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True Detective: Night Country ended its run on HBO tonight with a spectacular finale that explained what happened to the scientists at the Tsalal Arctic Research Center and who killed local environmental activist Annie K (Nivi Pedersen). The True Detective Season 4 finale also came with one last major nod to the franchise’s iconic first season. Namely, True Detective: Night Country creator, writer, and director Issa López gave Raymond Clark (Owen McDonnell) one of Matthew McConaughey‘s most quoted lines as Rust Cohle: “Time is a flat circle.”
**Spoilers for the True Detective Season 4 finale, now streaming on Max**
In the last episode of True Detective: Night Country, Chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) journeyed to the literal “Night Country,” a series of underground ice caves that ran all the way to a secret lab under the Tsalal Arctic Research Station. There, they found Raymond Clark and learned the truth about Annie K’s death. She had discovered that the scientists at Tsalal were speeding up the destruction of the local environment to quicken their own research. When the men discovered that Annie had destroyed all their work, they lost control and stabbed her with the star-shaped drill used to take ice samples. Although Raymond Clark claimed to still love her, he was the one who wound up choking her to death. Crooked cop Hank Prior (John Hawkes) helped dispose of Annie’s body, but, true to his word, didn’t kill her.
Later in the episode, Danvers and Navarro piece together that the Tsalal researchers’ sin would have gone unnoticed were it not for the local cleaning ladies who uncovered it for themselves. They banded together to eke out punishment on the scientists for Annie K’s murder. They drove the men out into the middle of the ice, demanded their clothes, and let nature do the rest. Raymond Clark was only able to evade their vengeance because he hid in the underground lab where Annie had died.
Before we learn all this, though, Danvers and Navarro have to interrogate Raymond Clark. While pressing him for answers, Clark utters the line, “Time is a flat circle.” Why did Issa López want to so strongly connect her original story to True Detective Season 1?
“Well, number one, I believe that it is true. You know, I do believe that. In a bunch of quite advanced physics theories, time is not linear. It’s happening all at the same time,” López told Decider. “That was what Rust Cohle was referring to in that first season. Everything is happening at the same time, all the time. And we’re doomed to be trapped in it.”
López explained that she purposely gave the line to a scientist to nod to the real physics behind the theory. (Though she emphasized that Clark “has lost his mind” at this point in the story.)
“So, I do believe he’s right. You know, that there’s places on Earth — and this is one of them — where reality becomes porous and things come through,” López said.
“He’s not wrong in saying Annie has always lived in that cave, you know? And it’s bigger than just Annie and she will forever be there. And joining it with the idea that there is a presence in the dark that is awakened by all of this and comes to get them.”
The concept of time being circuitous also appealed to López as a storyteller.
“We see Clark standing in the kitchen, condemned to that circularity, staring at —” López said. “We never knew what he was looking at when he spasms in Episode 1. But in Episode 6, we see that he’s staring at Navarro, who killed him, who allowed him to walk out.”
“He’s looking at his own death in that moment. And he understands it. So it is a circle.”
So…it is a circle! It’s also just the latest way — for better or worse, depending on your taste level — López has nodded to the original True Detective in her season of the HBO show. There have been spirals and references to Rust Cohle’s dead father Travis, and now this.
