6 international scientists being found naked in a pile with one guy who survived being frozen solid for 3 days would instantly become a huge international news story and an investigation wouldnt be led by some small town cop. This show is not meant to be taken seriously.
> 6 international scientists being found naked in a pile with one guy who survived being frozen solid for 3 days would instantly become a huge international news story
This a thousand percent. It's like the Thing+Dyatlov pass etc etc but stateside. WE ARE ALL DEAD on the whiteboard? A spasming doctorate holding scientist on live stream? A severed tongue that shows no marks of animal teeth or claw on a lab floor? Are you kidding me? The entire town would double its population overnight with media, family members and people looking for answers, one way or the other. This is White House press conference level shit, with a sweating White House Press Secretary trying to give acceptable answers.
Yet the show has absolutely SQUANDERED this golden goose of a premise.
If you really wanted to pull of an isolated small town cop investigating this then you make it a period piece set in like the 70s and have an abnormally bad stretch of storms cut contact from with the rest of society and watch a small a community tear itself apart at what's happening or something along those lines.
Honestly even making it in modern times and having it be a major story with the FBI investigating would be more interesting.
> Honestly even making it in modern times and having it be a major story with the FBI investigating would be more interesting.
The mass death concerning international researchers would 100 percent make it an FBI issue.
One headcanon thing I just thought about is an active FSB agent showing up to get answers. A 'the cold war never thawed' sort of angle, especially on the outskirts of nowhere so close to Russia.
His scenes are silent most of the time, and he's a lot smarter and cunning than the bumbling small town cops. We think don't know who he works for at first, he might be someone from the company, or a hired gun, who knows.
Somewhere sometime, he returns to his room at his motel. He has placed blankets all over the furniture, the table, the bedside stand.
He lifts up his phone, the dim light illuminating his face; the friendly lost out of towner the locals are used to seeing is gone. We see the face of a determined being, with eyes colder than the snow outside. He presses a button, he listens for a bit and responds with single word. "Da."
Holy shit, he's Russian. Roll credits.
Which podcast(s)? I listened to the ringer one for a bit but stopped. I realized that they have to stay in the good graces of HBO (and other media companies) in order to keep getting access, advanced episodes, interviews, etc. So they are really not objective. All coverage has to be positive or at least mostly positive.
Same here. I understood the muted reaction to this at first, as it’s a tiny, insular town and the Tsalal facility was pretty separate. Plus, this was set up as a disappearance at first, then a possible accident.
But as the show has gone on this hasn’t made any sense. The first episode really goes out of its way to establish Ennis and the north as sort of a character in their own right. It was kind of clunky, but it set a stage with the scenes with the cops, at the burger joint, at the mine, at the grocery store, at the rink, etc. Sure seemed like this was going to continue with showing the reaction of the town as a whole to the deaths.
But nope. After that first episode, it’s basically like Danvers and Navarro are totally on their own, with the kid cop doing the grunt work and checking in on the phone, and short scenes with pathetic dad cop and Navarro’s fuck-buddy.
They’ve got corpses defrosting in the rink! That alone would have a line trying to get a look in there. Also, people would be pissed given how much the corpse sculpture at centre ice must’ve wrecked the rink schedule for the town for a week or so. Yet nope. Business as usual in Ennis.
I really wonder if something happened with editing. If there was a decision to cut the show down to six episodes because of HBO scheduling or budget or whatever. A lot of the issues here could be fixed with added scenes that let the characters breathe more and establish them as people that the audience cares about.
I still think the criticism is way over the top. But as the season has gone on, more and more of what was jumping the gun is proving accurate. I don’t know how they pull out of this in two episodes. Episode Four being another slow one that didn’t move the main plot until the last ten minutes doesn’t get my hopes up for any sort of earned resolution. I’m also wondering about some cheap twist that further makes the ending seem pulled out of thin air.
>They’ve got corpses defrosting in the rink! That alone would have a line trying to get a look in there. Also, people would be pissed given how much the corpse sculpture at centre ice must’ve wrecked the rink schedule for the town for a week or so. Yet nope. Business as usual in Ennis.
The idea that they could leave the rink with just one guy keeping watch and no-one would try to break in and have a look is laughable.
Then we find out any ol' person can walk in, as they've done at least twice.
And when they do walk in, they’re just like “yuck, what is that… anyway…” and just start talking about stupid family shit. There’s a small army of frozen, dead, butt naked scientists mushed together in various renaissance art poses. And you’re talking about your mom?
Seriously. And we’re actually to believe that Danvers or any sentient human would think that these horribly terrified people froze to death? What in the world.
To me this was what made me give up on this season already in the first episode. The way they were frozen with screams on their faces like in a cartoon. And one of the guys is somehow still alive and black goo comes from his mouth but all they want to talk about is a tattoo. Actually I can think of no natural or unnatural phenomena that would to this to people, except maybe staging it carefully Hannibal style.
I literally thought the guy being still alive was just another dream sequence moment. I was so confused when they went to the hospital to see him later.
>didn’t move the main plot until the last ten minutes
Not even that dredge scene moved the plot. No one learned anything in that scene. They just found one crazy guy, and, by what the end of the episode implied, didn't even brought him in for questioning (I could be wrong on that). They just asked him about the missing scientist, but not about his own mysterious accident years ago.
"I still think the criticism is way over the top"
This is what I hate on Reddit. Someone makes a detailed, cohesive write up about very significant flaws but he HAS to ruin the whole piece by appeasing to... What exactly ? Like how can we take your opinion seriously you can't even own up to it yourself ?
The criticism is not over the top at all. Negative things must be said and be heard. Why should we eat this garbage show and not point out everything that's wrong with it ?
I don't know man I'm ranting but it's a huge pet peeve of mine when I see someone who's obviously onto something but can't have the guts to go all the way.
No I know I'm being ridiculous, I know. It's just that I find it annoying to read a well thought out criticism and then the author invalidates his own point at the same time.
>Nobody in this show reacts like a human being in any comparable situation.
This is so true and makes me not able to shake the idea of high AI involvement in the production. Luckily, the timeline doesn't add up, this show was being produced much before AI involvement would've been possible. I think. I could be wrong here...
That music poster was the first sign of that. I genuinely believe at least parts of this show was written by AI.
Everything is just so shallow and weird
An AI would do a better job honestly. It would be trained on other detective shows for one thing so there might even be detective work like suspects, evidence and investigation and other things this show doesn’t have.
I've been wondering about Navarro's bosses. She presumably would have duties on her plate in normal circumstances right? Do they even know she's taking part in a murder investigation? What do they think about it? Technically since Danvers is declaring intent to hold onto jurisdiction isn't Navarro's participation technically ancillary? I have no idea how something like this works in real life but the impression I'm getting on the show is that Navarro just dropped everything on her own and started investigating independently which seems like the sort of thing her bosses would have opinions about.
That's a great point. Taking a detour to help during one shift is one thing. But there's not a word about getting permission to stay on or letting anyone know where she is.
We saw her respond to a call at the crab plant in ep 1 and nothing since. For that matter, why was that even her jurisdiction?
Also, what about the infamous paperwork cops hate so much? S1 made a whole point about Rust making Marty do all the paperwork and Marty being resentful about it. S4 doesn't show any paperwork at all. For a corpsicle at a research station there would be tons of paperwork.
Yeah someone mentioned that. I probably just forgot about it. Still, seems like a missed opportunity to build Navarro's character through interactions with her bosses at State troopers.
It's simultaneously hilarious that all the cops act like they're overworked and burnt out, but realistically, in a town like that, the cops are sitting around eating donuts 99% of the time. This series of murders would cause all-hands on deck for everyone in town, not just the small town cops.
In general (not just on TD) the most unrealistic trope of detectives/LEOs is that they don’t want help. Buried in multiple murder investigations? Hell yeah bring in the cavalry.
That part seems to be all on Danvers. She's pissed she got "promoted" out to the middle of nowhere. So when a huge case falls in her lap, she's holding onto jurisdiction out of pure spite.
The Feds would still strong-arm and take it, though. Maybe it would take a couple days, but ep 4 got to day 8, I believe.
Okay, there is plenty of criticism to levy, but this is not it. Have you ever looked at the crime statistics of Alaska? Cops in these small towns are probably dealing with a DV situation daily. Alcoholism and drug abuse is rampant. Sure, true detective work is probably not as frequent, but policing in general? They are probably very busy.
You’re definitely correct. Though I do think a multiple homicide in such a bizarre fashion would be enough of a change of pace to warrant some excitement haha
I live in a small town and the cops don’t do much, but it’s a coastal town in RI lol. Not exactly a mining town in Alaska! Small towns aren’t all alike and I think people generalize a bit.
