Dark Country Creator Issa López On Drama’s Finale

SPOILER ALERT! This story contains plot points from the season 4 finale of True Detective: Night Country.

HBO’s crime anthology wrapped its fourth season Sunday with detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) solving the murder of the eight men from the Tsalal Arctic Research Station who vanished without a trace.

Here, creator/showrunner Issa López — who came to the anthology after the writing and directing the award-winning Mexican film Tigers Are Not Afraid (Vuelven) — talks about how she first broke the story about the men in the research station, who represented the drama’s moral center, and what it was like to work with Foster and Reis.

DEADLINE So did Navarro become a ghost in the finale after she walked out on the ice?

ISSA LÓPEZ I’m not saying that she’s alive, and I’m certainly not saying that she’s dead. I very carefully crafted this as an ink block test for you to discover yourself as an audience member. I do love that Navarro states very early in the series that she has this impulse to just walk away and leave everything behind. On the other hand, the entire series is an exploration of the fact that she feels a calling to the beyond. In the climax of the finale, and instead of fighting it and going in with pain and fear, she surrenders to it. And in doing it, she receives a piece of herself. So that call that she was afraid of is solved. The Aboriginal people in Australia go and walk about, find themselves and then come back, which is I think is what Kali embraced [for the character]. However, there is a chance that she is also going to be with the women before her to visit them. You can read it both ways and it’s up to you to interpret which one fulfills your heart.

DEADLINE For several episodes there, I thought you were telling a supernatural murder mystery, that something other-worldly killed these men. I’m assuming that was the point, to kind of throw us off?

LÓPEZ Again, it’s both. A horrible deed in the real world happened. Annie K. was killed. There’s no right reason for killing a woman anywhere. But on top of that, she’s killed for horrible reasons. That eventually brings consequences to these men. The women take justice upon themselves because justice is not coming from the outside, as we know that happens in the real world. They put the men out in the arctic. It’s very easy to think and assume they die of exposure and in dying of exposure, they go into a panicked state and have delirium, as is explained in the series. So it’s perfectly real. That’s a rational explanation. But there’s another explanation that these men walk into the ice. Their clothes are there for them to come back to so they can try to survive. They never come back for the clothes. Did they encounter something out there that they woke up when they were digging in places they were not supposed to be digging in? When they were taking the lives of women, because of where they were digging? That’s another vision of it. And once again, it’s your mission to decide which version you go with.

DEADLINE How did you come up with the story?

LÓPEZ I was briefly married to a scientist and I love science. I was an archeologist and I have studied anthropology. That’s the beauty of TV. You really have the space to explore your obsessions. And instead of seeing it as a challenge, I saw it as an opportunity to just throw and explore so many paths, so many ways to explain a single event.

DEADLINE You ended up giving us a history lesson about indigenous people in Alaska that most people don’t even know existed. Was that a goal?

LÓPEZ True Detective is about the locations. The place is a character as much as the characters themselves. So the first season takes place in Louisiana, the second season takes place in Los Angeles, the third season takes place in Arkansas. Each of those locations were incredibly distinctive and bring different elements. So I thought of Alaska, which is completely different from those three and where the nights last forever. It would have been absolutely wrong to talk about these communities without embracing and going in depth to the fact that 70% of the population of these towns in northwest Alaska are Iñupiaq. I was not familiar with them. So I learned as much as I could on my own. And then I enlisted the elder council of the tribe to go through every script with us and keep us real. We brought the people from Alaska, the Iñupiaq people as characters in the show, just to remind us that we were not using that as an interesting background. It became the story that we were telling.

DEADLINE So at what point during shooting did you ask yourself, why the hell did I pick a cold location?

LÓPEZ Oh, every night. I’m Mexican. What am I doing here? Nobody told me that I had to do that. Because I’m Mexican, I think there was perhaps a little expectation that I was going to do it along the border, or in the desert of Arizona or it was going to be tropical. No, I had to pick the harshest place on earth!

DEADLINE How was it working with Jodie and Kali? So much anger in every episode with those women! Did Did they require much direction?

LÓPEZ I think what’s interesting about working with women is that it’s pretty damn easy to access [motivation]. I mean, we are so happy to be in on those sets. But we’ve dealt with shit in our lives, all of us. And it’s easy to access and it’s fun to use it to create something positive. So it’s not a show about angry women, but it is also a show about angry women. It’s also about loneliness and it’s about loss and it’s about sadness and it’s about wanting to be with someone and share the things that we carry and not being able until we break through ourselves. But it is also about the anger that we feel and we carry. Kali and Jodie couldn’t be more different and the two of them couldn’t be more different than myself. But you do find there’s a communion of experiences and the technique they use with each other is different. With Jodie, everything comes from the mind. And if you are clear in the reasons for the character to access an emotion, she will get there. Kali and I come more from the world of emotions. So I would use verbal analysis with Jodie while I would go to Kali and say, ‘this is how you feel.’ Then I would let them go and they would achieve the same tone beautifully. It was gorgeous to watch.

DEADLINE I have to ask about Peter Prior [Finn Bennett]. He felt like the moral center of this story. I felt so sorry for him.

LÓPEZ Don’t be sad. I mean, yes, he’s absolutely the moral compass. He’s the uncorrupted one at the beginning of the story. But the truth is, it is a cop story. And I don’t think there is a simple way to be a cop in this world, if ever there was. And imparting justice, if that’s the function of the police, cannot be black and white. We’ve seen it over and over again. He’s a baby cop and he’s trying to become a full-fledged one. And he’s doing it by asking the right questions and getting the training as a detective. He’s not a full fledged cop until he has baptism by blood and it’s his own blood. Now, from a Freudian perspective, from a Greek tragedy perspective, there is an old human tradition that to become an adult you have to kill your parents. It’s a very primal image, but it’s behind so many modern conflicts. I took it a little literal in this case. He does have to break with the pain and the corruption and the dark emotions that Hank [John Hawkes] is asking him to connect with. He’s not that person. Peter makes a decision before any shots are fired and Hank understands that his life is over, everything is going to go downhill from there. Everything he did is going to be exposed. He knows he lost his child. So he raises the gun. And if you look carefully at the frame, Hank doesn’t have his finger on the trigger. He was not going to shoot Danvers, but he makes the gesture knowing that he’s going to go down.

DEADLINE Did you feel like you had enough episodes to tell your story? Did you want more?

LÓPEZ No, no. It was the opposite. HBO kept saying like, ‘please do eight, please. Okay. Seven.’ And I was like, no, six. That was me. I feel that overstaying your welcome is a mistake. You have to quit while you’re winning. Every story uses the space it needs. Six was the goal, and six was where we ended it.