“"You knew it was hopeless," said Andrew Maness as he stood over the book that lay on the desk, glaring at the pages of old handwriting in black ink. "You told me to always read the right words and to always have them in my mind, but you knew I would read the wrong words. You knew what I was. You knew that such a being existed only to read the wrong words and to want to see those words written across the sky in a black script. Because you yourself were the author of the book. And you brought your son to the place where he would read your words. This town was the wrong place, and you knew it was the wrong place. But you told yourself it was the only place where what you had done . .. might be undone. Because you became afraid of what you and those others had done. For years you were intrigued by the greatest madness, the most atrocious secrets and schemes, and then you became afraid. What did you discover that could make you so afraid, you and the others who were always intrigued by the monstrous things you told of, that you sang of, in the book? You preached to me that all change is grotesque, that the very possibility of change is evil. Yet in the book you declare 'transformation as the only truth' - the only truth of the Tsalal, that one who is without law or reason. 'There is no nature to things,' you wrote in the book. 'There are no faces except masks held tight against the pitching chaos behind them.' You wrote that there is not true growth or evolution in the life of this world but only transformations of appearance, an incessant melting and molding of surfaces without underlying essence. Above all you pronounced that there is no salvation of any being because no beings exist as such, nothing exists to be saved - everything, everyone exists only to be drawn into the slow and endless swirling of mutations that we may see every second of our lives if we simply gaze through the eyes of the Tsalal.

"Yet these truths of yours that you kept writing in your book cannot be the reason you became afraid, for even while your voice is somber or trembling to speak of these things, your phrases are burdened with fascination and you are always marvelling at the grand mockery of the universal masquerade, the 'hallucination of lies that obscures the vision of all but the elect of the Tsalal.' It is something of which you will not speak or cannot speak that caused you to become afraid. What did you discover that you could not face without renouncing what you and those others had done, without running to this town to hide yourself in the doctrines of a church that you did not truly uphold? Did this knowledge, this discovery remain within you, at once alive and annihilated to your memory? Was it this that allowed you to prophesy that the people of Moxton would return to their town, yet prevented you from telling what phenomenon could be more terrible than the nightmare they had fled, those grotesque changes which had overtaken the streets and houses of this place?”

“"As a young man," the Reverend Maness explained to his son, who was now a young man himself, "I thought myselt an adept in the magic of the old gods, a communicant of entities both demonic and divine. I did not comprehend for years that I was merely a curator in the museum where the old gods were on display, their replicas and corpses set up in the countless galleries of the invisible . . . and now the extinct. I knew that in past millennia these beings had always replaced one another as each of them passed away along with the worlds that worshipped them. This mirror-like succession of supreme monarchs may still seem eternal to those who have not sensed the great shadow which has always been positioned behind every deity or pantheon. Yet I was able to sense this shadow and see that it had eclipsed the old gods without in any way being one of their kind. For it was even older than they, the dark background against which they had forever carried on their escapades as best they could. But its emergence into the foreground of things was something new, an advent occurring not much more than a century ago. Perhaps this great blackness, this shadow, has always prevailed on worlds other than our own, places that have never known the gods of order, the gods of design. Even this world had long prepared for it, creating certain places where the illusion of a reality was worn quite thin and where the gods of order and design could barely breathe. Such places as this town of Moxton became fertile ground for this blackness no one had ever seen.

"Yes, it was not much more than a century ago that the people of this world betrayed their awareness of a new god that was not a god. Such an awareness may never be complete, never reach a true agony of illumination, except among an elect. I myself was slow in coming to it. The authenticity of my enlightenment may seem questionable and arbitrary, considering its source. Nonetheless, there is a tradition of revelation, an ancient protocol, by which knowledge of the unseen is delivered to us through inspired texts. And it is by means of these scriptures dictated from beyond that we of this world may discover what we have not and cannot experience in a direct confrontation. So it was with the Tsalal. But the book that I have written, and which I have named Isalal, is not the revealed codex of which I am speaking. It is only a reflection, or rather a distillation, of those other writings in which I first detected the existence, the emergence, of the Tsalal itself.

