then, a corrupt cop moves the corpse, neglecting, however, to deep-six the incriminating cell-phone video which later surfaces, inexplicably left, I think, in some sort of abandoned shack. The other maintenance workers learn that their sister has been murdered and, armed with hunting rifles, raid the laboratory, herd the scientists out on the floe ice, strip them naked, and let the men freeze to death. (The show condones and applauds this mass-murder: there are eight scientists killed in this way although one somehow escapes, hides in a sea-bottom dredger, and haunts the action until he's caught, and, then, murdered by the corrupt cop who is, in turn, killed by a head-shot by his own son who is protecting a virtuous chief of police played by Jodie Foster.) The solution to the mystery that I have now spoiled for you by this explanation is laboriously (and tediously) worked-out by two neurotic and border-line hysterical law enforcement officers, the local chief of police for the town of Ennis where most of the action takes place (Liz -- Jodie Foster) and a State Highway patrolwoman, Evangeline Navarro (played by the professional boxer Kali Reis). Evangeline, like Liz, is mentally ill -- she suffers from PTSD as a result of combat experiences, witnessed her mother's murder as a result of domestic abuse and takes the case involving a "missing and murdered indigenous woman" personally. She may also be traumatized as a result of being told by the ghost of her mother (who is hanging around on the battlefields of Iraq for some reason) that her indigenous name is Sucks-a-numchuck. Navarro has frequent hallucinations, most of them, it seems, derived from other Netflix and cable TV horror shows (and derived in turn from Japanese horror movies like The Ring): these visions involve mutilated corpses with white eyes and stringy long hair pointing as they howl vengefully. The two women are bound together by their complicity in another murder: Navarro offed a handcuffed villain, a perpetrator of domestic abuse, in the presence of Liz, the two of them staging the homicide to look like a suicide. This summary presents the tale in chronological fashion -- of course, the show scrambles the narrative and is afflicted by dozens of flashbacks usually grim sequences involving mayhem or grief. Liz's baby son was killed in a car crash and she's become a sort of zombie, carrying around a stuffed polar bear that represents her little boy and ferociously demanding sex on occasion from the hapless older cop who seems to be her fuck-buddy. (Navarro has a bearish boyfriend whom she sometimes rapes as well.) In my review, I have made the plot seem relatively clear. But, as dramatized, the story is totally obscure, involving all sorts of unresolved mysteries -- for instance, the action is triggered by the discovery of severed tongue on the laboratory floor (this is a reference to the amputated ear in Lynch's Blue Velvet) -- at the end of the show, someone acknowledges that no one cut out the dead woman's tongue and that, therefore, no explanation exists for the sudden appearance of this grisly relic. Night Country is full of absurdities that would be laughable if they weren't so tedious: a woman commits suicide (there are lots of suicides in the show) by walking into the icy ocean in the middle of nowhere in the middle of a month of darkness when the sun is hiding somewhere in the Arctic winter. But the suicide is immediately discovered by the Coast Guard and conveniently announced by radio. The natives can assemble when needed on the basis of the "Mukluk telegraph" -- that is, the Eskimo version of "hearing it on the grapevine." But, when the plot requires people to remain ignorant of story developments, the "Mukluk telegraph" inexplicably goes silent. In one idiotic scene, Liz needs to gather some clues and so she throws some kind of bioluminescent fluid on a hatch cover, barking out "get me a UV light." Fortunately, like the fluid, a UV light just happens to be within arm's reach so a hand print can be visualized glowing on the metal. Exactly how Liz deciphers the meaning of the handprint how she figures out to whom it belongs is left completely unexplained. The series' central mystery, involving a "corpsicle" -- that is, dead bodies frozen into contorted positions and all interlocked like some kind of Arctic Laocoon -- is never really explained. At one point, someone claims that the grotesque and macabre artifact is the result of a "slab avalanche" -- exactly what this is supposed to mean is never explicated. And, in fact, the show wants to have it both ways: there's supposed to be a natural explanation for all the apparitions and supernatural enigmas, but the show, also, suggests that mystical and malevolent supernatural forces are also at work. The result of this ambiguity is that neither the supernatural nor the rational explanations make any sense -- they just contradict one another and the viewer is left with a gruesome mess, a grisly melange that is like the frozen corpses, inert and impossible to decipher. (On the basis of various specious explanations, the "corpsicle" is kept in a local hockey arena in the Arctic village, a spectacle that is presumably open to the public as the mutilated corpses gradually thaw while tormented characters mutter and jawbone over their bodies.)
