The Best of the Worst Things Said About The Horrid 4th Season Of ‘True Detective’
Normalize JOMO!
"Of course, anyone who doesn't like the new season of True Detective must be a misogynist. And have a small penis. And something something, ‘muh patriarchy!’ Nobody cares about your opinion policing, you brain-broken misandrists.” — Nic Pizzolatto, Creator and show-runner of True Detective, Seasons 1-3
“We’re all in Night Country now.” — Heroin junkie in True Detective: Night Country
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The best thing about the terrible, horrible, no good, insultingly incompetent fourth season of True Detective, subtitled Night Country, is that I didn’t finish watching it.
It’s JOMO, baby, JOMO! The Joy Of Missing Out! Get it in your wheelhouse. Get it in your worldview. Normalize it. Stop watching shit content, stop hate-watching, stop supporting untalented hacks who are gleefully ruining all the great intellectual properties of past and present. Starve the beast, for of The Beast it is.
I had been unwillingly hate-watching HBO/Max’s True Detective: Night Country, because my son was reluctant to bail. I was ready to eject halfway through, after episode three of six (all prior seasons were eight, hmmmm), but he wanted to see how the mystery was solved and “maybe it’ll get better.”
But no. It got worse. Worse and worse and worse, stupid and illogical and insultingly bad, to the point where after S04E05, my kid had thankfully reached the tipping point: “This sucks. I don’t care about any of these characters and I don’t even care about the mystery any more.”
So we stopped. It was satisfying. It was gratifying to not grant show runner — yet another non-American woman, a Mexican PoC with no experience in U.S. television or Hollywood — Issa López the power and ability to assault my ears, eyeballs and memories all the way to her hijacked series’ inept bitter end (I read the spoilers; holy shit was the solution stooooopid!), to subserviently witness the climactic culmination of her incompetent smothering of arguably the greatest television series of all time (well, season one was, anyway).
I’ve already written a short dissection, right here, of how awful True Detective: Night Country was after seeing the fifth episode, 83% complete and painted so far into the crap corner by Ms. López it was clear there was no coming back. So I’m not going to repeat myself, nor am I going to give ammunition to ankle-biters who’ll snipe because I didn’t watch the damn thing to the end.
Instead, I’m going to cull observations about how much Night Country sucked, and why, from the people who’ve loved the series and know it best and stuck with it through the stoooopid season finalé: the True Detective subreddit.
As laughably 93% consistent as the predictable raves from so-called "top critics" compiled on shady Rotten Tomatoes are (while the public rating is on the fringe of “Rotten” at 60%, hmmmm), it is far more telling that there is pretty much 100% agreement in every post and thread on the True Detective subreddit — made up of thousands and thousands of fans of the series —that S04 stunk on ice. These critical analyses are far more intelligent and persuasive than the alleged “professionals” (who are “professionals” in the same way a streetcorner whore is a “professional” — “Presstitutes”!).
Reddit’s best written and most persuasive takes on True Detective: Night Country are satisfyingly brutal. And smart. And convincing. Far more convincing than the corporate whores, the shameful jerks who’ll sell a positive review and their soul for fifty bucks, who insist this shit is worth consuming as if it’s chocolate because, in the words of Screen Rant’s insufferable diversity typist (not a writer) Micah Bailey:
“Night Country features complex female leads who bring a distinct feel to the show, rectifying previous seasons' mistakes. [The series’] emphasis on complex and outspoken women solving a case is a much-needed change and a strong metaphor for previously silenced women; [these women are] flawed and compelling, avoiding the ‘Mary Sue’ issue found in other projects.”
Micah is either ignorant of previous seasons of True Detective — Season Two’s most interesting and compelling character is arguably Rachel McAdams’s jaded investigator from the L.A. sheriff’s office; Season Three had a meaty, three-dimensional role for Carmen Ejogo as one of the leads’ schoolteacher wife — or simply has a propaganda point to make and damn the facts if they get in his way. This is par for the corrupt course of contemporary “critics” (they’re not), who feel it is their duty to steer audiences towards socially engineered acceptable entertainment, not to judge it fairly in cold, hard clarity.
Far fairer judgment than the “professionals,” you’ll find on Reddit. The best place to start is the looooong thread “How I feel reading the good reviews of Season 4…” with an extensive collection of explanations of why the show suuuuuucked so bad and why the reviewers (not critics!) are soooooo stoooopid.
There is one specific comment from that thread that deserves special attention, because it’s (allegedly) written by a Native Alaskan woman who brilliantly deconstructs the series, the show runner and the cast’s hypocrisy. It has information I’ve not seen anywhere else, and places in stark relief the difference between Hollywood bullshit and hard-to-hear reality. There are spoilers involved, but really, who f’n cares at this point? The show was terrible, its solution sucked, and people should hear why the show was bad and the mystery’s solution ridiculous:
TEMPORARY-ABROCOMA29: I hope this terribly written season doesn’t turn viewers off of the theme in the future. The truth is, this wasn’t a Native story or a Native show. It has successfully marketed itself as the ultimate spectacle in authentic representation when it couldn’t be further from that.