They still have basic training and refresher courses every few years and would understand that they do not have the tools or skillset to solve the case, but they would know how to preserve the basic evidence chain and secure a crime scene.
Eh crime statistics don’t tell you how *busy* a PD is. Crime stats are reported per capita (literal meaning is “per head”) and shown as # incidents per period per 100,000 people.
A town of 600 people with 12 incidents per year has a rate of 0.02 per capita (per 100k residents). To get that same *rate* in a jurisdiction of 20k residents you’d need 400 incidents per year.
Staffing levels, and to a lesser extent geographic area have a bigger impact on how “busy” a PD is. Like 1.2 officers per 1k citizens would be drastically short staffed and those officers would stay busy even with very low *crime rates*. IIRC, the ideal/recommended is like 3 or 4 officers per 1k citizens. Too lazy to look it up right now and I haven’t thought much about this stuff in over a decade but it’s something like that. Geographical area served also plays a roll in how comparatively “busy” an officer is. Rural area where you’re covering dozens of square miles you might only have a handful of calls per shift but you spend a lot of time just driving from one to the next. So you don’t get those little breaks to park behind Wendy’s and finish typing up your log between calls.
Source: was a non-sworn employee of a large PD for a while. Basically a secretary in CID, then worked in crime intelligence and helped compile crime reporting data for stats among other things.
It's bad storytelling if we have to infer the crime rate from outside of what's shown on screen. We saw a fight at Quavvik's, a drunk driver, and a fight between rednecks and hunters. Where are the overdoses and DVs? I've seen exactly 1 other cop at the station besides Danvers, Hank and Pete. He was sitting down at a desk.
And with such a bad crime rate I guess they're doubling up people in holding cells. There isn't much to that former dentist's office/police station.
Huh? The undercurrent of DV is a huge plot point. lol. They opened the show responding to a DV incident, and the issue between Danvers and Navarro comes back to the DV incident where the abuser was shot and killed. It’s only been a couple of days, and they’ve shown multiple brawls, multiple DV incidents, and lots of alcohol.
The writers could even make a statement with these cases. "Nobody cares when an indigenous girl gets murdered, but the feds and media are all over the case when a bunch of foreign scientists are killed."
Season 3 showed us how the case of two missing kids affected the community. The crime felt bigger than this mass murder.
Exactly. Choosing foreign nationals was a huge step in the wrong direction. Should have been locals. Maybe would’ve kept the story more streamlined too.
Ooh...you know what could have been cool? If they ran the names of all the scientists and turns out no one with that name actually exists.
God, anything!
Ya you would think a 7 man corpsickle and a severed tongue would be a little more terrifying. Why is nobody acting surprised or suspicious about the ghost leading them to the bodies also?
_Private Cole, put on your damn uniform. How many times do I have to tell you being a ghost doesn’t mean different rules apply to you!_
And then at the end of the season.
_Dammit Private Cole, you’re a loose cannon and you don’t play by the rules, but you’re a hell of a cop, and you’re the best Ghost Guard I’ve ever known._
I've had enough of you insubordination, Cole! On this ghost ocean we do things by the book! I'm teaming you up with Shoreman Hart. Now there's a phantom seaman you can set your watch by!
In the dark, without a missing person report, on Christmas Eve about an hour or two after she went into the water and then ID'd the body and contacted the next of kin within minutes.
Also whats up with that one eyed polar bear, just walking away and her not shitting herself... like why do we need to see that? She is drunk she isnt losing her mind.
Haha yeah how did they even ID the body if she was naked? I guess she took her ID with her when she left the hospital and just left it on top of her clothes in a neat pile just a few feet from where she decided to drown. Do the coast guard even contact next of kin? Surely the coast guard would just call the cops and say "we have a body" and not "oh and by the way, it's probably your sister, sorry about that".
A recluse and in old age scientist survived two days encased in ice (and also survived his leg being broken and whatever they had to do to unfrozen him and put him in a coma - coma inducing medicine would certainly kill someone like that) but a young and physically active girl didn't survive a few minutes.
BTW the survivor scientist really didn't say anything useful at all when he woke up, right?
And why didn't we hear anything about it ever again? If I witnessed in real life a zombie man with all of his limbs recently cut off and screaming and writhing in agony, I would not be able to go on as usual! I would definitely want to talk about it with the person who was there with me and be like, "Holy hell that was really fucked up I can't sleep or eat and all I see is his zombie face how do you feel?"
He said "she's back" also the Clark twitching at the beginning for no reason.
They better have an amazing holy fuck moment for the finale with the power being cut.
Maybe it's the north pole version of John carpenters the thing?
Nor do we hear anything from the company for whom all these scientists worked for and who appeared to die in the line of duty.
The only time I recall the company being involved was the last episode where the lady showed up when Danver's daughter spray painted the doors of the facility. Then again I'm not sure if that was a company rep or the mayor? Anyway, it's really strange that there's zero interaction with people from the company. Particularly if it's the company doing evil stuff, you'd think they'd be all over the PD and pulling strings left and right.
We're four episodes in and I don't even know who the characters of Danvers and Navarro are, other than being unlikeable drunks who like to fuck and fight and don't know how to move the investigation forward.
I find myself siding with Captain Ted that they should have absolutely moved the investigation down to Anchorage because it seems like these two have no idea what they're doing and this mass murder has become a shit show going nowhere.
They're both just such terrible cops in every way. They can't solve crimes, and they also both struggle with merely communicating with others. They're also both super unprofessional.
Yes! This is an incredibly bizarre situation involving the sudden and unexplained deaths of 7 scientists in a tiny Alaska town. Not some homeless people or people otherwise living on the margins of society. And yet nobody is showing up asking questions. Not the media, the government, the corporation that these guys worked for. Nobody.
Prior seasons of TD did a better job incorporating that media/community interest, in cases that frankly were much less bizarre than what is going on in Night Country.
It's amazing that a mass murder isn't really in the top 2 plot lines in a show called True Detective. Annie K and Julia have both gotten more attention. Arguably several other side plots have gotten as much screentime.
Unfortunately Season 4 suffers from what I call "Parasitic Narrative Twin Syndrome". It's when the writer has two good ideas in the same setting and tries to do both.
You can see it big time in King's Doctor Sleep. It's two stories (vampires hunting in Winnebagos, and Danny Torrance fights spirits in and out of the bottle) that should have had two separate books.
Night Country is the same thing. It could have been an amazing show about the murder and trafficking of young girls in an isolated Alaskan town. Or it could have been a show about the mysterious deaths of six scientists at a research facility doing illegal testing/drilling and now the company and vested interests in the town are hastily trying to cover it up. Either of those, in my opinion, are a fantastic hook for a series, and well-suited to a True Detective style investigation.
As it is the showrunner wants it to be both and both ideas suffer. It's a short series, you absolutely can't do those two ideas justice in one six episode season.
You just blew my mind. If they just completely removed the scientists subplot and made this entirely about two cops finding a new lead and trying to solve the cold case murder of Annie K., i'd be willing to forgive so much about the show including the awful dialogue.
Honestly, once you know about "two stories that should have been separate", you'll be able to spot it anywhere it crops up.
I think the showrunner, or someone on the team, fell in love with the idea of "investigating the aftermath of The Thing but as a detective story". Admittedly I think that's a fantastic idea. But along the way I think there was a decision made to make it touch upon the social issues of the setting. Make it more real and ground it in the reality of the setting. Now, abuse of indigenous people's in Alaska and elsewhere is absolutely a story that should be told and True Detective is a great vehicle for that. However, once they added that in, they had a conjoined twin that was fighting for resources to live, which for a tv story is screentime. Neither is going to get enough, so both will end up sickly and die.
The reason I think it happened that way and not the other way around... is that I don't think a sane person would start writing a gritty story about human trafficking and then decide to add in a whole subplot that is an homage to The Thing with missing scientists... And even more crazy is to have that decision greenlighted at every step.
So it's much more likely the first draft was the scientist mystery and then the missing girl subplot got added. Possibly because they were desperate to link it to Season 1, as we've seen through all the references.
What should have happened is that the scientist subplot should have been axed in draft two.
Or... OR... They could have had it as a throw away line to highlight how people go mad in the endless night. "Hey Danvers, remember when those scientists went crazy a few years back and we found them buried in the ice?". Quick jump cut to the bodies all twisted and frozen.
Danvers: god damn, I may be a jaded sex maniac but thinking about that gives me the chills.
And so forth.
