True Detective rescues the franchise by harking back to its best

The fourth season, though, has undoubtedly changed the trajectory of the detective drama.

The new episodes are not only providing us with a fresh, chilling mystery of its own, but are also taking just enough from the first standout run to continue to keep viewers guessing.

It's no mean feat picking up an acclaimed series five years after its latest season, but this new instalment, with Jodie Foster and Kali Reis at its helm, is on course to be one of the franchise's best.

Amid the various reasons as to why that is – indigenous representation, superb casting and the menacingly dark backdrop of Alaska, to name just a few – the series pays homage to its roots. Namely, to the very first season, which put True Detective on the map and made people fall in love with the series.

Like any crime drama fan, True Detective followers especially know to pay attention to the small details and the characters that seem to blend into the background. After all, that was how the identity of the season 1 killer became all too apparent.

But season 4 literally begs the viewer to pay close attention to every shot, Arctic landscape and detail to try and figure out this complex and seemingly other-worldly case lying before us.

Yet let's talk about the painfully obvious – the links back to season 1 that are prompting fans to ideate as to how Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson's serial killer case could have a connection to the block of frozen male researchers in Ennis, Alaska.

With the series playing up to the much talked-about season 1 spiral, the fourth season continues to drop in references to the ominous pattern in various forms.

Without giving anything away about future episodes, the spiral continues to be a recurring motif: From the way that things are laid out, the drawing on one of the deceased's foreheads, the ceiling of the van where Raymond Clark (Owen McDonnell) and Annie K (Nivi Pedersen) secretly met through to the fact that the spiral was tattooed on the both of them.

The spiral, at this point, is basically everywhere we turn in the series, only cementing this fourth season as most definitely having links to the first.

Fans of season 1 will know that the spiral has chilling connections to the child-abusing cult at the centre of the murders, originally seen on the dead body of Dora Lange and ultimately setting off the chain of events that unfolded in the first run.

But the ending of True Detective season 4's latest episode only dives deeper into the theory of connection, with Clark and Annie's van an eerie callback to Carcosa, the intricate old stone ruin in the middle of the Louisiana Bayou region which was revealed to be the Tuttle cult's place of worship in the season 1 finale.

If you cast your mind back, not only did Rust (McConaughey) and Marty (Harrelson) nearly meet their end there, but they also came face to face with Errol Childress, the deranged serial killer that was a part of the cult and continued to go undetected kidnapping, abusing and killing countless women and children.

While that is not the case here in season 4, the inclusion of the seemingly messy van actually points to the same organised chaos of Carcosa, which was a labyrinth of shrines, antlers and branches.

While the van's focal point was the spiral on the ceiling, viewers will also surely have noticed the details surrounding the space, including the homemade stuffed dolls, shrine-like bed display, the frantic scribbles and writing on the walls and the twig sculptures that look similar to the season 1 devil's nests.

Not to mention the fact that, in this latest episode, not only do we get confirmation of a connection to Rust Cohle's father Travis, but we also have reference to the Tuttle family.

Peter (Finn Bennett) tells Danvers that after tracking the funding behind the Tsalal research facility, he has found a connection to Tuttle United, which Danvers discounts.

But this Easter egg will surely prick up many a True Detective fan's ears, as Childress was part of the Tuttle family, albeit the offspring of an affair.

Yet the Tuttles are also the powerful and generation-spanning Louisiana family who created the Tuttle cult. Said cult, as we learned in season 1, had abused, kidnapped and 'sacrificed' children in their worship of 'The Yellow King' and Carcosa.

Of course, fans will have to continue tuning into True Detective to see if and how those links transpire in future episodes, but for now, the inclusion of the Tuttle name is one that will both send chills but also underline the connections this family has in the True Detective universe.

As we understood in season 1, it's a family with immense wealth and power, governing at the highest bodies in politics and the church.

Clearly, here, we're to understand that it's a family that, despite those ongoing ties to the country's worst crimes, continues to operate without any consequence and generates enough money to fund scientific research.

Not only does the current run have these outright references to season 1, but more importantly, I think, the connection between Danvers (Foster) and Navarro (Reis) is one that is reminiscent of the love-hate relationship between Rust and Marty.

Without meaning to make this an entire piece about the way that these two women carry this drama superbly, their partnership (friendship is a stretch of a term) is one that is hard to define.

They have respect for each other's work like Marty and Rust, but don't hang out or swap jokes. It's clear, though, that there was a point in their lives where they certainly did, and that difficult, often spiky dynamic is one that continues to be a delight to watch.

While it's annoying that seasons of a drama need to be compared and contrasted, in a show like True Detective, which saw many fans fall out of love with the franchise in its previous two seasons, season 4 is a reminder that you can take snippets of a defining series and spin it into something entirely different and exciting.

True Detective: Night Country premiered on Sky Atlantic and NOW on Monday 15th January 2024. New episodes weekly. Find Sky deals here.

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