True Detective: Night Country is a show written by a Mexican woman who is neither Alaskan nor Native. There were no Natives or Alaskans on the creative team. It was shot in Iceland and most of the Inuit characters are portrayed by Greenlandic Inuit actors. One of the two lead characters is played by an African-American actress, Kali Reis, with some truly questionable Native lineage (check out the Wikipedia page for her ‘tribe’—Seaconke Wampanoag under the tab ‘genetic analysis’— 🤔”). 80% of the crew was Icelandic. Anna Lambe, Diane Benson and June Thiele are the only vaguely regionally/tribally accurate actors I could identify.
It feels like they just tried to cash in on a bunch of trendy pop culture headline grabbing social themes — Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women [MMIW], feminism, landback, water protectors, tribal sovereignty, Indigenous rights activism, colonialism etc. — while not having any ties to the community to go more than surface level or make any deeper statements about the human experience of these issues.
Annie K’s murderers were killed by a group of magical native vigilante Aunties who commit mass murder with impunity? Girl power! Native power! Fuck the white men; you go girl, kill them all — justice is yours for the taking! Is this supposed to be empowering or feel-good to us Native women? Am I missing something?
As a Native woman, I’m disgusted. As someone who knows people all around me whose family members have either vanished without a trace or been the victim of unsolved crimes, I can tell you these women would be crying and marching in the streets for decades without receiving justice. Show me one time there’s been an act of vigilante mass murder committed with impunity and I’ll eat my hat.
In reality MMIW cases go primarily unsolved or the killers are identified and released on a technicality. Most of the time the victims’ deaths are blamed on factors relating to their own “lifestyle choices” and that pretty much wraps up the investigation.
Fuck them for calling this an MMIW story and failing to accurately portray the power structures and social issues that create the environment for the problem to exist. Fuck them for resorting to magic and jump scares in a story with really important social implications. Fuck them for cashing in on the footwork Native victims’ families have done to bring awareness and attention to the MMIW cause, and obscuring the fact that they weren’t qualified to tell this story with the care it deserves.
Please don’t blame us for this mess. The show wasn’t bad because it was Native or female led or because the critics are misogynistic incels. The show deserves criticism because it was poorly written, badly executed and failed to do justice to the world it attempted to portray.
…The problem [of MMIW] feels so constant and unsolvable, which is why the faux “empowerment” of justice via a mass vigilante murder rings so utterly inauthentic. It borders on insulting that it was conjured up by a woman outside of our community who was likely paid millions of dollars for such an inauthentic portrayal of a reality she has no connection to. If you listen to the True Detective podcast, Issa proudly exclaims that she nicknamed them ‘The Justice Ladies.’ She made them all silent cleaners in the background which feels more like an archetype for Mexican immigrants that she mixes up with Native Alaskans. She really thinks she did something there. It’s pure fantasy.
The arrogance of Issa López to think she could accurately portray a culture and an extremely unique and remote geographical location, both which she has no personal ties to, without hiring the right experts… served us up a group of truly unlikeable characters, mainly Native women whose defining personality trait was anger… aggravates me. Especially when there was so much potential.”
Yeah, that’s the solution to the mystery, incidentally. An entire station of scientists was stripped naked at gunpoint and sent into the freezing night by a group of vigilante cleaning women. One of the scientists killed a girl, all the other scientists let him get away with it (supposedly), so 20 “Justice Ladies” took it upon themselves to murder the scientists and then the two lady cops decide at the end to let them get away with it. How heroic!
That’s some really shit writing from Issa López, if, indeed, she did actually write it. One of other very interesting Reddit comments makes a strong argument that the script may actually have been written by A.I.:
JBROOKSDEV: I cannot shake the idea that True Detective S4 was written using A.I.
Night County has been rattling around in my head, and while I have no direct proof it was written using LLM A.I. [Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence], there are some curious things that match up with LLM writing:
Issues with relationships - AI are known to have issues tracking/establishing relationships between subjects. I keep thinking about how Foster’s chief of police main character is compelled to answer to regional Chief of Police, when the reality is that she would only need to answer to the town’s Mayor. AI wouldn't understand this relationship, but would certainly have those official sounding police titles to pull from if it had enough samples. Furthermore, there's a part in the first episode where Foster’s character says something meant to establish another cop as a rookie cop’s father, but it also initially sounds as if she’s his mother, too (the line about lunch sandwiches being packed).
Issues with world building rules - Another issue is that AI will often break its own world building rules because it is AI and doesn't know how to track world building rules previously established. Like how it takes a ghost and a police force to find scientists, it takes a police force and hunters to try and find (and fail) to find a bad guy, yet the coast guard can quickly catch a woman who walks out on to the ice to die.