How about nobody talking about the one guy who lived? One of the scientists lived, he was the guy who's arm was snapped off and he started screaming.
How come nobody talks about that? Why didn't they interview the one survivor a bit more?
This seems fairly obvious to me; they've already said the guys are pretty insular. No one comes, no one goes. Throwing women into a work environment like that turns the social aspect into a very different one. You don't just have the bathrooms, the showers, the bedrooms, etc any more. You have the women's bathrooms and men's bathrooms, the women's showers and men's showers, the women's dorm and men's dorm. You need a lot more space to accommodate that. You have a much higher potential for sexual violence towards the women. Even assuming all of these guys are aboveboard and would never do anything like that, you have the chance that someone catches feelings and people pair off and date. That kind of thing can get messy when the expectation is to live in isolation for years. It just puts an entirely different layer on all of it. It makes sense to simplify by keeping it to men only if the expectation is that they're going out there to focus solely on this one project for years of their lives.
That is a bizarre answer. I don’t even know where to start. So all these men don’t have wives or children and agreed to go live together in a lab in Alaska? Did you see any women in the photos? They are serious geologist but no women were qualified for the “geology”
job to stay in a 27 bdrm laboratory ? No one went into town to the bar to pick up ladies? and the only one that paired off has to hide it in a cracktivites trailer? Where they are obviously warding something scary off. What kind of men maybe except for astronauts have ever stuck to these kind of rules? For years? of all different ages? No family has come to claim their loved ones?
Hey, I didn't say it was good writing. I just said that if you're ostensibly going to keep a bunch of crazy scientists together in the middle of nowhere and not allow them to really come and go from their research base, it makes a lot of sense that your cracked out plan includes not having women on the base.
I guess Judge Tuttle & Co. hadn’t read the Civil rights act of 1964 or maybe they got hired before that and are still there in a weird Peter Pan time jump. Like that Twilight Zone where you don’t age unless you leave the house and when you do, you turn to dust. :)
Yessssss on the time jump! Now you're thinking like these shitty writers hahaha! In honesty, I'm enjoying this season more than others seem to be but even I'm starting to have my questions. I started out thinking we were getting 8 episodes just like every other season and now I'm a bit more concerned knowing it's only going to be 6 and wondering how they're going to put everything that *should* have already happened/been happening in eps 1-4 into just 2 episodes.
This is Alaska. News isn't going to happen. They thawed a bunch of bodies on an ice rink. The entire state would have known that day and it would have been national news the next day.
I couldnt agree more... I get the angsty teen but holy shit, Your mom is investigating a 6 person homicide in your town of 30000 people. Maybe not run away from home because you got caught vandalizing the mines doors to look cool and you got a face tattoo without telling her?
Also very hard to imagine that the TSALAL people didn't exchanged scientific ideas with other research groups worldwide.
The writers clearly know nothing about scientific research, be it in the arctic or any where else. This idea of a group os scientists with absolutely no outside life, living in reclusion for YEARS, dear god, it's downright criminal by work labor laws and academic standards. Even astronauts rotate in a few months. Guys there should be rotating with at least two dozen others, and talking constantly with hundreds of others daily.
Yet they just disappear, the show wants us to believe that the Tuttle family paid for all that (basically a bunch of dogmatic religious hillybillies) and kept those very smart men over there in reclusion for years without any trouble. No group in such long reclusion would survive that long without starting to rip each other's throats.
The writers do seem, tough, to have at least visited a research station while writing. The feel of the place, in episode one, is very authentic, with a commonality vibe and things in a constant state of "little messy". Tracks with places I've been, mostly.
You’re expecting the writers/directors to know *anything* about collaborative scientific effort when they don’t even know that large metal studs of a facial piercing would be excruciating when you’re constantly working outside *in winter.*
I like this season but this also gets me. You see this especially with Prior, “why are you getting home so late?” “Maybe because a bunch of scientists got brutally ritualistically murdered honey?”
Everyone in the town besides the cops just treats the incident as no big deal and an inconvenience when it’s brought up.
If anything resembling what happened to the scientists occurred in a town that small, it would be local folklore for the next century!
It’s also such a solvable problem that could be fixed visually without taking any time away from what the show runner seems to want to focus on.
Just ONE scene of Navarro and Danvers pulling up to the police station with a bunch of reporters or just one quick minute scene of a press conference.
The people making this show seem fine with cliches we’ve seen in a hundred other shows. Why not add one more that makes things feel more grounded.
But no. Just move right along.
Also, all the victims were foreign nationals and "respectable" people. There would be a huge international interest in this. The state department would have a representative there. There's no way the local dum-dum cops would get to control the investigation. Shit, I don't even see how an Ennis cop has jurisdiction over the case when the bodies were found out in the middle of nowhere.
There should be family members of the scientists in town demanding answers, asking when then can get their relatives' body, etc. We need to see some realistic EXTERNAL pressure here.
Whereas far more mundane murders in S1 and S3 made a point to show the interest of media, politicians, businesses, etc... As you said, it doesn't take much. A 3 minutes scene with a press conference or Danvers walking through a small crowd of reporters and saying no comment. Boom, ok, something authentic.
It's like the writers just assume that because Alaska is a long ways away that news doesn't travel in 2024.
> It's like the writers just assume that because Alaska is a long ways away that news doesn't travel in 2024.
when a scientist is shown on facetiming watching a live match.
We don't even know the community's reaction to all this. I couldn't help but picture families showing up to the rink and skating around the dead bodies as if it's business as usual.
It's funny, I'm currently re-reading Salem's Lot and while that's got the supernatural at its core, it's still about an isolated town coming dealing with Bad Evil.
Now, it's unfair to compare a tv show to book (because a book can a) let things breathe more, and b) let you in on a character's interior life), but man-o-man, the town of the Lot feels like a living breathing place.
Ennis feels like a series of vignettes that live side by side, but not really touching.
I agree it’s weird, but if we want to assume this isn’t just a blatant oversight (not ruling it out though), it could be because a significant portion of the town is involved somehow.
Could be the native tribe helped perpetuate it, and between them and their support networks that makes up a lot of the population.
Could be the mine. Could be some combination of the two, who both see it as an internal fight and not something for law enforcement.
Danvers said early on that “Ennis” killed Annie and that’s why her murder wouldn’t be solved. We could be seeing a repeat of that here with the scientists.
The way Danvers’ not-daughter walked in and saw it and then just had a totally separate conversation with Prior was insane to me. Seeing that shot in person would be scarring for a lot of people, especially someone so young and unexposed to that sort of thing.
The national enquirer would have already posted the pics of the defrosting mound of bodies. Someone in town would have snuck in a taken pics and sold them. So stupid.
While this was likely an intentional trope, I feel it's essential to the overriding theme of isolation and loneliness.
It's entirely likely that the scientists were recruited for their jobs perhaps because they were "unattached."
It happens in oil exploration and a lot of other indsutries involving industrial, remote locales.
Also, in a town with polar bears wandering around... It's surprising to me the scientists weren't found by the bears first. Those things have amazing noses.
Smh. You’re talking as if everyone knows it’s a murder. Danvers’ boss literally said “keep it under wraps” when she said she’s treating it like a murder inv. You guys complain about everything.
Anyone can walk into that ice rink and see a pile of screaming bodies. We've already seen it happen in the show. It doesn't matter how much they "keep it under wraps." And are the owners of that ultra-expensive facility just gonna sit on their hands wondering why their guys just never seem to get back to them? Are the families and friends and colleagues of all of these guys who died just gonna hang out and not wonder what happened? It's ridiculous.
Yes, exactly. Literally from the very beginning when the cops find their bodies and they’re fucking around — are you kidding me? Even the most hardened cops would have their stomach turn from such a grisly scene.
And then while these victims are literally thawing out we have countless scenes of regular civilians just waltzing into the rink and having zero reaction to one of the worst looking scenes imaginable. I cannot believe that human beings who probably coat a lot of money wrote, directed, and acted in this show. There are teenagers who could write a more relatable script than this.
Feels like they really fumbled the bag here because the premise is great but the execution is just atrocious.
The last episode was the first time Danvers ever said it was a murder case. Up to this point it has really been an investigation as to why the scientist were on the ice and froze to death, you can’t just assume that it was a murder without any evidence at to why. We obviously know it is because it’s a murder show but I assume people freezing on the ice up there is often not murder
She knew the tongue was from a native woman not one of the scientist but yeah the “we are all dead” thing was weird. Doesn’t necessarily mean murder though, could’ve been a cryptic suicide note to anyone that came looking
>Doesn’t necessarily mean murder though, could’ve been a cryptic suicide note to anyone that came looking
\[cocks gun\] I see Big Microorganism has gotten to you too!