There's nothing in the show that is even remotely original. Everything has been done in other TV shows and films with much more authority and coherence. For instance, the opening scene involving a Inupiaq hunter, a sort of Nanook of the North, shooting at caribou as the sun is about to set for the next month of darkness, is derived from initial sequences in John Carpenter's The Thing; the "corpsicle" is also an artifact cribbed from that film. Every lame cliche imaginable about Arctic tribal people is dusted off and trotted out. About every second episode someone (or some several) have to go into a haunted house. Of course, the explorers of the haunted house can't turn on the lights and the Arctic winds are howling outside and tour heroines always separate so that they can each encounter the monsters lurking in the place each alone. Haunted houses in the show include a haunted sea-dredge, a haunted ice cave, several eerie and abandoned shacks, and, of course, the haunted research station itself which looks like the setting of The Thing, a series of corridors and laboratories that is always dark, chilly, and full of hidden menace. The show even shamelessly steals the "flattened time loop" theory from True Detective's first series, a digression, if I recall correctly, based on Nietzsche's idea of the eternal re-occurrence of the same, although dumbed-down for nitwits. Major revelations to Evangeline occur on the smoky desert battlefields of Iraq (or Afghanistan) where the poor woman consorts with gruesomely mutilated revenants.
Night Country is a misfire. It's surprising to see a post-George Floyd show featuring cops who torture people, murder them at will, and, then, lie under oath about mass murder -- all of this misconduct is supposed to be justified because the officers are portrayed as righteous, mostly, it seems, because of their exorbitant suffering and mental illness. (I don't think these sorts of defenses would have availed Derek Chauvin.) It's as if Dirty Harry were to justify his depredations by some hard knocks in his child hood. The program is vastly more incoherent and confusing than this review suggests and it would take pages to list the various plot developments that make no sense at all. Faulkner, who was one of the writers on The Big Sleep, admitted that he had no idea who had committed one of the murders important to the plot of that film noir classic. So, certainly, it's possible to make a sprightly and amusing crime show with so many twists and turns that the story can't really be reliably deciphered. But The Big Sleep features Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall supported by a number of fine character actors in eccentric roles and, ultimately, the movie is witty, has some good hard-boiled lines, and doesn't wallow in misery. By contrast, the equally incomprehensible Night Country goes on for six hours with dialogue consisting primarily of ominous, if meaningless, portents -- "we're all going to enter the night country now!" someone declare as if this makes sense. The supporting characters in the show, for instance, the doughty pioneer woman Rose, play parts that are either completely gratuitous or rife with implications that the narrative never takes the time to explain: why is Rose also haunted by a barefoot ghost? who is he? why is she expert at disposing of corpses in the icy sea water? why is she shown to be cleaning a long gun in the last episode, a weapon that is ostentatiously portrayed but never used. Jodie Foster acts her heart out, in some shots displaying four or five emotions in quick succession or, even, simultaneously, but the part is derivative and poorly written. Kali Reis is monotonously grim and violent; she just scowls at everyone.
It's unfair to pummel this 60 million dollar production with reference to a far better story by Arthur Conan Doyle that has the same structure, the famous novella The Hound of the Baskervilles. A demonic dog, acting according to an ancestral curse, kills people at a remote country estate. Two detectives, Holmes and his sidekick, Watson, investigate the case and, ultimately, reveal a non-supernatural explanation for the apparently ghostly homicides. This is similar to the Arctic moors in Night Country, the herds of ghosts and revenants haunting the place and the gruesome killings that have to be solved by Liz and Evangeline. But the Hound of the Baskervilles is a classic, makes sense and remains entertaining to this day. There's been a lot of controversy on the Internet about Night Country -- the show has been recruited for both sides of the culture wars: some claim the series is too "woke" with its lesbian characters, pervasive themes involving domestic abuse and its endorsement of violence by Native peoples to protect their rights. Some commentators explain the distaste for the show by the franchise creator Nic Pizolatto as evidence of his sexism or even racism. When a program fails on its merits, Internet advertising tries to create a buzz about the show on the basis of polemical pros and cons that are claimed to have political significance; it's a highly "meta" approach to marketing -- if the product is no good, attack those who point out that it's no good on the basis of their supposedly revanchist politics. (The same approach was used to create specious controversy about the very dull and inept movie Barbie -- liking the movie was a kind of virtue signaling against the reactionary political forces supposedly directed against the film.) You can pretty much identify a turkey today by the amount of controversy that internet pundits labor to create about criticism of a show. The more controversy, the less likely that the show or movie is any good. After the furor dies down, the fourth series of True Detective (Night Country) will be totally forgotten.
Issa Lopez wrote most of the episodes of Night Country and directed all six shows.
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