cherold

Yeah yeah, haters, not-the-first-season blah blah blah. This was so satisfying. It offers a series of shocking events, ingenious revelations and a whole emotional journey.

It's also an interesting and unusual example of something that leans into women's righteous anger over a system that often fails them, and asks, what is the answer. I feel like a lot of the reviews are missing that, or are just upset by it. But I (a man) found it thrilling and cathartic.

Now, I do have to admit that, once you think about it, the final reveal is rather unpersuasive, because what happens couldn't have happened without leaving more of a trace. I wish they'd made more of an effort to explain that, but this series was ultimately more about anger and sorrow than about crossing every T.

A lot of people complaining about the end also complained about all the prior episodes. In my case, this series grabbed me at the beginning (unlike the first season of episode 1, which immediately lost me), and I was riveted every step of the way.

So good.

This episode hits the ground running with a weird caribou stampede, a freaky freakout, and a bunch of frozen dead people. It quickly introduces the central characters, Jodie Foster as a flinty chief of police, and Kali Reis as the very intense Evangeline Navarro. Surprisingly, Foster and Reis are evenly matched, even though Foster has been acting since she fell out of the womb and Reis has a handful of credits. They both give fantastic performances.

In this episode, and the season in general, the dead are always there, and their spirits sometimes appear. I don't like supernatural elements in my mysteries if they are leaned on too heavily, but the show manages to hit a nice balance of rationale and supernatural elements.

I instantly loved this episode, and continued to love it all the way through the last episode. You should watch it.

When I saw the first season of the first episode of True Detective, I hated it. It was slow, static, and humorlessly self-important. I don't care how many people say it was brilliant, I found it utterly painful to watch.

So I ignored True Detective after that, until I heard there was a season starring Jodie Foster. So I had to watch that. And it was amazing. It was weird, and intense, and dark, and neither humorless nor self-important.

Interestingly, a lot of True Detective fans apparently hate this season. And that makes sense. If you loved the vibe of the first season, you might not love the vibe of Night Country. The new showrunner who replaced the original guy just has a different aesthetic. Arguably they shouldn't have made this part of the True Detective series. They should have made it a new, spin-off series. But financially this probably made the most sense.

I wish IMDB had a way to rate individual seasons, but they don't, so I won't offer a star rating here. I just want people to know that if you hate the start of True Detective you should jump forward to season 4.