Don’t know how many peeps here have seen the latest season of True Detective called “Night Country”, but so far I’ve really enjoyed it. However strolling over to lovely reddit-logo has a lot of blubbering manchildren upset about the new season which just so happens to have two female leads, focuses upon abuses of Native Alaskans and women in general (domestic abuse, murder, etc), and also has native empowerment over exploitation as a theme. Well I just watched the final episode and I fuckin’ loved it, so here’s kinda a short tldr of it marked as a spoiler as I encourage y’all to see the show first if you haven’t (it’s an anthology so really only Seasons 1, 3 and this one are worth it).

spoiler

Alright so the season began with a murder/suicide of a bunch of research scientists digging up ice cores to find microbes for eternal life or whatever (they had been found naked dead on the ice), however while checking the crime scene a human tongue is found and connected with the murder of a Alaskan Native woman several years ago by the name of Annie K (a woman that protested the activities of the local mining corp that was poisoning the town leading to stillbirths and other horrible stuff). Annie was a central figure to the town’s native population being one of the younger upcoming midwives and spiritualist (don’t know the proper term). She had been found stabbed and dumped over by the mine and her murder buried by the police and local politicians in cooperation with the mine to avoid public backlash.

Welp turns out she was murdered by the Tsalal scientists when she found out they were the ones responsible for the pollution in a bid to thaw the permafrost and ice to get to harder to reach ice core samples. This would later be found out by the local circle of Native Women who performed a lot of the menial labor in town (maids and so had access to a lot of areas such as the police station, the mining office and the Tsalal station), so in revenge the women staged a faked suicide on to the ice, forcing the men at gunpoint to strip and wander into a blizzard for the sins they committed (all the men were responsible for stabbing Annie K to death Agustus Ceasar style when she tried sneaking into Tsalal many years ago to find info on the pollution). Anyway the season ends with the current cop duo covering for the Native women and letting the murder go unsolved as well as resolving issues of mother hood and sisterhood (similar to how season 1 was about the lacking of fathers and brothers/comrades as a secondary theme).

So yeah gonna be a lot of wojak-nooo in response to the show being turned into “Woke Detective”. Anyway it’s a pretty good season and is worth a try even though it does drag sometimes (but is thankfully only 6 episodes something I think was wisely chosen by the show lead).

  • soli@infosec.pubEnglish
    33·
    9 months ago

    It’s actually way funnier. I CTRL+F’d the thread to see what the reactions would be.

    I actually didn’t get any feminist themes outside of the main characters being female.

    What do you see as the feminist and indigenous power of this story? Is it just because the leads were women?

    This is the most unadulterated feminist rage I’ve seen on screen for a long time. Time and time again it exposes misogynistic violence and punishes it. Yet even when it’s this unsubtle, all the average reddit nerd can see as feminist is “it has women in it”.

    We joke about how “political” to these people means “women or people of colour exist”, but it is not just a facade. It’s literally all these nerds can comprehend.

    • Bloobish [comrade/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      22·
      9 months ago

      There’s a reason I love the one Putin meme line of “you are a westerner and so I already know you are functionally illiterate”. Like holy shit what the fuck happened, do people not understand the basics of themes in stories or are American consumers just wanting media to be a self insert fantasy trip like fucking isekais for anime nerds?

  • nat_turner_overdrive [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    18·
    9 months ago

    I didn’t particularly like this season, and knowing that the story wasn’t written as a “True Detective” season goes a long way to explaining why it is the way it is. I think there’s probably a very good story in it, but it was damaged by trying to shoehorn True Detective tie-ins and themes to a story that didn’t fit them. The acting was pretty good, but I think it would have been better as a movie without any awkward True Detective stuff tacked on.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      8·
      9 months ago

      I think there’s probably a very good story in it

      Like, its fine. The big distinction between this season and prior seasons

      spoiler

      does feel like they needed to give it a happy-ish ending. Rather than our gumshoes coming upon a dread behemoth of human horror operating at the edge of our perception, we’ve got a conspiracy of the underclass revolting against elites. Which is… fine on its face. But it seems to cut across the actual events of the show, in which supporting caste are actively in conflict with the organizations that were presumably already defeated by the conspiracy’s acts.

      There’s also this pseudo-scientific “we cracked the secret of life! we just had to destroy the local ecology to do it!” bit at the end, that never really has a coherent consequence. Its a motive for what was going on, but it stumbles out as a definitive in a show that works best when it keeps the really weird shit on the edge.

