- The finale of "True Detective: Night Country" answered some of our biggest questions — and left others open.
- Showrunner Issa López weighed in on some of the show's biggest mysteries with Business Insider.
If you're looking for clean resolutions to all of the mysteries of "True Detective: Night Country," you're not going to find them — and showrunner Issa López is fine with that.
The fourth season of the 'True Detective" anthology series ended with its sixth episode on Sunday, bringing an end to the investigation of what happened to the Tsalal scientists. Still, that conclusion is ambiguous at best: After Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) fight for their lives at the research center, they uncover some hard truths, some emotional ones, and even more questions.
López told Business Insider that she wants to leave many of the season's biggest questions open to interpretation by the viewers, rather than answering everything herself.
"For me, what's in the script is for me to know," López said. "I'm not going to stop the imagination of anybody, because in a way I think a good script is a Rorschach test, an inkblot test, where I create the blot and I show it to you. What you read into it is interesting, and I will never interfere with that because it's about who you are."
Here, we break down the biggest questions left unanswered in the "Night Country" finale — and what López has to say about them.
Warning: Major spoilers ahead for episode six of "True Detective: Night Country."
Who cut out Annie Kowtok's tongue?
By episode six, Danvers and Navarro's investigation into the Tsalal scientists has brought them to the facility itself, by way of the ice caves. Trapped inside during a blizzard, they find and capture surviving scientist Raymond Clark, managing to wring some truth out of him: The Tsalal men were the ones who killed Annie Kowtok after she discovered the truth about their facility.
We already knew that Silver Sky, the mining company, was bankrolling Tsalal, which was likely falsifying its pollution levels. But Clark reveals that Tsalal were the ones egging the company on: The higher pollution softened up the permafrost, making it easier for them to extract potentially world-saving DNA from the past. When Kowtok found out, she destroyed the facility's work — and the men killed her. Silver Sky sent corrupt cop Hank Prior to move the body.
But by the finale, we still don't have the answer to one of the show's first questions: Who cut out Kowtok's tongue, and who left it at Tsalal when the scientists died?
"That's one that I'm not going to be telling you because my goal was to give you the possibility of choosing your answers here," López told BI. "There are many ways that tongue could have ended up there. Some of them are natural and some of them are not."
One of those possibilities, López said, could have been Kowtok's ghost leaving the tongue the night the Tsalal men died. Another could be that Clark was the one who cut it out of her mouth and left it. Or perhaps, it was the women who killed the Tsalal men — if you choose to believe that was the truth.
How did the Tsalal scientists die?
When Danvers and Navarro grill Clark about the dead men, he says that Kowtok was the one who killed them. But the pair uncover a different story when they visit Bee, the woman who cleaned the facility. While mopping, she discovered the research cave — and the murder weapon that killed Kowtok.
She tells them a story: She and a group of other Iñupiaq women stormed the facility, forcing the men outside at gunpoint, transporting them away from the city, disrobing them, and sending them out naked on the ice. There, "she" could decide whether or not she wanted them — after all, they were the ones who condemned themselves when they "dug in her home in the ice, when they killed her daughter in there," and awakened her.
"But it's just a story," Bee says at the end. Danvers tells her, and the now assembled crowd of her community members, that the official tale was that the men were killed in a slab avalanche and that the case was closed.
López told BI that it was again up to the audience to decide if they believed Bee's story.
"The scientists died in a way that would seem to match that, but it's up to you to decide if it's just a story or they died because of an avalanche," she said. "If really there was something out there in the dark waiting for them, or they just froze to death and they panicked, as we hear both theories throughout the entire series."
How did Raymond Clark die?
After Danvers and Navarro interrogate Clark, he seemingly begs Navarro to either kill him or let him do it himself. Later, after the power at the facility goes out, Danvers and Navarro find him frozen to death outside. Danvers accuses Navarro of allowing Clark to die by suicide and cutting the power.
Navarro denies that she cut the power, but doesn't push back on the accusation that she set Clark free. Later in the episode, we learn that a video of Clark confessing to the pollution coverup is circulating online. Still, it's not immediately clear how he died.
"I do believe that Navarro set him free," López told BI. "They make a deal, and that's how she makes the video. He tells the truth and she lets him go. What happens once he's free out there? We don't know."
What happens to Navarro at the end?
Navarro's ending is somewhat ambiguous as well. While Danvers has to account for the deaths of Clark, Otis Heiss, and Hank Prior, Navarro has seemingly skipped town. Danvers visits her home and finds it empty, while Qavvik, the man she hooked up with, notices that she left his toothbrush outside his restaurant. In one shot, Navarro walks out onto the ice.
When asked about what she thinks happened to Navarro, Danvers says that she doesn't think it likely that they'll "find Evangeline Navarro out there on the ice." The series then ends with a shot of Danvers and Navarro together on a porch overlooking a bay.
It seems to be a peaceful — if not completely happy — ending for Navarro. Still, it's somewhat ambiguous, and that's part of the point.
"A lot of these questions are for you," López said. "A lot of them. I'm not going to clarify all of those completely."