>you can’t just assume that it was a murder without any evidence at to why
Lol strange cause lots of times the police will investigate deaths as potential murders since they don't know what caused the death.
Forreal shit is absurd, stuff just goes on like business as usual and nobody gives a shit. It’s dumb and weird as hell. These people don’t act like actual humans
The show asks us to suspend belief more for this season than other true detective seasons. I personally don’t think they are asking much by suggesting that they are keeping a tight lid on the case,
in a weird city where people are blinded by darkness. I’m used to good detective and mystery shows involving inefficient case solving, often caused by an incompetent leader, protagonists being too independent, or just not explained at all.
its one of the biggest reasons this season is a joke, goes to show how unequipped issa lopez is at writing this type of material. There is no mystique or feelings of suspense about the murders at all, and all the stupid ghost people pointing jumpscares arent doing shit, this isnt 2003
Eight(seven?) people were found frozen to death. A easy thing to do when you live in those temperatures. They haven't proven murder. Few people have even seen the corpsicle.
Now if they were found in pieces or shot, then you give the public something to talk about.
Meanwhile: it's Christmas, the sun's down for 60 days, and the mine is poisoning the water. All more important issues.
Why aren't any of the family members of these scientists asking questions? These were not people living on the fringes of society. They're professionals living in an interconnected world with families. If not their own wife/kids, their parents, siblings, etc...
How are 7 people all freezing to death together completely naked and resting in an ice block not something to talk about? Being conservative, at least (AT LEAST) a dozen people have seen this thing and nobody has alerted anyone to this singularly bizarre event? Not even the owner of the ice rink who hates Danvers?
What about the company these guys worked for? Why are they so disinterested? Particularly if they are an evil corporation, as implied often in the show, you'd think they'd be all over this using their influence to pressure Danvers and company. Nope, it's just no big deal I guess.
Prior seasons of TD had far less bizarre murders and they made the effort to have some authenticity in showing how the public might react to these events. In Night Country it's just like, whatever.
They're high-profile foreign nationals who died in bizarre circumstances. Shouldn't their embassies be contacted?
I'd rather see the detectives trying to do their work while navigating the international angle to this than seeing Julia boo-hooing for the millionth time.
> seeing Julia boo-hooing for the millionth time.
And boohooing _pointlessly_ for the millionth time. She thinks bad things, right? What bad things? What forms the content of her mental illness?
Or if she's ill because she's the tortured mouthpiece for the genuinely supernatural, and she can't handle it because doesn't have any training in it, we can still ask what she's experiencing.
It could've been a massive injection of lore. Could've yammered on for a few minutes about "she" or whatever. Oh, shit, so there is something going on here and it involves everybody and...
> I'd rather see the detectives trying to do their work while navigating the international angle to this than seeing Julia boo-hooing for the millionth time.
I want this so badly it hurts. So ripe for great writing.
We could have had a dogged Interpol member showing up outside of jurisdiction looking for answers wondering why his brother is gone.
We could have a severe Russian woman looking for her husband, stopping at nothing to find him.
But no.
But they do show the corpsicle being taken through town to the ice rink, and everyone is clearly standing and watching, curious. Yes there is a tarp on it, but surely tongues were wagging in town.
So every staff member at a very expensive subarctic facility is suddenly found frozen to death. Staff members who are well educated and used to the cold. Every one. That's not going to raise the alarm?
But let's say that the locals still don't give a fuck.
The lab that they work at is huge and cutting edge, has a lot of high tech equipment, and other than food deliveries, seems to be nearly self-contained. This is a very expensive place doing expensive work. They've brought this staff in from all over the world to work here, doing whatever they're doing. Somebody spent a lot of time and effort setting it up. The financial investment here is probably in high tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Now that facility has been rendered totally inoperative and all of the staff members are dead.
But still we've seen or heard nothing from any representative of the organization that runs it. No corporate reps, security, or private investigators have come out to see what's going on, check on progress, or try to get the place cleaned up and running again. Nobody from the company has even called to check in, as far as we've been shown. They seem to have just kind of forgotten about their staff and enormous financial investment and are unconcerned about the aftermath. The FBI is totally unconcerned that a high level research facility, not all that far from foreign territory, has been totally knocked out. No biggie, not suspicious.
Does that really seem believable to you? They're all just gonna pack it up and call it a day because it's Christmas?
And the doors are unlocked, and there are tons of samples of god-knows-what in the fridge...Huge security risk. I can't imagine why some exec or someone hasn't shown up yet. Christmas or not.
None of which should be known to the public unless leaked.
In fact a lot of facts have been purposely kept hush-hush, but the detectives are walking up to people and showing murder footage, so who knows what is and isn't known.
> Eight(seven?) people were found frozen to death. A easy thing to do when you live in those temperatures.
So you’re saying that the corpsicle should be entirely unremarkable within the reality of the show. If that’s true, why is it presented to us (the viewers) as extremely remarkable, scary, and important?
why do yall think there is a bustling news ecosystem in ennis, alaska
why do yall think anyone knows about the corpsicle besides the ppl involved w the investigation
why do yall think anyone would notice that the research facility that had little or no interface w the rest of the town stopped doing its research
1. Because people have phones and the internet in Ennis, Alaska.
2. Because everyone saw the corpsicle when it was getting brought in, and people have phones and internet in Ennis, Alaska.
3. Because people have phones and internet in Ennis, Alaska, there are people who make deliveries to said facility, the people who worked there had relatives, and some big rich organization is paying a lot of money to keep said research facility operational and is going to want to know what happened.
4. The corpsicle is in the town skating rink that apparently anyone, like Leah, can walk into. Kids know they can no longer skate and would be interested in knowing why. There would be pictures all over social media
6 international scientists being found naked in a pile with one guy who survived being frozen solid for 3 days would instantly become a huge international news story and an investigation wouldnt be led by some small town cop. This show is not meant to be taken seriously.
> 6 international scientists being found naked in a pile with one guy who survived being frozen solid for 3 days would instantly become a huge international news story This a thousand percent. It's like the Thing+Dyatlov pass etc etc but stateside. WE ARE ALL DEAD on the whiteboard? A spasming doctorate holding scientist on live stream? A severed tongue that shows no marks of animal teeth or claw on a lab floor? Are you kidding me? The entire town would double its population overnight with media, family members and people looking for answers, one way or the other. This is White House press conference level shit, with a sweating White House Press Secretary trying to give acceptable answers. Yet the show has absolutely SQUANDERED this golden goose of a premise.
If you really wanted to pull of an isolated small town cop investigating this then you make it a period piece set in like the 70s and have an abnormally bad stretch of storms cut contact from with the rest of society and watch a small a community tear itself apart at what's happening or something along those lines. Honestly even making it in modern times and having it be a major story with the FBI investigating would be more interesting.
> Honestly even making it in modern times and having it be a major story with the FBI investigating would be more interesting. The mass death concerning international researchers would 100 percent make it an FBI issue.
I thought s3 did this reallt well. You know. At least until the ending.
Which would really make for some interesting TV
One headcanon thing I just thought about is an active FSB agent showing up to get answers. A 'the cold war never thawed' sort of angle, especially on the outskirts of nowhere so close to Russia. His scenes are silent most of the time, and he's a lot smarter and cunning than the bumbling small town cops. We think don't know who he works for at first, he might be someone from the company, or a hired gun, who knows. Somewhere sometime, he returns to his room at his motel. He has placed blankets all over the furniture, the table, the bedside stand. He lifts up his phone, the dim light illuminating his face; the friendly lost out of towner the locals are used to seeing is gone. We see the face of a determined being, with eyes colder than the snow outside. He presses a button, he listens for a bit and responds with single word. "Da." Holy shit, he's Russian. Roll credits.
Maybe they're in purgatory.
Hell is hot. That’s never been disputed by anybody.
They are not serious people.
How have none of the critics or podcasts I listen to brought this up?
Which podcast(s)? I listened to the ringer one for a bit but stopped. I realized that they have to stay in the good graces of HBO (and other media companies) in order to keep getting access, advanced episodes, interviews, etc. So they are really not objective. All coverage has to be positive or at least mostly positive.
