Rose has ambiguous thoughts about the spiral, too, saying that it’s “Older than us. Older than the ice, probably.” Longtime viewers might recall that the spiral appears as a tattoo on the body of season 1 murder victim Dora Lange, who was killed by a man named Errol (Glenn Fleshler). While many of the first season’s folk horror-tinged mysteries turn out to be based in reality, Rust also sees a swirl of cosmic colors in the sky when he faces off against Errol, and witnesses birds flying in a spiral pattern matching Dora’s tattoo in an earlier scene. Just as the new season blurs the line between magical realism and mental illness, the original show explained these moments as acid flashbacks, hallucinations triggered by bits of LSD still stuck in Rust’s system.
Yet Rust also hints that his own survivalist father had delusions or grand theories about the universe of his own. “He had some very f***ing strange ideas,” Rust recalled at one point, noting that his mother was only present in his early days and his dad was a Vietnam vet. “There’s nothing like the night sky out there, though,” Rust added, a line that’s echoed by a season 4 shot of Travis’ ghost reaching meaningfully up to the sky. Could Travis’ ideas have to do with the powerful, death-preventing microorganisms scientists believed were out on the ice? Or maybe the bloody woman of local legend who appears in a child’s drawing in episode 1? Does the timeline here make any sense, or should we chalk it all up to time being a flat circle? There are still plenty of mysteries to be solved, but in the meantime, “True Detective: Night Country” deserves credit for throwing fans for a loop with Rose’s casually world-shifting reveal.
“True Detective: Night Country” airs on HBO and streams on Max Sundays at 9 pm PT/ET.
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