True Detective is a series that seen some ups and down in it’s time, the anthology having a rocky second season after a universally praised first one. True Detective: Night Country, starring Jodie Foster, is set in Alaska in the territory where the sun sets for months at a time. It’s going to make for (literally) the darkest season of the show yet.
HBO recently dropped the first page of the first script for the first episode on the Twitter account for the upcoming fourth season of their popular crime anthology series set to drop this year, and it’s scene-setting at its finest.
When it was announced that not only would there be a fourth season of HBO’s crime anthology series, True Detective, but that it would star Jodie Foster whose 1991 psychological thriller, The Silence of the Lambs, still reigns supreme in the pop culture landscape, things seemed ripe for a big comeback for the franchise. Tag in Kali Reis as her sidekick for the happenings, and writer/director Issa López, whose 2017 Tigers Are Not Afraid made a big international splash, and there seemed to be something there. Add in a frigid setting during an endless night, and everything was set for a new season that explored mankind’s inner darkness.
EXT-ARCTIC, the extract begins, short for Exterior Arctic, cold words for a cold landscape. It describes the sun dying fast over the endless white landscape, a horizon of frost like the icy version of the deserts David Lean shot for Lawrence of Arabia, swallowing the sun for weeks or even months. This makes it a great setting for a series known for exploring the dark night of the soul now doing it in a literal fashion. Much like 30 Days of Night, True Detective is taking advantage of a natural phenomenon, that is the rotation of the earth, to strip away the leads' ability to have the bright light of day helping guide them and instead plunging them into darkness.
Announcing the remoteness, 150 MILES ABOVE THE ARCTIC CIRCLE, and that it’s THE LAST SUNSET OF THE YEAR, sets an ominous tone that fans of movies like The Thing known only all too well, that of people trapped far away from civilization with nowhere to turn and nowhere to run as things go from bad to worse. For a series that has dealt with murderous cults, criminal syndicates, and kidnappers, only the writers of True Detective: Night Country know for sure what they have planned for the two leads in this frozen tundra of crime-solving and violence that lies ahead.
True Detective: Night Country is coming 2023.
Source: HBO/Twitter