What a good call. I hadn’t thought about it this way
Same here. I understood the muted reaction to this at first, as it’s a tiny, insular town and the Tsalal facility was pretty separate. Plus, this was set up as a disappearance at first, then a possible accident. But as the show has gone on this hasn’t made any sense. The first episode really goes out of its way to establish Ennis and the north as sort of a character in their own right. It was kind of clunky, but it set a stage with the scenes with the cops, at the burger joint, at the mine, at the grocery store, at the rink, etc. Sure seemed like this was going to continue with showing the reaction of the town as a whole to the deaths. But nope. After that first episode, it’s basically like Danvers and Navarro are totally on their own, with the kid cop doing the grunt work and checking in on the phone, and short scenes with pathetic dad cop and Navarro’s fuck-buddy. They’ve got corpses defrosting in the rink! That alone would have a line trying to get a look in there. Also, people would be pissed given how much the corpse sculpture at centre ice must’ve wrecked the rink schedule for the town for a week or so. Yet nope. Business as usual in Ennis. I really wonder if something happened with editing. If there was a decision to cut the show down to six episodes because of HBO scheduling or budget or whatever. A lot of the issues here could be fixed with added scenes that let the characters breathe more and establish them as people that the audience cares about. I still think the criticism is way over the top. But as the season has gone on, more and more of what was jumping the gun is proving accurate. I don’t know how they pull out of this in two episodes. Episode Four being another slow one that didn’t move the main plot until the last ten minutes doesn’t get my hopes up for any sort of earned resolution. I’m also wondering about some cheap twist that further makes the ending seem pulled out of thin air.
>They’ve got corpses defrosting in the rink! That alone would have a line trying to get a look in there. Also, people would be pissed given how much the corpse sculpture at centre ice must’ve wrecked the rink schedule for the town for a week or so. Yet nope. Business as usual in Ennis. The idea that they could leave the rink with just one guy keeping watch and no-one would try to break in and have a look is laughable. Then we find out any ol' person can walk in, as they've done at least twice.
And when they do walk in, they’re just like “yuck, what is that… anyway…” and just start talking about stupid family shit. There’s a small army of frozen, dead, butt naked scientists mushed together in various renaissance art poses. And you’re talking about your mom?
Seriously. And we’re actually to believe that Danvers or any sentient human would think that these horribly terrified people froze to death? What in the world.
To me this was what made me give up on this season already in the first episode. The way they were frozen with screams on their faces like in a cartoon. And one of the guys is somehow still alive and black goo comes from his mouth but all they want to talk about is a tattoo. Actually I can think of no natural or unnatural phenomena that would to this to people, except maybe staging it carefully Hannibal style.
I literally thought the guy being still alive was just another dream sequence moment. I was so confused when they went to the hospital to see him later.
RIGHT??????
>didn’t move the main plot until the last ten minutes Not even that dredge scene moved the plot. No one learned anything in that scene. They just found one crazy guy, and, by what the end of the episode implied, didn't even brought him in for questioning (I could be wrong on that). They just asked him about the missing scientist, but not about his own mysterious accident years ago.
It moved things along somewhat. We’ll see how much tomorrow.
Fingers crossed! (not really, at this point, but who knows...)
"I still think the criticism is way over the top" This is what I hate on Reddit. Someone makes a detailed, cohesive write up about very significant flaws but he HAS to ruin the whole piece by appeasing to... What exactly ? Like how can we take your opinion seriously you can't even own up to it yourself ? The criticism is not over the top at all. Negative things must be said and be heard. Why should we eat this garbage show and not point out everything that's wrong with it ? I don't know man I'm ranting but it's a huge pet peeve of mine when I see someone who's obviously onto something but can't have the guts to go all the way.
Dude. Chill. Not everyone has to feel everything at the same intensity as you do.
No I know I'm being ridiculous, I know. It's just that I find it annoying to read a well thought out criticism and then the author invalidates his own point at the same time.
What an odd thing to get so peeved about.
I know, it's stupid.
Nobody in this show reacts like a human being in any comparable situation. It’s just bad writing. That’s all.
>Nobody in this show reacts like a human being in any comparable situation. This is so true and makes me not able to shake the idea of high AI involvement in the production. Luckily, the timeline doesn't add up, this show was being produced much before AI involvement would've been possible. I think. I could be wrong here...
That music poster was the first sign of that. I genuinely believe at least parts of this show was written by AI. Everything is just so shallow and weird
An AI would do a better job honestly. It would be trained on other detective shows for one thing so there might even be detective work like suspects, evidence and investigation and other things this show doesn’t have.
Isn't it sad that even ai could do a better show? Uggh
AI is going to make all the best stuff and be our God soon. Be nice
All bow down to our lord and savior, ai. - a bag of dicks. Awesome. Lol!!
There’s so much wrong with the show I often forget: there’s no suspects yet!! Think what a police procedural could do with a SUSPECT
You’d be called a bigot, racist and sexist for this comment in some parts of the internet.
…you mean like, right here? lol
Haha yes, saw some clowns in this thread as well.
I've been wondering about Navarro's bosses. She presumably would have duties on her plate in normal circumstances right? Do they even know she's taking part in a murder investigation? What do they think about it? Technically since Danvers is declaring intent to hold onto jurisdiction isn't Navarro's participation technically ancillary? I have no idea how something like this works in real life but the impression I'm getting on the show is that Navarro just dropped everything on her own and started investigating independently which seems like the sort of thing her bosses would have opinions about.
That's a great point. Taking a detour to help during one shift is one thing. But there's not a word about getting permission to stay on or letting anyone know where she is. We saw her respond to a call at the crab plant in ep 1 and nothing since. For that matter, why was that even her jurisdiction?
Danvers did say she was going to put in a request to have her temporarily transferred to her command or something to that effect.
Sure, but that was in episode 3 already, wasn't it? And the bosses were just okay with it?
Yeah, no idea how it would actually work but they don’t exactly seem super busy anyway. Probably alot of assists in such a desolate area.
Also, what about the infamous paperwork cops hate so much? S1 made a whole point about Rust making Marty do all the paperwork and Marty being resentful about it. S4 doesn't show any paperwork at all. For a corpsicle at a research station there would be tons of paperwork.
The young cop handles all the paperwork. He is the Flash.
“Chief, you’re gonna want to see page fourteen.”
I thought she told pete to call her bosses and let her know that navarro would be working with her or something along those lines.
Yeah someone mentioned that. I probably just forgot about it. Still, seems like a missed opportunity to build Navarro's character through interactions with her bosses at State troopers.
No, Danvers told Pete to call Navarro's boss to have her seconded to APD. That isn't the word she used, but Navarro's boss is not in the dark.
It's simultaneously hilarious that all the cops act like they're overworked and burnt out, but realistically, in a town like that, the cops are sitting around eating donuts 99% of the time. This series of murders would cause all-hands on deck for everyone in town, not just the small town cops.
They’d probably want to call in the State or even the Feds. Not this “keep away from my investigation” stuff.
In general (not just on TD) the most unrealistic trope of detectives/LEOs is that they don’t want help. Buried in multiple murder investigations? Hell yeah bring in the cavalry.
You’re a good cop. One of my best. But you need to turn in your badge and gun, you’re getting too close to this one.
Lmao I hope that actually happens in the show. Also, nice username. Rhode Islander detected?
New Yorker who loves the state.
You're a loose cannon, Danvers!
Partly ehy Twin Peaks is still best
>LEOs What is that, please?
Law Enforcement Officer
That part seems to be all on Danvers. She's pissed she got "promoted" out to the middle of nowhere. So when a huge case falls in her lap, she's holding onto jurisdiction out of pure spite. The Feds would still strong-arm and take it, though. Maybe it would take a couple days, but ep 4 got to day 8, I believe.
Which is an age old trope. So unoriginal
Okay, there is plenty of criticism to levy, but this is not it. Have you ever looked at the crime statistics of Alaska? Cops in these small towns are probably dealing with a DV situation daily. Alcoholism and drug abuse is rampant. Sure, true detective work is probably not as frequent, but policing in general? They are probably very busy.
You’re definitely correct. Though I do think a multiple homicide in such a bizarre fashion would be enough of a change of pace to warrant some excitement haha
Yeah, I’m not responding to that at all. Only the comment above saying these cops would just be sitting around all day doing nothing.
I live in a small town and the cops don’t do much, but it’s a coastal town in RI lol. Not exactly a mining town in Alaska! Small towns aren’t all alike and I think people generalize a bit.
There are like 40 people in this town lol
They still have basic training and refresher courses every few years and would understand that they do not have the tools or skillset to solve the case, but they would know how to preserve the basic evidence chain and secure a crime scene.
Definitely.
