Well, that's it, the entire mystery at the center of True Detective season 4 has finally been unraveled and we know all there is to know about Annie K's tragic murder and the curious disappearance – and later, deaths – of the Tsalal scientists.
Following six, slow burn episodes, the finale saw Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Navarro (Kali Reis) find themselves back at the research station, where they tortured Raymond Clark (Owen McDonnell) into revealing the truth about what happened to Annie – and got him to explain how he had managed not to succumb to the same fate as his frozen friends, too.
Now, it should go without saying that there are *major spoilers* below, so if you've yet to finish True Detective: Night Country and don't want to know what happens, turn back now!
Who killed Annie K?
It's the question on everyone's lips, right? While True Detective: Night Country opens with the Tsalal scientists going missing, the show soon shifts focus to solving the murder of Annie K, thanks to Navarro and Danvers' vested interest in the six-year-old cold case. The pair still want to figure out what happened to the researchers, sure, but with the incidents so obviously linked, it makes more sense to initially try to uncover truths about the first one. It helps, then, that the duo have much more luck finding clues as to what happened to Annie than they do the scientists.
Having previously found Annie's phone and the horrifying, self-recorded video on it that suggests Annie died – or was attacked, at least – in some sort of ice cave, Navarro and Danvers seek out the help of the latter's science teacher and ex-lover Adam. Despite them suggesting that there aren't any ice caves in Ennis, he proves otherwise, and points them in the direction of a naturally formed one that is likely to exhibit the frozen whale bones seen in the back of Annie's tape.
Refusing to follow Adam's advice on using an expert to investigate it, Danvers and Navarro travel to the suspected location of the tunnel and start digging. Before long, they discover a hollow, so the pair of them jump down and begin exploring. Guided by some sort of unseen supernatural force, Navarro confidently navigates the tunnels as if she's been there before, but their search hits a snag when they fall through the floor into an even deeper chamber. It's here they unexpectedly bump into Raymond Clark (Owen McDonnell), Annie's ex-lover and the only Tsalal scientist so far unaccounted for.
A chase ensues, which leads them to a fully-equipped laboratory of sorts – and it just so happens to have prehistoric markings in the walls that resemble Annie and Raymond's matching tattoos. There, they also discover a unique-looking tool that resembles the kind of star-shaped weapon Annie was fatally stabbed with 32 times. Then, climbing a ladder and going through a hatch, they curiously find themselves in... the Tsalal research station (you heard The Beatles' 'Twist and Shout', right?).
While Raymond locks Danvers in a freezer and knocks Navarro unconscious, the duo eventually manage to overpower the scientist (in other words, Navarro beats him to a pulp). They strap him to a chair and force him to watch Annie's last video on loop, hoping that her screams will guilt him into talking. They were right...
"It's my fault. She found some notes, just scribbles really, and she started to piece together what we were doing," he begins, before explaining that his team were "digging for the DNA of a microorganism contained in the permafrost" that could "save the world". Only the pollution from the mines, which has been turning the water of many of Ennis's First Nation residents toxic, was essential to their work and they'd been actively pushing the mine to produce more pollutant...
"It helps soften the permafrost," Raymond goes on. "We could extract the DNA with much less damage, and faster."
Using Raymond's discarded notes, Annie found the lab in which Danvers and Navarro stumbled across earlier and started destroying the scientists' work. "I think she was just trying to find a paper trail to prove that the mine was paying us but she discovered the truth," says Raymond, as a flashback catches viewers up. "All those years, all that potential to do so much good, she just obliterated it."
When Raymond heard Annie's screams from the basement lab, he rushed down there and found Anders Lund, the station's lead scientist, viciously stabbing her. As he pulled his superior off, he stepped on Annie's phone, which suggests that video was taken just as Lund attacked her. Terrified, the injured Annie grabbed a bit of piping and whacked Raymond over the head with it, causing him to fall back just as the other researchers came into the room. Quickly realizing what had happened, the group piled in on Annie, and "finished the job" as Raymond looked on in horror.
Despite his claim to Danvers and Navarro that he'd "never hurt" Annie, the flashback continues to reveal that she didn't actually die from the team's assault – and that Raymond suffocated her with his own T-shirt.
What happened to Raymond Clark?
Having revealed [some of] the truth to Danvers and Navarro, and being seemingly unable to live with what he did to Annie, the sleep-deprived Raymond – having presumably been freed from his duct-tape shackles by Navarro in a scene we weren't privy to – walks out into the blizzard and sits down in the snow. It doesn't take a scientist to work out what happens next...
Still, his fate is confirmed when Navarro and Danvers discover his frozen corpse just outside the building's back doors.
How did the other Tsalal research scientists die?
The Tsalal researchers were, essentially, killed by the indigenous women of Ennis after one of them, Beatrice, a cleaner at Tsalal, learned what they had done to Annie. An activist and a midwife, Annie was a beloved member of the town's Iñupiat community, and the women couldn't stand to see the scientists quite literally get away with murder, so they took matters into their own hands.
On the night of the researchers' disappearance, a bunch of them descended upon the Tsalal Arctic Research Station with guns, and shepherded the men into a large truck, which they then drove out into the middle of the wintery tundra. They forced the scientists out of the vehicle and ordered them to strip, before telling them to flee into the darkness – which explains why the scientists' clothes were found folded up. If they refused? They'd likely shoot them. Figuring it was better to take their chances out in the cold, the frightened men bolted, and obviously froze to death in a huddle later on.
Danvers and Navarro catch on to this thanks to something Raymond said earlier about his escape... You see, the only reason Raymond survived is because he'd descended into the bunker on the night the Ennis women attacked, having been spooked by the cut power and an overwhelming belief that the intruders were actually Annie's spirit come to get her revenge. Despite the womens' best efforts to get the hatch door open station-side, Raymond – hearing the commotion outside – held it shut for over an hour, successfully evading the group, and went into hiding in the icy tunnels below.