Repetitive pulled responses - AI loves to repeat itself whenever it can, especially if you train it on a small sample. I can't help but think about the fact that every time a scene needs an ending or something needs to happen, a character gets a call from someone saying "you need to see this". Creating a new script for each episode using AI instead of having a consistent scene chart would allow for this issue to happen. The AI can't be bothered to remember what it used last episode, especially if they were created at different times.
Inconsistent scene structure - the biggest red flag for me was the fact that episode 5 ends with the Christmas tree and ear bleeding thing, but in episode 6, it is left behind and never mentioned. Again, AI can't be bothered to remember where it left off last episode, especially if the script was generated new each time.
Here’s another Reddit post making the “it was written by A.I.” accusation, using the argument that the dialog is so rudimentary and dull it reads robotically, while ChatGPT prompts return a remarkably similar story to what we ultimately got.
Personally, I’d like to add that Night Country’s klutzy storytelling includes a bunch of Woke tropes we suspiciously see again and again in zombie Hollywood entrainment that, in hindsight, feels like it could have been added by A.I. prompt: There’s a corrupt evil father, murdered by his son (HBO loves that shit). There’s a lesbian teen involved in an under-aged romance (the Hollywood pedos love that shit). Badass women beat up wimpy men (the witches love that shit). Laws and arrests are ignored in lieu of holier-than-thou judgmental protagonists deciding “Justice Women” can literally get away with mass-murder (the occupying regime’s DoJ loves that shit).
I’m not saying for sure that True Detective: Night Country’s shitty screenplay was written by A.I., just that it sounds like it could have been. Perhaps the script wasn’t written by A.I., perhaps it’s just that ignoramus Issa López is a focking diversity hire hack with a telenovela background and no taste or sense of the American mindset. As one commenter replied to the A.I. argument:
“Its not A.I. It’s just telenovela shit. Characters and grievances get resolved so the show can continue. It’s just cultural shock honestly. The issue with wanting a diverse writer and director is that the execs think they already have a cultural context for how things are done. Leftist executives think you can take a Latina telenovela writer who has worked mainly in Mexico, and that her approach to entertainment will be the same as two male writers raised in the US in the same cultural context.”
Whether dumbed-down diversity hire hack Issa López is real or actually an A.I. construct and not a real person, either way, if there’s legit concern about your writing being so inhuman that people are questioning whether it might be A.I., you should consider learning how to code or maybe wait tables. Or at least GTFO of Hollywood and return to making Mexican baby daddy dramas. Just sayin’.
Or perhaps this season of True Detective merely got edited to death. Because all prior entries were eight episodes, and maybe this series was also originally eight episodes until HBO/Max realized it was a turkey so they pruned it down to only six and some explanatory stuff got sliced out. Because….
There’s no shortage of subplots and story elements in True Detective: Night Country that are never resolved or make so sense. So many that it got an entire subreddit rundown: A List of Plot Lines That Went Nowhere.
I’m pushing 2,500 words at this point, so I think I’ve made mine. True Detective: Night Country was made by idiots and enjoyed by idiots, and the people who know the franchise best think it failed catastrophically. I would bet a Bitcoin that in time it will be recognized and acknowledged as the lousy low I.Q. shit show it is, the same way all the corrupt corporate creeps and creepers raved about The Last Jedi (91%/42% on RT) and Captain Marvel (79%/45%) at the time but now everybody knows they are near the nadir of anti-entertainment from a Hollywood that hates you.
Currently, the corporate media talking point from the Penske Publishing puppets and their ilk is that True Detective: Night Country is the most-watched season of the series ever, but that’s an in-the-moment lie. The “reporting” only encompasses the first run of the show; all the other seasons, over time, have accumulated far, far more viewers than the 12 million or so who tuned in/streamed the season finalé. Get back to us in a year, let’s see how Night Country stacks up against all the earlier, better, smarter, not seemingly A.I.-written seasons.
Of course, because Hollywood is a polluted bubble environment where everybody would rather live their lies than confront the truth, perhaps HBO/Max will take the rave reviews from rotters and moderate viewership bump on face value and steam straight into another clown world creative iceberg. Maybe next season we’ll get True Detective: Idiocracy, starring The Rock and Awkwafina. Can't wait!
Haven't finished reading yet but just want to register this issue of "strong independent female characters".... like Ripley or Sara Conner? Literally the two greatest sci-fi franchises of American film had "strong independent female characters". And that was over 40 years ago. And no one awed and cooed how it was so great. No way gave a shit because the films were great (moat of them) and thats all anyone cares about. Somehow they have reoriented people to demand what they have already gotten but with poor performances and unnecessary emphasis on what should just be a fucking given. Ugh.
Thanks for the warning. The other ones I loved. McConnaughey and Harrelson’s season is one for the ages.