Who would want to live in the Alaskan wilderness? Separated from the American border by almost 1,500 miles (but only 650-odd from Russia), this is bleakness incarnate. The wind moans, the soil is hard as iron, and the water runs still as stone. This land of snow on snow is the setting for True Detective: Night Country, the fourth instalment of Sky’s acclaimed series, which probes the very darkest recesses of our inhabited world – and the human psyche.
Jodie Foster is Liz Danvers, chief of police in the small central Alaskan town of Ennis. The community there has grown to serve local mining interests, but tensions surface between the newer residents and the indigenous communities who have long lived in this frozen wasteland. “We were here before,” a group of protestors chant. Also out on the tundra is the TSALAL Arctic Research Centre, which is where the show’s central mystery unfolds: the eight men who work there suddenly go missing. An investigation into the vanished scientists will bring Danvers back into contact with her estranged protégé Evangeline Navarro (former professional boxer Kali Reis) who is defrosting her own, somehow related, cold case.
