Mild spoilers for all six episodes of True Detective: Night Country below.

As someone born within the Land of the Midnight Sun, and a longtime traveler through its wilderness, I noticed my ears perk up when the trailers rolled out for Issa López’s Max series True Detective: Night Country. The frigid setting of Alaska is near and dear to my heart; this season, which concludes on Sunday, also promised to mix a few of my favorite genres—noir, suspense, and supernatural horror. To live in wintertime Alaska is to cultivate an affinity for extreme cold and darkness, or no less than a stoic indifference. The oldest, most rural communities are akin to ice-bright stars in a constellation—geographically isolated, adrift upon a black sea. Reachable by radio wave, by sailing, by flight. Their streets and roads spiral from town center axes into surrounding hills worn to the gumline by eons of wind, connecting to nothing, vanishing just like the ends of hemorrhaged veins into the vast empty. It’s a land where voices echo and the wind moaning across the tundra sounds an awful lot like ghosts. Season 4’s aesthetic captures the essence of loneliness, of estrangement, particular to the Arctic.

Where does Night Country land within the tradition of “polar” horror and suspense? One can trace this season’s roots to 19^th-century works The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe (1838) and Jules Verne’s An Antarctic Mystery (1897), via Night Country’s foregrounding of Tsalal Research Station, where eight scientists have vanished under exceedingly ominous circumstances. Night Country also joins a cinematic catalog that features, amongst many others, 1951’s The Thing From Another World (and John Carpenter’s seminal 1982 remake); Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001); Smilla’s Sense of Snow (1997); 30 Days of Night (2007); and the more moderen streaming series Fortitude (Season 1, 2015) and The Terror (Season 1, 2018). While Night Country bears certain hallmarks of those works (conspiracy, corruption, paranoia, isolation), an ethereal undercurrent of magical realism sets it other than the pack. Despite the show’s heritage as the newest installment of a well-established series and its complement of inescapable references to a broader array of like-minded narratives, Night Country seems to be as slippery as a seal and just as elusive.

Season 4 dispenses with the violent, broken, hypermasculine protagonists of Season 1, inverting the formula by centering women and affording them greater agency in what’s otherwise classic mystery noir. Historically, this has been a male-dominated subgenre when it comes to POV characters, which makes Night Country’s take refreshing. Smilla’s Sense of Snow—the 1992 novel by Peter Høeg, in addition to the 1997 film, each of which featured an alienated, yet persistent female protagonist—actually left tracks for López to follow. The thing about noir is that no matter gender, everybody’s generally in crisis. Characters react to trauma along a predictable spectrum. They self-medicate via sex and liquor, or stronger. And when push involves shove, hash is sure to get settled with violence.

Rather than a 180-degree reversal, divergences between Seasons 1 and 4 are inclined to be a matter of mirroring and jagged, splintered refraction. The detectives at the guts of this darkness drink, fornicate, fight on the drop of a deerstalker hat, and brood with the perfect of male hard-bitten protagonists from Alaska to Scandinavia. Jodie Foster’s Liz Danvers is a cool and competent foil, as we’d expect; meanwhile, Kali Reis’ Evangeline Navarro seethes with volcanic wrath. Both cops harbor secrets. Their collegial enmity and bitterness easily rival the dysfunctional Season 1 duo of Rustin Cohle and Martin Hart.

If you squint, Liz Danvers presents as a version of Clarice Starling, hero of The Silence of the Lambs. Night Country posits a Clarice who never escaped her small-town provenance, never exorcised the demons of the barn, never shipped off to ending school at Quantico. No, this character inherits the post of local sheriff and is duly subsumed by the squalor and pettiness of the role. Consequently, Danvers is less refined, less constrained than Starling. Indeed, beneath her dogged, by-the-book persona, she’s wildly undisciplined, a boozy philanderer willing to abet a murder or two if the cause is righteous. Devastated by personal tragedy, terminally cynical, and trapped within the purgatorial amber of small-town Alaska, she’s the deep roller Dr. Lecter warned her alter ego about.

