A lot goes down in the sixth and final episode of True Detective Season 4, Night Country. So, to help you keep things straight, we’ve explained all the major plot points in True Detective Season 4’s finale below.
Who Killed Anne Kowtok in True Detective Season 4?
True Detective Season 4, Episode 6, “Part 6,” reveals that all the Tsalal Research Station scientists were guilty of Anne Kowtok’s murder. Anders Lund – the guy who is seemingly possessed before dying in Episode 4 – initiated the killing, after discovering Anne destroying the years’ worth of the station’s work.
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Anne’s boyfriend (and Lund’s colleague) Raymond Clark briefly interrupted Lund’s frenzied stabbing, however, the rest of the Tsalal crew soon arrived and resumed the attack. Clark himself then smothered Anne, both as a mercy (given the severity of her injuries) and to safeguard the station’s secrets.
Who Killed the Tsalal Research Station Scientists?
Bee, Blair, and several other female employees of the Tsalal Research Station killed the facility’s scientists – validating a popular True Detective Season 4 fan theory. Why did they do it? Because Bee, Blair, and Co. learned that Tsalal was responsible for Anne’s murder.
Believing that the police wouldn’t help them, the group stormed Tsalal (as depicted in Episode 1). They rounded up the scientists at gunpoint and took them to the edge of town. They then made the scientists strip down, drew spiral symbols on their faces, and forced them to march out onto the ice.
What’s with the spiral symbol? As with most of what shakes down in the Season 4 finale, you can chalk up its inclusion to the mundane or the mystical, however, showrunner Issa López’s grounded explanation is that it’s a nod to the coiled-up fossil in the roof of the cave laboratory where Anne died.
Who Planted Anne Kowtok’s Tongue at Tsalal?
How Anne Kowtok’s tongue wound up at the Tsalal Research Station is the True Detective Season 4 finale’s big unanswered question. Both Clark and Bee deny responsibility for planting at the site. That said, Clark indirectly accuses crooked cop Hank Prior of cutting out Anne’s tongue while disposing of her body.
Showrunner Issa López suggested that Clark’s hypothesis has merit in a recent interview with Variety. But she also offered another, paranormal explanation for the mystery surrounding Anne’s tongue. According to the showrunner, audiences have to decide for themselves what really happened.
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In the first, more grounded version of events outlined by López, Hank did indeed desecrate Anne’s corpse, to make her death look like an anti-activist killing and draw suspicion away from Tsalal. Bee, Blair, and their co-workers found the tongue, preserved it, and (despite Bee’s assertions otherwise), left it at Tsalal as “a sign that now is the time of the truth of storytelling.”
In López’s second, supernaturally-charged account, Anne’s tongue was cut out during her murder. It then vanished, only to reappear when Anne’s spirit descends on Tsalal the night the scientists disappear. “Annie does visit the station with the women, and leaves her own tongue,” López said. “Because she knows this is how it starts – that she can finally tell her story.”
How Were the Tuttles Involved With the Murders?
True Detective Season 4 set up the possibility early on that Season 1’s Tuttle cult was connected to Night Country‘s intertwined murder cases. Did this pan out in the finale? Not really, no. The Tuttles were involved only in so far as their company, Tuttle United, is a co-founder of the Silver Sky mine.
Nobody at Silver Sky ordered Anne’s death – they just covered it up after the fact. The shady mining outfit likewise played no role in the Tsalal scientists’ deaths. That said, they did push for a speedy resolution to the case, to avoid exposing their role in willfully polluting Ennis, Alaska (which caused multiple deaths).
What Happens to Evangeline Navarro?
During True Detective Season 4’s extended epilogue, we learn that Detective Evangeline Navarro has vanished. A handful of shots during the episode’s closing montage depict Navarro going out onto the ice – something no one else in Night Country has survived. Even so, there are clues that Navarro is still alive.
For starters, the investigators debriefing Chief Liz Danvers mention that Navarro has been sighted since going off the grid. Then there’s Danvers’ assertion that “nobody ever really leaves” Ennis. Finally, the closing scene in Episode 6, “Part 6,” sees Navarro standing on Danvers’ porch – although whether she’s present is unclear.
Showrunner Issa López addressed this ambiguity in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, admitting that she personally believes Navarro survived her frosty journey. “For me as an audience member, Navarro is alive,” López said. “She went out and had her walkabout in a way in the ice, because now she can do that, and find a way back. But it is true that no one ever leaves Ennis… or anywhere.”
Was True Detective Season 4’s Story Really Supernatural?
That’s up for individual viewers to decide. True Detective Season 4’s finale leaves the door open for both rational and supernatural interpretations of all of Night Country‘s key events.
This is especially true of the fourth season’s central murder case, as showrunner Issa López recently told Variety. “True Detective: Night Country both believes in the supernatural and believes that there is a rational explanation in the everyday world for every single event that you see,” López explained.
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“Very much in the tradition of the original True Detective – where you can assume that Rust Cohle, in the very climax of the series, looking up above the altar in Carcosa of the Yellow King and seeing the spiral of the universe opening before him, is because he fried his brain with drugs years before,” she continued.
“Or you can think that he’s actually peering into the Carcosa kingdom. It’s for you to decide.”
“The women throw the men into the night and the cold, and they died of exactly of panic-induced hypothermia and self-harm because of the cold. Are we going to go with that? Or are we going to go with that they faced something they’d woken up in that bone chamber, and that finally came to ‘claim their souls,’ as Bee says.”
All six episodes of True Detective: Night Country are currently streaming on HBO and Max.
