Does Jodie Foster Make ‘True Detective’ Worth Watching Again?

True Detective may never recapture the original highs that turned it into a zeitgeisty phenomenon with the power to rejuvenate the career of a bona fide A-lister à la the McConaissance. Still, over its subsequent seasons (including its unfairly derided sophomore run), HBO’s crime series has continued to tap an appealingly anguished vein, using homicide investigations as vehicles for exploring an existential brand of loneliness, fury, and great inconsolable despair. No matter its stories’ nominal focuses, it’s an anthology swathed in a noir-ish shroud of misery and malevolence, and at its finest, it plumbs the bleakest recesses of the soul, as well as the terrifying ancient evils that refuse to die and endlessly corrupt us.

Five years after its underrated third go-round starring Mahershala Ali, the show returns with True Detective: Night Country on Jan. 14, a six-episode iteration most notable for being spearheaded not by creator Nic Pizzolatto but, instead, by Tigers Are Not Afraid director Issa López—and, also, for setting aside its trademark brooding machismo to fixate on a pair of female cops played by Jodie Foster and Kali Reis. Despite those twists, however, this new saga is in various ways an extension of its predecessors, in particular its sensational maiden season, including with regards to the baffling and horrific crime at its epicenter. Trying to bite off more than it can chew to the detriment of its own strengths, this multifaceted descent into a chilly abyss doesn’t completely come together. Even so, it never completely unravels, courtesy of the unshakeable pain and desolation that wraps around its every character like a noose.

In fictional Ennis, Alaska (“Welcome to the End of the World”), located 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle, the last December sunset of the year has arrived, heralding the start of a perpetually dark winter. This remote enclave consists of a meager main street with a few shops, a bar, and a police station, whose chief Liz Danvers (Foster) does her best to rub everyone the wrong way, especially Evangeline Navarro (Reis), a colleague whom she demoted—due to a prior, secretive case—to trooper, much to Navarro’s lingering anger. Danvers cares for her former Native boyfriend’s teen Leah (Isabella Star LaBlanc) as her own daughter, and their relationship is rife with tension that only escalates once troublemaking Leah begins joining protests against the Silver Sky Mining operation that employs most locals and is under fire for pollution that’s turned the area’s water supply black.

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