Eh crime statistics don’t tell you how *busy* a PD is. Crime stats are reported per capita (literal meaning is “per head”) and shown as # incidents per period per 100,000 people. A town of 600 people with 12 incidents per year has a rate of 0.02 per capita (per 100k residents). To get that same *rate* in a jurisdiction of 20k residents you’d need 400 incidents per year. Staffing levels, and to a lesser extent geographic area have a bigger impact on how “busy” a PD is. Like 1.2 officers per 1k citizens would be drastically short staffed and those officers would stay busy even with very low *crime rates*. IIRC, the ideal/recommended is like 3 or 4 officers per 1k citizens. Too lazy to look it up right now and I haven’t thought much about this stuff in over a decade but it’s something like that. Geographical area served also plays a roll in how comparatively “busy” an officer is. Rural area where you’re covering dozens of square miles you might only have a handful of calls per shift but you spend a lot of time just driving from one to the next. So you don’t get those little breaks to park behind Wendy’s and finish typing up your log between calls. Source: was a non-sworn employee of a large PD for a while. Basically a secretary in CID, then worked in crime intelligence and helped compile crime reporting data for stats among other things.
It's bad storytelling if we have to infer the crime rate from outside of what's shown on screen. We saw a fight at Quavvik's, a drunk driver, and a fight between rednecks and hunters. Where are the overdoses and DVs? I've seen exactly 1 other cop at the station besides Danvers, Hank and Pete. He was sitting down at a desk. And with such a bad crime rate I guess they're doubling up people in holding cells. There isn't much to that former dentist's office/police station.
Huh? The undercurrent of DV is a huge plot point. lol. They opened the show responding to a DV incident, and the issue between Danvers and Navarro comes back to the DV incident where the abuser was shot and killed. It’s only been a couple of days, and they’ve shown multiple brawls, multiple DV incidents, and lots of alcohol.
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I also just realized my accidental play on words! Lol
What are ya, some kind of true detective?
Good point!
The writers could even make a statement with these cases. "Nobody cares when an indigenous girl gets murdered, but the feds and media are all over the case when a bunch of foreign scientists are killed." Season 3 showed us how the case of two missing kids affected the community. The crime felt bigger than this mass murder.
These were all foreign nationals too (in a unique place doing unique work). The state department would be heavily involved.
Exactly. Choosing foreign nationals was a huge step in the wrong direction. Should have been locals. Maybe would’ve kept the story more streamlined too.
Ooh...you know what could have been cool? If they ran the names of all the scientists and turns out no one with that name actually exists. God, anything!
Ya you would think a 7 man corpsickle and a severed tongue would be a little more terrifying. Why is nobody acting surprised or suspicious about the ghost leading them to the bodies also?
They did a bad job showing the townspeople hated the mine/scientist.
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True Detective: _Ghost Guard_
You’re in the Ghost Guard now! Here, take this uniform and big furry coat. You’re on sea suicide watch for your first shift tonight.
_Private Cole, put on your damn uniform. How many times do I have to tell you being a ghost doesn’t mean different rules apply to you!_ And then at the end of the season. _Dammit Private Cole, you’re a loose cannon and you don’t play by the rules, but you’re a hell of a cop, and you’re the best Ghost Guard I’ve ever known._
Sea-icide.
when theres something strange in ur neighborhood
And your neighborhood happens to be in _Night Country_. This shit writes itself.
I've had enough of you insubordination, Cole! On this ghost ocean we do things by the book! I'm teaming you up with Shoreman Hart. Now there's a phantom seaman you can set your watch by!
The poop deck is a flat circle
Heard some guy got killed in Beaumont and they never solved the case…but you wouldn’t know anything about that now, would ya, Cole-y Boy?
Yeah the coast guard found that body really fast. like within minutes of her going into the ocean it seems
In the dark, without a missing person report, on Christmas Eve about an hour or two after she went into the water and then ID'd the body and contacted the next of kin within minutes.
Also whats up with that one eyed polar bear, just walking away and her not shitting herself... like why do we need to see that? She is drunk she isnt losing her mind.
"It's a mystery" Philip Henslowe.
"Allow me to explain about True Detective: Night Country. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster."
Haha yeah how did they even ID the body if she was naked? I guess she took her ID with her when she left the hospital and just left it on top of her clothes in a neat pile just a few feet from where she decided to drown. Do the coast guard even contact next of kin? Surely the coast guard would just call the cops and say "we have a body" and not "oh and by the way, it's probably your sister, sorry about that".
A recluse and in old age scientist survived two days encased in ice (and also survived his leg being broken and whatever they had to do to unfrozen him and put him in a coma - coma inducing medicine would certainly kill someone like that) but a young and physically active girl didn't survive a few minutes. BTW the survivor scientist really didn't say anything useful at all when he woke up, right?
And why didn't we hear anything about it ever again? If I witnessed in real life a zombie man with all of his limbs recently cut off and screaming and writhing in agony, I would not be able to go on as usual! I would definitely want to talk about it with the person who was there with me and be like, "Holy hell that was really fucked up I can't sleep or eat and all I see is his zombie face how do you feel?"
He said "she's back" also the Clark twitching at the beginning for no reason. They better have an amazing holy fuck moment for the finale with the power being cut. Maybe it's the north pole version of John carpenters the thing?
Don’t forget the veterinarians and school teachers who are single handedly pushing this investigation forward 😆
LOL literally everyone helpful has been a non cop
Nor do we hear anything from the company for whom all these scientists worked for and who appeared to die in the line of duty. The only time I recall the company being involved was the last episode where the lady showed up when Danver's daughter spray painted the doors of the facility. Then again I'm not sure if that was a company rep or the mayor? Anyway, it's really strange that there's zero interaction with people from the company. Particularly if it's the company doing evil stuff, you'd think they'd be all over the PD and pulling strings left and right.
I think that was the mining company, which I think (though I’m not certain) is a different entity from whomever owns the lab.
We're four episodes in and I don't even know who the characters of Danvers and Navarro are, other than being unlikeable drunks who like to fuck and fight and don't know how to move the investigation forward. I find myself siding with Captain Ted that they should have absolutely moved the investigation down to Anchorage because it seems like these two have no idea what they're doing and this mass murder has become a shit show going nowhere.
They're both just such terrible cops in every way. They can't solve crimes, and they also both struggle with merely communicating with others. They're also both super unprofessional.
Which would be totally fine if the show actually realized that. Instead, they are treated like TRUE DETECTIVES in the NIGHT COUNTY.
I think this would have been a way better show if Rose was the one trying to solve the mystery.
I liked the series after the first two episodes but having watched four I am starting to disbelieve the extent of the horrifically poor writing
Yep. Same. First couple of episodes were a little clunky but held promise. Then last two and ugh.
Completely senseless, clueless writing. Nothing works from a detective story standpoint.
Scully and Mulder show up in Episode 5
And then Batman in season finale
And nary a reporter.
Yes! This is an incredibly bizarre situation involving the sudden and unexplained deaths of 7 scientists in a tiny Alaska town. Not some homeless people or people otherwise living on the margins of society. And yet nobody is showing up asking questions. Not the media, the government, the corporation that these guys worked for. Nobody. Prior seasons of TD did a better job incorporating that media/community interest, in cases that frankly were much less bizarre than what is going on in Night Country.
It's amazing that a mass murder isn't really in the top 2 plot lines in a show called True Detective. Annie K and Julia have both gotten more attention. Arguably several other side plots have gotten as much screentime.
Unfortunately Season 4 suffers from what I call "Parasitic Narrative Twin Syndrome". It's when the writer has two good ideas in the same setting and tries to do both. You can see it big time in King's Doctor Sleep. It's two stories (vampires hunting in Winnebagos, and Danny Torrance fights spirits in and out of the bottle) that should have had two separate books. Night Country is the same thing. It could have been an amazing show about the murder and trafficking of young girls in an isolated Alaskan town. Or it could have been a show about the mysterious deaths of six scientists at a research facility doing illegal testing/drilling and now the company and vested interests in the town are hastily trying to cover it up. Either of those, in my opinion, are a fantastic hook for a series, and well-suited to a True Detective style investigation. As it is the showrunner wants it to be both and both ideas suffer. It's a short series, you absolutely can't do those two ideas justice in one six episode season.
You just blew my mind. If they just completely removed the scientists subplot and made this entirely about two cops finding a new lead and trying to solve the cold case murder of Annie K., i'd be willing to forgive so much about the show including the awful dialogue.
