True Detective - Night Country E2: Mastery

For a while there I found myself wondering what to say about Episode Two of True Detective - Night Country. I know I liked it -- I was pretty much riveted by it from start to finish, but I couldn't quite put my finger on what specifically it was I liked. Sometimes stories can work on us like that. I've always found that when I don't like something about a story, that aspect stands out to me. Finding out what I do like takes a bit more examination. Eventually, I figured out why I'm really enjoying the show, though.

Unlike True Detective Season One which was a revolution in the world of event television, Night Country isn't reinventing the wheel. It knows it can't and it's not trying to. Instead, Night Country is, so far, a testament to the power of a simple idea executed masterfully.

If you don't look at this image and think X-Files, I'm not sure we can be friends. Credit: HBO

I'm not saying that Night Country is entirely unoriginal, but rather that it is operating well within the tropes and forms of detective fiction and doing so with a powerful understated style and mastery. There's the haunted lead detective trope, the buddy cop trope, and the small town trope just to name a few--all modes of storytelling we've seen before, but not like this.

Not with Captain Danvers' mix of cheek and bullheadedness. Not with Navarro's laser focus on an old case she can't forget. Not with seven dead bodies naked in the ice. Not with a town where people commonly see ghosts. Not with a deputy being cat-fished online and a dead girl who's missing her tongue and a secretly-funded research team searching for the origin of life. Not with this very specific, deliberately paced and structured powder keg of a setting and scenario.

So even if Night Country appears on the surface to be doing things that we've seen done before, digging down reveals subtle, original twists on tropes to keep them fresh. It shows an awareness on the writers' part that they are covering well-trod ground and making the decision that if they're going to continue down this road, they're going to do it their way.

***

Thanks for reading my review. If you liked it, consider buying me a cup of coffee at https://ko-fi.com/kieranobrien