      I was hoping for a bit of Reanimator by the final episode, but all I really got was The Proletariat as the guy under the mask at the end of an episode of Scooby Do.

      One of the more recent TrueAnon Epsidoes breaks it down better than I could. But Season 4 feels more like a True Detective themed show than a proper season.

      • nat_turner_overdrive [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        6·
        9 months ago

        Yeah, so much of it seemed rushed or hacked together to please the execs who wanted a fourth season.

        spoiler

        The spiral was just slapped on top, the scientists encouraging pollution to soften the ice instead of just heat powered by the grid their station is hooked up to. The blizzard was also badly done, if that research station truck was there the whole time why not get in it and run the motor and heater when the station lost power. For that matter, if they were able to keep going outside and standing in it, why couldn’t they drive in it?

    • Bloobish [comrade/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      6·
      9 months ago

      I’d rate it on par with season 3 and much better than season 2 (that one was incoherent as all get out), nothing however tops season 1 just for how well crafted the timeline skips and callbacks to previous individuals is (was a very well done mystery). I feel that this season had some good themes on female alienation similar to male alienation of season 1 (refusal to properly address the demands of fatherhood versus the grief of a woman stopping her from fully embracing motherhood again towards others). The overall narrative was also pretty nice to see but did stumble at times even with the short episode count (something I’m thankful for as 10 eps would have dragged on for way too long).

  • Huldra [they/them, it/its]@hexbear.netEnglish
    14·
    9 months ago

    Sounds like it has a better overall theme about policing and shit than the first season arguably does, where bullshit crooked bureaucracy prevent the REAL cops from doing the REAL work and taking down the REAL bad guys and winning back affection from the family they alienated by being violent cheating patriarchs.

    • Bloobish [comrade/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      17·
      9 months ago

      I mean season 1 had Rust and Cohle pretty much only be able to actually solve the crime and begin healing once they left the police force and went independently after the murderer (somewhat exposing the Tuttles but still not truly “winning”), still though it really had weaker themes on fatherhood compared to season 4 regarding motherhood. I think what will make certain people made is this wasn’t bitter enough as a bittersweet ending as it ended more on a somber triumph over tragedy and learning to endure through living (living through our connections to those we love I think).

      • Huldra [they/them, it/its]@hexbear.netEnglish
        10·
        9 months ago

        Sorta, but they still basically use cop tactics with breaking the law and torture on top of that, so it comes off less like critiquing the police from the outside and more closely approaches “if the good cops were allowed to do X that would solve things.”

        • Bloobish [comrade/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
          15·
          9 months ago

          I always got the feeling that the torture, such as Cohle beating the shit out of the two guys his daughter was with was more a reflection on how shit he was as a father (then again there’s peeps that also don’t get that shows like the Sopranos are about bad people doing bad things) and used masculine domination and abuse as a demonstration of his concept of “fatherhood” instead of actually being present with his family (instead of cheating on his wife and ignoring his two daughters as they grew up). The other torture that happened was similar enough to what was done in season 4 to a complicit enabler/accomplice that I feel it’s there to reflect how grim the setting is by pushing the sins in front of those that allowed it to happen (the VHS tape or the recording). All seasons of True Detective do however exhibit examples of “rogue cops/detectives good copoganda” and I feel season 4 is only redeemed because of how the mystery ends, i.e. —>

          spoiler

          how the true bad guys are dealt with via community defense/vigilantism as the women of the town know the cops aren’t going to do shit and so take things into their own hand.

          • Great_Leader_Is_Dead@hexbear.netEnglish
            5·
            9 months ago

            Hot take: I didn’t really like the scene where they tortured Clark. They weren’t 100% sure he was in anyway responsible for either killings yet, it’s a reasonable assumption but they didn’t really try any other form of interrogation first before resorting to just torturing him. To me it almost came off like the two leads were just in a shitty mood over everything that happened and just took it out on this dude they thought MIGHT be the killer, which makes them come off a shitty investigators. I think it would have made more sense for Navarro to start torturing him but then… I forget her character’s name, Jodie Foster to hold her back and try a more traditional interrogation technique since her character was a more by the books cop motivated more by a desire to solve the case than justice or vengeance.

  • Great_Leader_Is_Dead@hexbear.netEnglish
    11·
    9 months ago

    Finally finished it.

    spoiler

    I’ll echo the sentiment a lot of people have been making, it was a good show, but not really a good True Detective show. I probably would have liked it MORE had it been it’s own little miniseries with no relation to TD.

