‘True Detective: Night Country’ Has Stopped Making Any Amount Of Sense

I was wobbling on True Detective: Night Country by the end of episode 3 last week, but this week? It’s lost me. Not just on the end note of a guy saying “we’re all in Night Country now,” representative of increasingly bad writing in the series, but because so many things are happening that just don’t make sense.

I’m not even talking about the central mystery per se, as True Detective is barely even focusing on that at all at this point. But this week alone:

• How was Julia’s naked body found and identified by the Coast Guard so that information could be relayed to Navarro just a few hours after it happened? She shouldn’t have been found for days or weeks or maybe even ever, and this felt like something they jammed in there to make Navarro become unhinged even though it doesn’t actually make sense.
• Why is Danvers’ kid mad at her when she’s arrested spray painting a literal building and she gets her off without anyone pressing charges? Why would she storm out of there furious at her? What else was Danvers supposed to do in that situation?
• Why is Prior’s wife so mad at him all the time? Yes, it’s true that he’s been working super late and long but this is a multiple murder case with a killer still at large, so yeah, it’s kind of important. And there’s no reason to think anything like this has happened in the town before so it’s not like he would have been this busy before this week. Also, why does his wife have him saved in her phone as “Prior”?
• Why did they not discuss the video of Annie K earlier? Danvers has a line like “we need to talk about it.” I mean, yeah, obviously. And even then the extent of her policework is just watching the video over and over again. And why is no one spending more than two seconds inside Tsalal station itself, where the actual crime happened? They went there once for like twenty minutes and have never been back.

Again, this week I’m not even getting into the supernatural aspects of this, which I do not like, albeit now it seems like everything Navarro sees is just her family’s schizophrenia starting to affect her as well. As for Danvers seeing CGI polar bears, that’s a whole other thing I’ll get into at a different point, but almost nothing is really making sense. But it’s the little things like everything above that adds up to make this script feel rushed and unfinished and converted messily from what was supposed to be a different show. And it’s just getting worse.

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