True Detective: Night Country is technically Season 4 of the investigative anthology series – but it came with the hype of having some of the biggest direct connections to Season 1 of the show.
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NOTE: This article contains spoilers for True Detective: Night Country Episodes 1 & 2!
The first season of True Detective remains the most acclaimed and popular of the series – in no small part because of a strange brew mix of existential philosophy, classic Noir detective tropes, and a core mystery that lent itself to fan theories about the killer lurking in the wings. Night Country has a lot of those same elements – only the heady (read: depressing) concepts discussed by Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle have been traded for mysterious (read: baffling) supernatural elements, in which the sights of ghosts and/or spirits are mundane occurrences in the Alaskan town of Ennis.
However, even though the themes and influences in True Detective Seasons 1 and 4 couldn’t be more different, there is some common ground between them for some significant connections.
Travis Is The Father of Rust Cohle
The biggest early theory of True Detective: Night Country is that one of its most enigmatic characters in the first episodes, Travis (Erling Eliasson), is actually the father of Season 1 protagonist Rust Cole (McConaughey).
Travis appears as a ghostly apparition to reclusive Ennis woman Rose Aguineau (Fiona Shaw) and leads her to the site of the twisted, frozen, bodies of the Tsalal Research Station crew that went missing. In Episode 2, Rose talks with Trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) about the supernatural experience, filling in the backstory about how “Travis Cohle” was her lover, who found out he had terminal Leukemia and decided to handle it by voluntarily walking out into the cold and freezing to death. His body was discovered by Navarro, which linked her with Rose.
True Detective: Night Country showrunner Issa López has since given soft confirmation that Travis is Rust’s father, stating: “Travis is his own creature. He comes directly from the mythology of the first season. 😉”
This connection instantly makes True Detective: Night Country more relevant to the storyline from Season 1. Rust shared at one point that he went back to Alaska to be with his father for some time between the years of the investigation, and the season ended with Rust claiming to have communed with this father’s spirit when he was comatose after getting injured while battling the serial killer known as The Yellow King. In that sense, Travis is quickly becoming a spirit that is both literally and figuratively hanging over True Detective.
Spirals of Darkness
One of True Detective Season 1’s biggest signatures was the spiral symbol. The spirals were found at scenes where Rust Cohle and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) were investigating the ritualistic murders and strange cult happenings in the Louisiana swamplands. There were many theories about all the historical, mystical, and occult meanings of the symbol – and now that mystery has extended into True Detective: Night Country.
Episode 2 of Night Country revealed that a victim of the Tsalal Research station had a spiral carved into his head. Navarro and Chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) find more disturbing spirals when looking into researcher Raymond Clark (Owen McDonnell) and his connection to the earlier murder of “Annie K,” the outspoken woman who was killed years earlier, leaving Danvers and Navarro haunted by the unsolved case and estranged from one another. Both Clark and Annie got spiral tattoos on their bodies, and the secret trailer they kept to hide their romance also had a massive spiral drawn on the ceiling.
True Detective’s spiral (or vortex) symbol has been associated with theories of time and circumstances being circular in their repetition – as well as the occult and secret societies that practice it. That latter bit was a major subplot of Season 1, as Rust and Marty discovered over the decades that Louisiana’s darkest corners were home to such rituals – often involving the abuse and/or slaughter of young kids. Night Country seems to be taking the symbol even further into the supernatural horror genre, with early hints that Ennis, Alaska could sit on a vortex or portal to some other kind of dark realm or power.
Tuttle Cult Inc.
The secret society that catered to and covered up the murders of the “Yellow King” in True Detective Season 1 was controlled and operated by a powerful family known as the Tuttle Family. The Tuttle Cult worshipped ideas that can be found in stories by famous horror writers like H.P. Lovecraft, Robert W. Chambers, and Ambrose Bierce – with two of the most iconic being Hastur, The Yellow King, and the “Carcosa,” the ritual site where the Tuttle family committed acts as vile as the sexual abuse and sacrifice of children.
The ending of True Detective Season 1 revealed that serial killer Errol Childress (aka The Yellow King Killer) was actually the son of a bastard Tuttle named William Lee Childress, and had been allowed to operate for years within the Tuttle Cult, which also protected him. Rust and Marty killed Errol, and Rust exposed Bill Tuttle’s crimes enough for the publicly-revered man to take his own life rather than face shame and consequences. However, it was noted that the larger sphere of power and influence the Tuttles had was not ultimately disrupted by the investigation, as the family was simply too powerful to face true justice.
True Detective: Night Country Episode 2 revealed a detail that wasn’t significant to the characters – but very significant to viewers. In one scene, young cop Peter Prior (Finn Bennett) is running down the leads he’s found for his boss Chief Danvers. Peter mentions that he dug into who owns the Tsalal Research Station where the killings happened, and it is run by an NGO run through a shell company called NC Global, which is part of a larger corporate conglomerate named “Tuttle United.”
Yes, the Tuttle Family (and its cult) has reach all the way to the end of the world in Ennis, Alaska. The reveal that the Tuttles are even tangentially involved in Night Country instantly reframes the nature of this season. Suddenly, the supernatural elements that are far more pronounced in this fourth season seem way more relevant and less odd. True Detective Season 1 only scratched the surface of evil otherworldly evil being harnessed by evil people; it’s easy to see True Detective: Night Country getting deeper into how much the supernatural is actually at work in this franchise universe, as well as revealing more about what kind of prize the Tuttle family is chasing via the Occult.
True Detective: Night Country is now streaming on Hulu and Max.
