True Detective: What Happened at the End of the Night Country Premiere?

True Detective returned to HBO on Sunday night with a brand new season, sending the anthology series to an Alaskan town in the middle of a weeks-long darkness. The season, titled True Detective: Night Country, brings together to officers with bitter feelings towards one another after a cold case intersects with the disappearance of several men at a research facility. The premiere of this eerie new season was a throwback for True Detective in a lot of ways, including that it sets up a ton of questions and gets fans wondering if there's something sinister or supernatural at play.

Like the acclaimed first season of the series, Night Country gives you a lot to think and theorize about, especially after the premiere's final scene. WARNING: This article contains MAJOR SPOILERS for True Detective: Night Country! Continue reading at your own risk...

The "main" case at the center of True Detective: Night Country surrounds eight researchers at a remote facility in Alaska who completely disappear. Police Chief Danvers (Jodie Foster) is investigating the missing persons case and enlists the help of Navarro (Kali Reis) because a severed tongue at the empty facility seemingly connects to an old murder case. There's no telling what happened to the researchers just yet, but Danvers and Navarro do happen to find them at the end of the episode. Their discovery in its final moments is one of the episode's most disturbing scenes.

The duo of officers find the bodies of the missing researchers frozen in the snow, seemingly out in the middle of nowhere. That discovery establishes quite a few questions, like why the researchers ended up there and whether or not something killed them before the cold.

What seems even more important to the story, however, is just how Danvers and Navarro came upon those bodies. A woman named Rose spent the whole episode seeing visions of a dead man named Travis. She followed him out into the snowy darkness and he led her to the bodies. 

So Rose's connection to Travis and the dead will be a something to think about as we head into the rest of the season. It also brings into play the idea of the supernatural (or even extraterrestrial). The mystery at the center of the first season of True Detective didn't turn out to be quite as mystifying as it seemed. There was an explanation for quite a lot of things. So far, this season seems to be taking things in a different direction.

What did you think of the True Detective: Night Country season premiere? Let us know in the comments!