    The ending reveal was a bit too cathartic, TD supposed to end more with a creeping horror of “oh we didn’t really solve the WHOLE mystery” as the detectives walk off into the night.

    Plus the villainy of the villains felt a bit too SciFi and less eldritch to me, the evil in other TDs is more just the physical and emotional lust of the wealthy manifesting in mysterious way. Now I think there is maybe something cool you could have done with the immortality angle, the rich would love nothing more than to keep the pedo orgies going on forever, but just having a bunch of creepy nerd scientists and not some shadowy group you barely get a glimpse at robbed some of the horror for me.

    Some other nip picky complaints about minor plot holes, yadda yadda.

    BUT MY FUCKING BIGGEST GRIPE! THE ONE THING THAT ACTUALLY DETRACTED FROM MY ENJOYMENT! NO BIG CREATIVE SHOOTOUT SCENE!!!

    No seriously that a fucking foundational element of True Detective! S1: chase scene in the projects with the bikers, S2: when they raid the meth lab run by the Mexican gangsters, S3: rednecks attack the native American guy’s house. You have to have a big cool shootout scene for it to be a true True Detective season and this one didn’t have one! This is my most major complaint.

  • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    9 months ago

    it’s an anthology so really only Seasons 1, 3 and this one are worth it

    I-was-saying i liked season 2.

    Loved season 4, really enjoyed it. Looking forward to watching them through again now that its done. I thought ep 6 was a satisfying conclusion.

    Its crazy how this show has pissed so many people off lol. I looked through reddit too and they just hate it.

    • TheModerateTankie [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      I get it if people didn’t like it for whatever reason, but there areso many wierd complaints, shit like "she stole a toothbrush and that’s gross. " “it’s episode 4 and there are too many unresolved plot lines.” “Was it ghosts or not? make up your mind you stupid show.”

      I’m pretty sure most of the porblem these people have is that there were women in it having sex and they didn’t look like Alexandra Daddario, and so they spent the rest of the runtime looking for things to get mad at.

      • BurgerPunk [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        4·
        9 months ago

        so they spent the rest of the runtime looking for things to get mad at.

        Yeah, that’s what its seemed like to me too. Like anything, nobody has to like it, and there’s definitely fair criticisms if it - but that’s not what I’ve seen people on reddit mad about.

        it’s episode 4 and there are too many unresolved plot lines

        I agree that that’s a weird complaint, but i do understand critism that the pacing might be a bit of for a series. I think its pace makes more sense as a 6 part film, and that eps 5 and 6 pay off all the set up.

        • TheModerateTankie [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
          4·
          9 months ago

          I just find it kind of wierd that anyone would be mad about a mystery show with supernatural elements for not explaining everything half-way through the show, or for having side story lines that don’t immediately tie back into the main murder mystery. Like, isn’t the fun of these types of shows trying to guess how it all ties together?

    • Bloobish [comrade/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      I’d give it a 7.5 out of ten and am thankful they didn’t try to make it longer like the previous seasons, had some good eerie moments and good landscape shots of night time Alaska being good icey rural horror (good counter to the grunge of the gulf coast being post modern southern gothic).

  • Futterbinger [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    5·
    9 months ago

    I thought the themes were fine if a bit wonky especially with the twist of the scientists encouraging the mine to pollute. That seems like an allegory for climate change that just kinda falls flat when they already had a fairly good allegory for climate change going to being with.

    In regards to the writing it really felt like the show was written to be 8 episodes instead of 6 and was originally going to show lengthier portions of different timelines rather than just flashbacks. It ended up giving the characters interpersonal issues a lot of screentime while leaving a lot of the detective work to happen off screen or understood through dialogue and inference. I think having two more episodes could have rounded that imbalance out more. As well as given us more actual context for the characters and their issues.

  • Assian_Candor [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    4·
    9 months ago
    spoiler

    So is Navarro immortal or what? I’m too dense to get it but like the mom, the sister and Navarro are all mediums? Like I don’t get the point of her walking off onto the ice at the end but then showing up at the lake house in the final scene, or them showing the scene with Clark shaking and her as Annie

    • Bloobish [comrade/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago
      spoiler

      I felt that Navarro either accepted her role as some type of Yupik spirit hero (“they who bring the light after the long dark”) or she’s just dead and Danvers more or less is okay with seeing ghosts now (a metaphor for accepting our connections to those we love but are dead maybe?)