Back in the station in present day, Navarro and Danvers inspect the hatch door, and find a three-fingered handprint on its surface, implicating Blair Hartman, who lost two digits in a crabbing accident a while back. "The question isn't 'who killed Annie K', but 'who knows who killed her'," Danvers says. The duo don't realize the whole story though until the blizzard dies down, when they finally escape the station, and pay a visit to Blair, Beatrice, and their pals...
"It's always the same story with the same ending," Beatrice tells Danvers when she asks why the women didn't go to the cops. "Nothing ever happens, so we told ourselves a different story; a different ending."
True Detective: Night Country concludes with Danvers and Navarro assuring the women that they'll keep what really happened a secret and that "the case is closed", before the former tells her superiors that police officer Hank Prior had been corrupt and likely to have gotten into an altercation with Otis, and that the Tsalal researchers were killed by a slab avalanche. Her superiors mention a video of Raymond Clark confessing his and his team's murder of Annie K, too, which Danvers finds in Navarro's abandoned home in a flashback playing out simultaneously.
What happened to Hank?
While Hank wasn't responsible for the murder of Annie, he was involved in covering it up – a reveal that basically signed his death warrant in terms of the show. Hank (John Hawkes) confessed to being wrapped up in the case during a confrontation with Danvers and his son Pete Prior (Finn Bennett) at the former's house, which led to Prior shooting his father in the head to protect his boss.
Shady cop Hank had snuck his way into Danvers' home to kill Otis Heiss, a German engineer and cave mapper who had ties to Tsalal and Lund. (Danvers, persuading addict Heiss to help by plying him with drugs, figured he'd be of assistance when she and Navarro go to investigate the cave in which Annie supposedly died). When Hank's unofficial boss, Silver Sky mine owner Kate McKitterick, learned that Otis had been found by the police, she ordered Hank to murder him, to ensure Danvers and co. couldn't use him to implicate the mine and work out what really happened to Annie.
Hank succeeds, shooting Otis as soon as he gets to Danvers, but he gets more than he bargained for when Pete, who he didn't know was staying in the garage, bursts in with his own gun. Hank reveals he moved Annie's body – not her tongue, though, he left that behind, from the cave to town, and deliberately withheld evidence surrounding the case from Navarro and Danvers, before turning his firearm on the latter. Before he can pull the trigger, though, Pete takes his father out.
Later, Pete cleans up the mess left by the violent altercation and takes both Otis and Hank's bodies to Rose Aguineau's. Covered by the blizzard, he and Rose drill holes in the ice, puncture the corpses' lungs – so they don't float, as Rose points out – and drop them into the water.
Did Danvers and Navarro kill William Wheeler?
Like in its previous chapters, this season's sleuths are haunted by cases from the past. As more and more of the central mystery is unraveled, we also learn throughout the show that Danvers and Navarro fell out with one another following a particularly bleak one.
Early on in episode 5, Prior quizzes Danvers on their fight, and she tells him about the William Wheeler case, which saw the former partners regularly get domestic abuse calls from his wife. Danvers goes on to tell Prior that one particular house visit led to her and Navarro finding the bodies of William and his wife, and they'd just assumed that William had beaten his wife to death before turning a gun on himself in guilt. A flashback details, however, that Danvers is lying to Prior in the present, and that William was actually still alive when they arrived. Triggered by the violent scene, Navarro, whose own father was abusive, shot William in the head, and the detectives made it look like a suicide.
Later, Danvers confesses all to Prior after he tells her he's discovered that Wheeler was left-handed, and yet his fatal wound was on his right side. Prior also reveals that he'd used an old photo of William's wife to work out that Danvers' snaps from the crime scene were flipped to make it look like the injuries Wheeler's wife sustained were by someone right-handed.
What happened to Danvers' son and husband?
True Detective season 4 never explicitly explains what happened to Danvers' late husband Jake and son Holden, but it's heavily implied that the pair were killed in a tragic car accident some years ago.
"You know he doesn't really look like you, but there's something in his eyes," a shivering Navarro tells Danvers as they try to stick out the storm in the powerless station. Turns out, the little boy she's been seeing in her visions is Holden, suggesting that Navarro has an otherworldly connection to the afterlife. "Holden..."
"Shut up," Danvers snaps back, as Navarro replies: "He's out there, Liz, and he said that..."
"Shut the fuck up," Danvers barks. "You don't say his name. You hear me! You shut your mouth. You don't know... when he was trapped in that car... was he scared? Was he hurt? Was he screaming 'mommy'? You don't get to come here and tell me 'he said...' or I will shoot your sick, fucking mouth right off your face. You wanna go out there and die, you wanna follow your ghosts and curl up in a ball and die out on the ice out there, you go ahead. But leave my kid out of it!"
Later, as Danvers drifts in and out of consciousness having falling through the ice outside the station, we see a montage of her memories with Holden and a flashback where she steps outside her house to find shattered glass and two crushed vehicles on the road.
Will there be a True Detective season 5?
As it stands, HBO has made no official announcement when it comes to a fifth season of True Detective, so we'd assume that nothing is in the pipeline at the moment. Before Night Country, season 2 premiered in June 2015 while season 3 began airing in January 2019, which means that, even if we were to get another installment, we'd likely be looking at a four-to-five year wait.
But no news isn't necessarily bad news when it comes to this show, either. It seems worth noting that season 3 was confirmed in August 2017, two years after its predecessor concluded… so anything is possible.
True Detective is streaming on NOW in the UK and Max in the US. If you've binged it all and are now suffering from a True Detective-shaped hole in your heart, check out our list of the best new TV shows to give you something to look forward to.