Evangeline Navarro is the nucleus of Season 4: the living, reacting causeway traversing worlds and cultures. She is a damaged crusader who won’t abandon an old murder investigation and a seer with one foot within the realms beyond, stricken by whispering spirits. Most necessary, she bears witness to the numinous. In a moment of overboiling frustration, she fishes an orange from her parka pocket and hurls it across the ice. The orange mysteriously rolls back to her from the other way, and we’re reminded of an earlier scene featuring a close-up of a duplicate of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), abandoned half-read at Tsalal Station. This conjures to mind a passage of the novel wherein Judge Holden, the massive bad, enthralls a band of scalp hunters together with his fireside meditation on the natures of God, man, and warfare. He flings a coin into the desert night, just for the item to unerringly arc back into his hand. The recurring orange and coin suggest the mutability of physics, of reality at large. Time is circular, distance illusory, free will a charade. All matter, all space, condenses to an origin point in case your field of view is broad enough. Or perhaps it’s a parlor trick and we’re rubes. Chicanery and magic bear a detailed resemblance at the hours of darkness. The same could possibly be argued of events in Ennis, the perspectives of its residents.

I appreciate Easter eggs as much as the subsequent guy, but Season 4 verges on overstuffed within the areas of fan service, hidden cookies, and callbacks. Danvers’ child, Holden, as in Judge Holden. “Time is a flat circle.” Harking back to Season 1, and against all logic, the Tuttle empire has dramatically expanded in scope. Rustin Cohle’s dad, Travis, is a revenant; his dad’s lover, Rose Aguineau, a druid. Obsession with vision, as demonstrated by the looks of a one-eyed polar bear (an echo of Rust’s tiny mirror). The recurring spiral, which acts as a warning of thin ice, insignia of a blood cult, or more esoterically, a representation of the orbital pattern of a frozen dwarf planet named Sedna. The Thing represented in various character names (Blair and Clark), the duvet of a DVD, and the gruesome “corpsicle,” which resembles the alien creature from Carpenter’s aforementioned 1982 film caught midtransformation.

It’s a skinny line between love and hate, because the song goes.

Conversely, director/author López gets that less is more when it comes to philosophizing. She deftly winnows the fat from Season 1’s exchanges between Hart and Cohle and their various antagonists. Instead of warmed-over Thomas Ligotti or Nietzsche-adjacent monologues, López hits us with rarer, pithier quotes, then steps away to allow them to do their work. A chief example of this happens when Rose, Ennis’ local hermit, says to her collaborator, after deep-sixing a corpse, “I guess you’re thinking the worst part is done. It’s not. What comes after, forever, that’s the worst fucking part.” On one other occasion, someone remarks that Navarro’s belief in God have to be a comfort because it suggests we’re not alone within the abyss of creation. She responds, “No, we’re alone. God too.” Thus ends the interaction. This is in line with the austere nature of the backdrop, and the prosaic bleakness of life on the Alaskan frontier.

Irrational explanations aren’t explicit or coherent this season as they’d be in a completely fantastical drama. Rather, mystical elements align with the general direction of the series. Things that go bump within the night are coyly open to interpretation until the last moment; even then, López provides a fig leaf of rationality for many who shy from the occult. So it goes with the denouement of Night Country. The riddle’s answer is ambiguous; several strings are left dangling. However, this time the cleanest, most blatant solution happens to be the ineffable one: Trooper Navarro is an avatar/vessel of the Inuit goddess Sedna, woke up to exact vengeance upon the boys who violated nature and poisoned her faithful. Sedna is offended, and he or she works in not-so-mysterious ways.

The “Yellow King” storyline that kicked off True Detective in 2014 was set within the South, the geographical and narrative antipodes of Night Country—an oppositional scenario that directly delineates artistic incongruencies (hot vs. cold, light vs. dark) while reifying what the seasons share in common, namely a quest for truth carried out across physical and emotional wastelands.

Season 1 teased supernatural horror fans before ultimately revealing that the otherworldly elements were merely trappings. Brilliant because the initial arc was, it pulled some punches through the latter stages, seeming to lack the courage of its convictions; an existential nightmare undercut with the unmasking of a Scooby-Doo villain and a dose of unearned optimism. By contrast, Night Country grows stronger, weirder, with each episode. The twisting narrative and stellar acting performances construct to a crescendo, fulfilling an initial audacious promise that there may be more beneath heaven than dreamt of in our philosophy. Not only is the world stranger than we imagine, we passengers on this odyssey will simply need to live with that revelation. I count myself amongst those that doubted that López would really go there despite the eeriness of the primary couple of episodes.

Wrong.

Usually, there’s an all-too-human monster at the top of a terrible dream. But sometimes there’s an angel or a devil. What comes after has all the time been waiting; it would be, without end. Season 4’s dreamlike aftermath leaves us as haunted because the denizens of Ennis.