‘True Detective: Night Country’ Team Explains Ambiguous Ending: “You Should Be Making Theories”

[This story contains major spoilers from the True Detective: Night Country finale.]

True Detective: Night Country winked and nodded to the HBO crime anthology’s original iteration all season long. But perhaps never more overtly than in the finale, which conjured up the franchise’s most indelible phrase: “Time is a flat circle.”

In the sprawling episode, viewers finally learn the answers to some of the biggest mysteries littered throughout Night Country, including this big one: What question should we have been asking all along? Turns out, it’s not “Who or what killed these men?” But instead: “Who knows who killed Annie K?”

By the end of the finale, it’s revealed the two cases are completely linked: The scientists killed Annie in an act straight out of Lord of the Flies, and Annie’s community — many of them women who worked at the research station — rose up and killed the scientists in kind. The women explain their actions in a story told to officers Danvers and Navarro (Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, respectively), and rather than arrest them, the pair decide to leave the case be, satisfied that a certain kind of justice was done.

“It was an homage to many things,” showrunner, director and writer Issa López tells The Hollywood Reporter about her initial ideas for the ending. “Some of the best Sherlock Holmes stories are the ones where he walks away after he finds the killer, shrugs his shoulders and says, ‘Well, I guess we’ll never know what happened.’ I sadly believe we can’t always expect the establishment’s justice to come and impart justice. So many times, it’s us who have to figure out a way for justice to play. I felt that after so many stories where murder and missing Indigenous women are represented, it’s external agents who come and reveal what happened. I thought it would be so interesting to have the women themselves step in and tell the story differently, and give it their own ending.”

For their part, the cast were all shocked at how things turned out. “If you paid close attention from episode one, you may or may not have had an idea,” Reis tells THR. “It’s an ending that leaves you guessing, and leaves you talking about it. It’s one of those stories you have to see another time in order to see the whole picture.”

But the ending is also ambiguous in other ways, as certain elements are never concretely answered. For one, is there truly an ancient force lurking in Ennis, Alaska? Or were the supernatural components of the series nothing more than tricks of the mind? Why was Annie’s tongue found in the research station, a question openly asked and never answered by the end of the series? 

“You should be making theories,” says López, challenging the audience and suggesting there are clues littered through the season to such open-ended questions. “[Not revealing the tongue] was a fight, because so many people working with me were like, ‘No, really? You’re not going to give that to us?’ And you know, in life, you don’t always get all the answers. Some of them are for you to figure out. I’m not going to do all the homework on my own for you.”

Are the answers to the lingering questions supernaturally charged? Some feel it’s still ambiguous, while others, like Reis, are fully on board with the notion that something old is driving the action forward.

“I’m Team Navarro, so I absolutely believe the supernatural [is real],” says Reis. “There’s the dark, the atmosphere, Alaska itself, the cultural connections, the Indigenous people, and the idea that the land does not belong to us, we belong to the land. I think that’s a huge element of this series. You can call that energy ‘supernatural,’ or you don’t have to, but we walk among the dead. They’re here, whether you want to believe it or not. Energy is real and it’s universal. I absolutely believe that there are all kinds of supernatural aspects to this part.”

López adds, “You can read this entire series and just go with the real world explanations, that every event is ‘real,’ or you can read the story on a supernatural level, just like the [first season of] True Detective. Is there a real Yellow King, or has Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) just fried his brain on drugs?”

Speaking of season one, how did that “time is a flat circle” line wind up in the finale, anyway?

“I felt that if someone was going to drop that line, it had to be a scientist. Because that theory has to do with a lot of really advanced physics and the flow of time,” López explains. “I do believe that Clark [Owen McDonnell, who says the line] is crazy. But I also believe Annie’s always had these dreams about the spiral because she always inhabited that secret cave in a way, and was always going to find her fate. She’s always existed there, and she will always be there, and time is not linear in that way. It’s a flat circle.”

“Nobody’s ever really gone,” she continues. “I do believe in that part of the philosophy. That it’s the ethos of this show. Cohle voices it in the first episode of season one. It’s not just in here for the fans, it’s done because I do believe that events turn around and come back and come back, and we’re trapped in it.”

Unfortunately, it’s not likely we’re trapped inside Night Country, with all six episodes now finally in the ether. Despite a pretty conclusive ending, would the team involved want to revisit another season with the Night Country cast?

“In a heartbeat,” says Finn Bennett, whose character Pete Prior spends the finale disposing of his father’s corpse. “I do love the show’s model of moving onto new characters in a new setting, but I would love to work with all of those people again and I really loved playing Prior.”

“I loved playing Navarro,” says Reis. “She’s so complex, so dark, so layered. I absolutely adored her. But, would we do a Night Country 2? I don’t think so. If it ain’t broke, leave it where it is.”

For her part, Foster largely agrees with Reis about Night Country staying where it’s left in the end. But that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t want another way into the franchise: “I’d be happy to be the pizza delivery woman that comes in at any point in any season of True Detective, and especially if Issa is directing. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I felt that way about Silence of the Lambs, too. Sometimes you get a team that knows exactly how everything is supposed to be, and I felt that way on this one.”

True Detective: Night Country is now streaming its full season on Max. Read THR‘s coverage on the season here.