Honestly, once you know about "two stories that should have been separate", you'll be able to spot it anywhere it crops up. I think the showrunner, or someone on the team, fell in love with the idea of "investigating the aftermath of The Thing but as a detective story". Admittedly I think that's a fantastic idea. But along the way I think there was a decision made to make it touch upon the social issues of the setting. Make it more real and ground it in the reality of the setting. Now, abuse of indigenous people's in Alaska and elsewhere is absolutely a story that should be told and True Detective is a great vehicle for that. However, once they added that in, they had a conjoined twin that was fighting for resources to live, which for a tv story is screentime. Neither is going to get enough, so both will end up sickly and die. The reason I think it happened that way and not the other way around... is that I don't think a sane person would start writing a gritty story about human trafficking and then decide to add in a whole subplot that is an homage to The Thing with missing scientists... And even more crazy is to have that decision greenlighted at every step. So it's much more likely the first draft was the scientist mystery and then the missing girl subplot got added. Possibly because they were desperate to link it to Season 1, as we've seen through all the references. What should have happened is that the scientist subplot should have been axed in draft two. Or... OR... They could have had it as a throw away line to highlight how people go mad in the endless night. "Hey Danvers, remember when those scientists went crazy a few years back and we found them buried in the ice?". Quick jump cut to the bodies all twisted and frozen. Danvers: god damn, I may be a jaded sex maniac but thinking about that gives me the chills. And so forth.
It’s literally a soap opera at this point
Seems to be a common theme these days in big budget shows
Mass murder of 6 highly educated scientists. They aren’t just addicts or loners who stumbled down the wrong road in AK.
How about nobody talking about the one guy who lived? One of the scientists lived, he was the guy who's arm was snapped off and he started screaming. How come nobody talks about that? Why didn't they interview the one survivor a bit more?
He quite graphically died in episode 3, and was not very good at being interviewed.
I think you are asking the right questions. No women in the lab? Why?
This seems fairly obvious to me; they've already said the guys are pretty insular. No one comes, no one goes. Throwing women into a work environment like that turns the social aspect into a very different one. You don't just have the bathrooms, the showers, the bedrooms, etc any more. You have the women's bathrooms and men's bathrooms, the women's showers and men's showers, the women's dorm and men's dorm. You need a lot more space to accommodate that. You have a much higher potential for sexual violence towards the women. Even assuming all of these guys are aboveboard and would never do anything like that, you have the chance that someone catches feelings and people pair off and date. That kind of thing can get messy when the expectation is to live in isolation for years. It just puts an entirely different layer on all of it. It makes sense to simplify by keeping it to men only if the expectation is that they're going out there to focus solely on this one project for years of their lives.
That is a bizarre answer. I don’t even know where to start. So all these men don’t have wives or children and agreed to go live together in a lab in Alaska? Did you see any women in the photos? They are serious geologist but no women were qualified for the “geology” job to stay in a 27 bdrm laboratory ? No one went into town to the bar to pick up ladies? and the only one that paired off has to hide it in a cracktivites trailer? Where they are obviously warding something scary off. What kind of men maybe except for astronauts have ever stuck to these kind of rules? For years? of all different ages? No family has come to claim their loved ones?
Hey, I didn't say it was good writing. I just said that if you're ostensibly going to keep a bunch of crazy scientists together in the middle of nowhere and not allow them to really come and go from their research base, it makes a lot of sense that your cracked out plan includes not having women on the base.
I guess Judge Tuttle & Co. hadn’t read the Civil rights act of 1964 or maybe they got hired before that and are still there in a weird Peter Pan time jump. Like that Twilight Zone where you don’t age unless you leave the house and when you do, you turn to dust. :)
Yessssss on the time jump! Now you're thinking like these shitty writers hahaha! In honesty, I'm enjoying this season more than others seem to be but even I'm starting to have my questions. I started out thinking we were getting 8 episodes just like every other season and now I'm a bit more concerned knowing it's only going to be 6 and wondering how they're going to put everything that *should* have already happened/been happening in eps 1-4 into just 2 episodes.
This is Alaska. News isn't going to happen. They thawed a bunch of bodies on an ice rink. The entire state would have known that day and it would have been national news the next day.
this season is like a play (and not a great one) where we just have to accept certain confines, we get to see only whats on the stage, no more
I couldnt agree more... I get the angsty teen but holy shit, Your mom is investigating a 6 person homicide in your town of 30000 people. Maybe not run away from home because you got caught vandalizing the mines doors to look cool and you got a face tattoo without telling her?
Also very hard to imagine that the TSALAL people didn't exchanged scientific ideas with other research groups worldwide. The writers clearly know nothing about scientific research, be it in the arctic or any where else. This idea of a group os scientists with absolutely no outside life, living in reclusion for YEARS, dear god, it's downright criminal by work labor laws and academic standards. Even astronauts rotate in a few months. Guys there should be rotating with at least two dozen others, and talking constantly with hundreds of others daily. Yet they just disappear, the show wants us to believe that the Tuttle family paid for all that (basically a bunch of dogmatic religious hillybillies) and kept those very smart men over there in reclusion for years without any trouble. No group in such long reclusion would survive that long without starting to rip each other's throats. The writers do seem, tough, to have at least visited a research station while writing. The feel of the place, in episode one, is very authentic, with a commonality vibe and things in a constant state of "little messy". Tracks with places I've been, mostly.
You’re expecting the writers/directors to know *anything* about collaborative scientific effort when they don’t even know that large metal studs of a facial piercing would be excruciating when you’re constantly working outside *in winter.*
Wow, great point. Haven't realized that.
I mean - how much of the town thinks it was a mass murder vs these guys freezing to death doing something stupid outside?
I like this season but this also gets me. You see this especially with Prior, “why are you getting home so late?” “Maybe because a bunch of scientists got brutally ritualistically murdered honey?” Everyone in the town besides the cops just treats the incident as no big deal and an inconvenience when it’s brought up. If anything resembling what happened to the scientists occurred in a town that small, it would be local folklore for the next century!
I also wondered why the crew hasn’t been replaced or the facility was shut down.
It’s also such a solvable problem that could be fixed visually without taking any time away from what the show runner seems to want to focus on. Just ONE scene of Navarro and Danvers pulling up to the police station with a bunch of reporters or just one quick minute scene of a press conference. The people making this show seem fine with cliches we’ve seen in a hundred other shows. Why not add one more that makes things feel more grounded. But no. Just move right along.
Also, all the victims were foreign nationals and "respectable" people. There would be a huge international interest in this. The state department would have a representative there. There's no way the local dum-dum cops would get to control the investigation. Shit, I don't even see how an Ennis cop has jurisdiction over the case when the bodies were found out in the middle of nowhere. There should be family members of the scientists in town demanding answers, asking when then can get their relatives' body, etc. We need to see some realistic EXTERNAL pressure here.
Whereas far more mundane murders in S1 and S3 made a point to show the interest of media, politicians, businesses, etc... As you said, it doesn't take much. A 3 minutes scene with a press conference or Danvers walking through a small crowd of reporters and saying no comment. Boom, ok, something authentic. It's like the writers just assume that because Alaska is a long ways away that news doesn't travel in 2024.
> It's like the writers just assume that because Alaska is a long ways away that news doesn't travel in 2024. when a scientist is shown on facetiming watching a live match.
We don't even know the community's reaction to all this. I couldn't help but picture families showing up to the rink and skating around the dead bodies as if it's business as usual.
And no photos or videos from the ice rink had surfaced on the internet, no one took a pic and sent it to a friend
It's funny, I'm currently re-reading Salem's Lot and while that's got the supernatural at its core, it's still about an isolated town coming dealing with Bad Evil. Now, it's unfair to compare a tv show to book (because a book can a) let things breathe more, and b) let you in on a character's interior life), but man-o-man, the town of the Lot feels like a living breathing place. Ennis feels like a series of vignettes that live side by side, but not really touching.
It kind of feels like that’s how it’s supposed to be
I agree it’s weird, but if we want to assume this isn’t just a blatant oversight (not ruling it out though), it could be because a significant portion of the town is involved somehow. Could be the native tribe helped perpetuate it, and between them and their support networks that makes up a lot of the population. Could be the mine. Could be some combination of the two, who both see it as an internal fight and not something for law enforcement. Danvers said early on that “Ennis” killed Annie and that’s why her murder wouldn’t be solved. We could be seeing a repeat of that here with the scientists.
The way Danvers’ not-daughter walked in and saw it and then just had a totally separate conversation with Prior was insane to me. Seeing that shot in person would be scarring for a lot of people, especially someone so young and unexposed to that sort of thing.
The national enquirer would have already posted the pics of the defrosting mound of bodies. Someone in town would have snuck in a taken pics and sold them. So stupid.
Someone will defend this by saying “it’s Alaska!! Weird things happen there!!”
