While “Night Country” is very much a spiritual sequel to season 1, and even feels like a dramatization of Rust’s final line from that season, it’s not actually tying up specific loose strings from Pizzolatto’s episodes. Instead, López took the symbol and created her own mythology, as represented by the fact the spiral in “Night Country” travels clockwise from the center out, while the season 1 version unraveled anticlockwise. Season 4’s spiral is just as potent and foreboding a symbol as its season 1 counterpart, but it’s not tied to any child abuse cults or ritualistic murders. Instead, it represents the enduring and often vengeful spirit of the natural environment and of those whose land has been degraded by people who shouldn’t be there in the first place.
What’s more, López told the official “Night Country” podcast:
“There’s a reason that spirals are a warning. Interestingly, when you fall down a spiral, you’re also falling down to the center, and sometimes falling all the way down to the center is what you need to find yourself. So yes, there is a lot of catastrophe happening here, but it’s the path to discovery.”
As such, this new version of the spiral symbolizes something much more hopeful than Rust’s “Time is a flat circle” philosophy and actually represents a process of self-discovery. In that sense, the spiral of “Night Country” is about a return to a natural state, both in terms of the natural world and within ourselves. Even if you’re a season 1 fan who felt let down by these revelations, you’ve gotta give it to López for crafting a coherent mythology for her version of the spiral and reinterpreting a classic “True Detective” trope to create something original.
“True Detective: Night Country” is streaming on Max.
