'True Detective' Season 4's Scooby Doo-Ass Finale: Open Thread

People loved it! People hated it! Some of us brave souls thought it was just okay.

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(Yes, this will have True Detective season 4 spoilers, duh).

HBO

Another season of True Detective has come and gone, and whatever you think about it, HBO once again seemed to dominate the television conversation. Either that or my feed is dominated by extremely 38-year-old people. Could be both! Who knows?

Anyway, I mostly enjoyed this season. It seemed pretty clear early on that whatever explanation Issa López cooked up to solve this season’s dual murder mysteries (the hikers who froze to death naked in the snow, and the years-old murder of protestor Annie Kowtok) wasn’t going to be a very good one. (López is this season’s showrunner, after creator Nic Pizzolatto, who sort of fought with everyone on the last two seasons, left).

And… it wasn’t. Luckily I expected that, so it wasn’t a big letdown. The denouement (I still can’t type this word without thinking of Nic Cage in Adaptation) is rarely my favorite part of a murder-mystery anyway, and with this season I mostly just enjoyed the characters and setting. The theme song did a great job setting the tone for the show (which is canon now thanks to season one) but after that the music choices were all over the place. Slowed down dramatic covers of “Twist and Shout” and “Save Tonight?” Using an Eagle-Eye Cherry cover to underline a feeling of unease is almost bizarre enough to count as inspired. But then tacking on a slowed-down “Twist and Shout” just made it feel pathological, like maybe someone involved really just likes slowed down dramatic covers. I honestly can’t think of a worse song to apply the slowed-down-dramatic-cover treatment to than “Twist and Shout.” I also could’ve done without the CGI polar bear (with all the out-of-work bears out there, you’re really going to just rub it in their faces like this? in this economy?).

But (but!) Jodie Foster did her usual thing to great effect (why do we love to see her play a tortured cop?), Kali Reis was an interesting new face, and John Hawkes is one of the greatest character actors of his generation. Christopher Eccleston was also nice to see (my favorite Ralph Fiennes substitute), and pretty much the whole ensemble was compelling and well chosen. As an enthusiastic consumer of countless doomed polar exploration books I’ve always wanted to see a spooky show set in a dead-end town in the Arctic, and this mostly scratched that itch. This season, like a lot of shows, was best when it let “interesting places, interesting faces” do most of the heavy-lifting.

For my money, the high point was episode 5, culminating in that genuinely surprising heel turn from John Hawkes’ character and his subsequent gory death. That was exciting, and maybe instructively, it didn’t have all that much to do with solving the mystery.

Which brings us to episode 6, which, in my humble opinion, was a Scooby Doo-ass finale. If you know that this season’s big mystery was inspired by the Dyatlov Pass Incident, hearing the medical examiner in Anchorage explain that the deaths were caused by a “slab avalanche” last episode wasn’t a big surprise. Of course, that’s the kind of explanation that doesn’t satisfy anyone, so the show turned it into a piece of a cover-up instead. So what were they covering up?

I guess Issa López figured that one disappointing explanation wasn’t enough, so she gave it a Murder on the Orient Express ending too. What if the researchers killed Annie Kowtok, and all the women in the town killed the researchers??

To quote Adaptation here again, Bob McKee’s big screenwriting advice in the movie is “wow them with the ending.” Which this season seemed to attempt, but the corrollary was “don’t cheat.”

In order to make all that work, the show cooked up a scenario in which the town’s mine, which was financing the lab, was intentionally over-polluting, to help the lab dig whatever unnamed medical breakthrough out of the ice cores. Oh shit, we’re doing a terra-forming plot now?? That one had me and all the fans of 1996’s The Arrival shouting “do you want to see the ruins, my friend?”

I’m pretty sure terraforming doesn’t work that fast, but sure, whatever. It’s a TV show.

THAT plotline justified Annie Kowtok’s murder, since she found out about it through her researcher boyfriend Raymond Clark. She got mad, and started smashing all the lab’s equipment. At which point some angry Scandinavian (or was he German?) killed her for messing up his stuff. You know how those Nordics are, very particular about organization. The researchers all helped cover it up. To protect their important research! It was too important to jeopardize, whatever it was! Something to do with time being a flat circle (the only thing less important than plot is continuity).

Officer Navarro learns her native name from a ghost (I think?), then uses it to introduce herself to the female lab support staff, who, thanks to her having a native name, suddenly feel comfortable enough with her to tell her the whole story. Which was that they, as a group, discovered Annie Kowtok’s murder, and forced all the researcher men out into the snow naked as retribution, and that’s how the men died. This information was delivered by one of the women staffers, though gradually all of them filed into the same room where she was explaining it, as if they had been waiting in a clown car just off stage. “Ah, so it was those characters I vaguely remember being introduced three episodes ago that did it? Fascinating.”

It felt like the show wanted credit for telling these native women’s stories or some such, but the Greek chorus thing at the end mostly took away from that because it felt so obviously tacked on (also there was a white lady there?). You don’t get extra credit for tacking on five extra women who just show up to fill a plot hole in one scene. That’s not telling their stories, it’s using them as a crutch. (For what it’s worth, I thought the native women who were actual characters in the show performed that task just fine).

And so Navarro and Danvers help the women keep this secret, while exposing the mine’s pollution, getting it shut down, and everyone lives happily ever after. It had everything but the cops pulling the mask off an evil industrialist’s face during a perp walk as he snarls “And I would’ve gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for these meddling women!”

Again, don’t cheat.

I could accept the terraforming speed run, whatever the time-is-a-flat-circle callback was supposed to be, the murder, the cover-up conspiracy, the collective retribution sequence (they all ran out onto a frozen lake naked during an Alaskan blizzard? no one thought risking being shot might be preferable to that?), and the Greek chorus reveal separately, but not together.

Also, this mostly didn’t seem like a happily ever after kind of show. That’s a lot of cheating just to give us an ending that doesn’t even seem to fit the show that well anyway.

All that being said, the sequence leading up to the reveal was mostly a great example of why I kept watching the show. Navarro and Danvers have to cut their way into a network of ice caves in the middle of a blizzard. Then they had to worm their way through tight, frozen cave passages to try to find a body. It all seemed like an extremely terrible idea and the whole sequence had me anxiety sweating. They did this all without a rope, and then fell through a floor in the ice tunnel, landing in a cavern too deep to climb out of. Again, during a blizzard in Alaska with no one knowing where they were.

The show solved this way too easily, which was sort of a mixed blessing as a viewer, in that I didn’t quite buy it, but I needed a break from my underground cave anxiety by that point so I accepted it.

I was also into the process of Prior having to cover up a murder and dispose of his dad’s body. Turns out I like to shout instructions at the TV when someone is trying to cover up a murder. Big time backseat murderer over here, it’s just my nature. I thought they could’ve done more with that, but I get it, they had to save time for dopey exposition flashbacks.

I’m reading Ed Zwick’s memoir about the film business right now, and in it he writes something like, “There are really only two types of movies, the ones people remember and the ones they don’t.”

I think that’s mostly true, though I would add a lower barrier for television shows. There are two kinds of television shows, the kind people watch and the kind they don’t. I watched all of True Detective season four, so it gets a de facto passing grade from me. Scooby Doo-ass ending notwithstanding.