Spoilers follow for True Detective: Night Country finale “Part Six.”
There are three ways to read the ending of True Detective: Night Country, says showrunner Issa López. The real story: A group of Native women exacting revenge for the murder of Annie Kowtok sent the Tsalal scientists to their deaths on the ice. The fake story, a cover-up: The mining company secretly funding the research station and lining cops’ pockets blames a freak avalanche for the corpsicle. Both stories are narrative certainties in Night Country’s season finale, but the third reading, one in which a supernatural power — a ghost, a god, a force of nature, something else — met the scientists in their final moments is just as plausible: There’s an entity in Ennis we might not understand but some characters certainly feel. Ensuring the scripts had an ambiguity that allowed each viewer to decide just how realistic or fantastical they wanted Night Country to be was “my gift and my curse,” López explains. “To walk a tight line between genre and realism is my favorite hurdle to try to surpass,” she says. “My favorite option is a little bit of both.”
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