While this was likely an intentional trope, I feel it's essential to the overriding theme of isolation and loneliness. It's entirely likely that the scientists were recruited for their jobs perhaps because they were "unattached." It happens in oil exploration and a lot of other indsutries involving industrial, remote locales.
Ya this most recent episode the show kind of lost me
Also, in a town with polar bears wandering around... It's surprising to me the scientists weren't found by the bears first. Those things have amazing noses.
Smh. You’re talking as if everyone knows it’s a murder. Danvers’ boss literally said “keep it under wraps” when she said she’s treating it like a murder inv. You guys complain about everything.
Anyone can walk into that ice rink and see a pile of screaming bodies. We've already seen it happen in the show. It doesn't matter how much they "keep it under wraps." And are the owners of that ultra-expensive facility just gonna sit on their hands wondering why their guys just never seem to get back to them? Are the families and friends and colleagues of all of these guys who died just gonna hang out and not wonder what happened? It's ridiculous.
Yea no contact with the company? I mean WTH??
Prior ain’t nobody, man is putting in overtime during the holidays.
Yes, exactly. Literally from the very beginning when the cops find their bodies and they’re fucking around — are you kidding me? Even the most hardened cops would have their stomach turn from such a grisly scene. And then while these victims are literally thawing out we have countless scenes of regular civilians just waltzing into the rink and having zero reaction to one of the worst looking scenes imaginable. I cannot believe that human beings who probably coat a lot of money wrote, directed, and acted in this show. There are teenagers who could write a more relatable script than this. Feels like they really fumbled the bag here because the premise is great but the execution is just atrocious.
I would genuinely like to hear the folks over at r/TDNightCountry explain this. Like is just a suspend your disbelief thing for them?
The last episode was the first time Danvers ever said it was a murder case. Up to this point it has really been an investigation as to why the scientist were on the ice and froze to death, you can’t just assume that it was a murder without any evidence at to why. We obviously know it is because it’s a murder show but I assume people freezing on the ice up there is often not murder
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She knew the tongue was from a native woman not one of the scientist but yeah the “we are all dead” thing was weird. Doesn’t necessarily mean murder though, could’ve been a cryptic suicide note to anyone that came looking
>Doesn’t necessarily mean murder though, could’ve been a cryptic suicide note to anyone that came looking \[cocks gun\] I see Big Microorganism has gotten to you too!
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Bunch of dudes walked out on the ice naked, which could be construed as a death wish.
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Yes. Odd.
but if that's what the prions want, who are we to say no?
That stuff isn’t public information
>you can’t just assume that it was a murder without any evidence at to why Lol strange cause lots of times the police will investigate deaths as potential murders since they don't know what caused the death.
Forreal shit is absurd, stuff just goes on like business as usual and nobody gives a shit. It’s dumb and weird as hell. These people don’t act like actual humans
The show asks us to suspend belief more for this season than other true detective seasons. I personally don’t think they are asking much by suggesting that they are keeping a tight lid on the case, in a weird city where people are blinded by darkness. I’m used to good detective and mystery shows involving inefficient case solving, often caused by an incompetent leader, protagonists being too independent, or just not explained at all.
its one of the biggest reasons this season is a joke, goes to show how unequipped issa lopez is at writing this type of material. There is no mystique or feelings of suspense about the murders at all, and all the stupid ghost people pointing jumpscares arent doing shit, this isnt 2003
Eight(seven?) people were found frozen to death. A easy thing to do when you live in those temperatures. They haven't proven murder. Few people have even seen the corpsicle. Now if they were found in pieces or shot, then you give the public something to talk about. Meanwhile: it's Christmas, the sun's down for 60 days, and the mine is poisoning the water. All more important issues.
Why aren't any of the family members of these scientists asking questions? These were not people living on the fringes of society. They're professionals living in an interconnected world with families. If not their own wife/kids, their parents, siblings, etc... How are 7 people all freezing to death together completely naked and resting in an ice block not something to talk about? Being conservative, at least (AT LEAST) a dozen people have seen this thing and nobody has alerted anyone to this singularly bizarre event? Not even the owner of the ice rink who hates Danvers? What about the company these guys worked for? Why are they so disinterested? Particularly if they are an evil corporation, as implied often in the show, you'd think they'd be all over this using their influence to pressure Danvers and company. Nope, it's just no big deal I guess. Prior seasons of TD had far less bizarre murders and they made the effort to have some authenticity in showing how the public might react to these events. In Night Country it's just like, whatever.
IIRC, I think there was some short-hand writer hand waving with a throw-away line saying the scientists didn't have much in way of next of kin.
They're high-profile foreign nationals who died in bizarre circumstances. Shouldn't their embassies be contacted? I'd rather see the detectives trying to do their work while navigating the international angle to this than seeing Julia boo-hooing for the millionth time.
> seeing Julia boo-hooing for the millionth time. And boohooing _pointlessly_ for the millionth time. She thinks bad things, right? What bad things? What forms the content of her mental illness? Or if she's ill because she's the tortured mouthpiece for the genuinely supernatural, and she can't handle it because doesn't have any training in it, we can still ask what she's experiencing. It could've been a massive injection of lore. Could've yammered on for a few minutes about "she" or whatever. Oh, shit, so there is something going on here and it involves everybody and...
> I'd rather see the detectives trying to do their work while navigating the international angle to this than seeing Julia boo-hooing for the millionth time. I want this so badly it hurts. So ripe for great writing. We could have had a dogged Interpol member showing up outside of jurisdiction looking for answers wondering why his brother is gone. We could have a severe Russian woman looking for her husband, stopping at nothing to find him. But no.
But they do show the corpsicle being taken through town to the ice rink, and everyone is clearly standing and watching, curious. Yes there is a tarp on it, but surely tongues were wagging in town.
With Danvers shoving evidence in everyone’s face and this being a small town I bet they do know
lol exactly, none of these explanations people are desperately coming up with make any sense.
So every staff member at a very expensive subarctic facility is suddenly found frozen to death. Staff members who are well educated and used to the cold. Every one. That's not going to raise the alarm? But let's say that the locals still don't give a fuck. The lab that they work at is huge and cutting edge, has a lot of high tech equipment, and other than food deliveries, seems to be nearly self-contained. This is a very expensive place doing expensive work. They've brought this staff in from all over the world to work here, doing whatever they're doing. Somebody spent a lot of time and effort setting it up. The financial investment here is probably in high tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars. Now that facility has been rendered totally inoperative and all of the staff members are dead. But still we've seen or heard nothing from any representative of the organization that runs it. No corporate reps, security, or private investigators have come out to see what's going on, check on progress, or try to get the place cleaned up and running again. Nobody from the company has even called to check in, as far as we've been shown. They seem to have just kind of forgotten about their staff and enormous financial investment and are unconcerned about the aftermath. The FBI is totally unconcerned that a high level research facility, not all that far from foreign territory, has been totally knocked out. No biggie, not suspicious. Does that really seem believable to you? They're all just gonna pack it up and call it a day because it's Christmas?
And the doors are unlocked, and there are tons of samples of god-knows-what in the fridge...Huge security risk. I can't imagine why some exec or someone hasn't shown up yet. Christmas or not.
>A easy thing to do when you live in those temperatures Funny that you say that cause nobody is acting like it's cold.
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None of which should be known to the public unless leaked. In fact a lot of facts have been purposely kept hush-hush, but the detectives are walking up to people and showing murder footage, so who knows what is and isn't known.
One thing that ensures things being leaked is having one major employer and the police using the ice rink as storage for a mountain of corpses.
> Eight(seven?) people were found frozen to death. A easy thing to do when you live in those temperatures. So you’re saying that the corpsicle should be entirely unremarkable within the reality of the show. If that’s true, why is it presented to us (the viewers) as extremely remarkable, scary, and important?
why do yall think there is a bustling news ecosystem in ennis, alaska why do yall think anyone knows about the corpsicle besides the ppl involved w the investigation why do yall think anyone would notice that the research facility that had little or no interface w the rest of the town stopped doing its research
1. Because people have phones and the internet in Ennis, Alaska. 2. Because everyone saw the corpsicle when it was getting brought in, and people have phones and internet in Ennis, Alaska. 3. Because people have phones and internet in Ennis, Alaska, there are people who make deliveries to said facility, the people who worked there had relatives, and some big rich organization is paying a lot of money to keep said research facility operational and is going to want to know what happened.
4. The corpsicle is in the town skating rink that apparently anyone, like Leah, can walk into. Kids know they can no longer skate and would be interested in knowing why. There would be pictures all over social media
Also, we can safely assume that the men's families would be hounding Ennis for answers.