"Of course, there have always been writings of a certain kind, a primeval lore which provided allusions to the darkness of creation and to monstrosities of every type, human and inhuman, as if there were a difference. Something profoundly dark and grotesque has always had a life in every language of this world, appearing at intervals and throwing its shadow for a moment upon stories that try to make sense of things, often confounding the most happy tale. And this shadow is never banished in any of these stories, however we may pretend otherwise. The darkness of the grotesque is an immortal enigma: in all the legends of the dead, in all the tales of creatures of the night, in all the mythologies of mad gods and lucid demons, there remains a kind of mocking nonsense to the end, a thick and resonant voice which calls out from the heart of these stories and declares: 'Still I am here.' And the idiot laughter of that voice - how it sounds through the ages!

This laughter often reaches our ears through certain stories wherein this grotesque spirit itself has had a hand. However we have tried to ignore the laughter of this voice, however we have tried to overwhelm its words and protect ourselves by always keeping other words in our minds, it still sounds throughout the world.

"But it was not much more than a century ago that this laughter began to rise to a pitch. You have heard it yourself, Andrew, as you furtively made incursions into my library during your younger days, revelling in a Gothic feast of the grotesque. These books do not hold an arcane knowledge intended for the select few but were written for a world which had begun to slight the gods of order and design, to question their very existence and to exalt in the disorders of the grotesque. Both of us have now studied the books in which the Tsalal was being gradually revealed as the very nucleus of our universe, even if their authors remained innocent of the revelations they were perpetrating. It was from one of the most enlightened of this sect of Gothic storytellers that I took the name of that one. You recall, Andrew, the adventures of an Arthur Pym in a fantastic land where everything, people and landscape alike, is of a perfect blackness - the Antarctic country of Tsalal. This was among the finest evocations I had discovered of that blackness no one had ever seen, a literary unveiling of being without soul or substance, without meaning or necessity - not a universe of design and order but one whose sole principle was that of senseless transmutation. A universe of the grotesque. And from that moment it became my ambition to invoke what I now called the Tsalal, and ultimately to effect a worldly incarnation of the thing itself.”

True Detective: Night Country SEASON FINALE

True Detective Night Country Pt. 6 Directed & Written by Issa López * For a recap & review of the penultimate episode, click here. December 31st, the fourteenth day of night in Ennis. Danvers and Navarro cautiously enter the ice caves. There’s an eerie presence immediately. Outside, the storm has begun to rage. Danvers and Navarro head into the caves looking for anything they can find. Navarro…

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Finished Night Country, it was very, very good. I do think they dialed back on the supernatural element for the finale opting to leave what happened in the final moments of the scientists lives up to interpretation.

I do have one nitpick

That vehicle bay had working cars, we know it because Danvers and Navarro used it to go back to the cleaning staff afterwards. Fully operational, heated cars, during the worst of the storm and the power was out. What, they couldn't pull the cars 5 feet out of the bay and keep warm in there instead?

Also, Danvers looking pretty good for someone who survived hypothermic shock.

But those are minor quibbles. Overall a good, strong and engaging (if short) season.

WHAT WAS WITH THE TONGUE!?

Bit of an odd bio for a geologist. Not impossible, but unusual. Everyone else's bios looked more like what I'd expect, so it looks like they got someone knowledgeable to write the website. Still not sure how studying ancient microbes in the ice could lead to curing diseases and aging like their mission statement claims, but whatever pays the bills and brings in grant money, I guess. Not everyone thinks studying extinct microbes from millions of years ago is sufficiently fascinating all by itself.

So far got three draft chapters in my TLF fic whose titles are John le Carre homages

well two but a third one will exist eventually

and there’s a whole plot/character situation that is one long homage to one of the Smiley novels, but that would be spoilers…

True Detective: Night Country ^ Ending Explained

Season Four of True Detective called Night Country is red hot with so many questions about what is going on in the remote town of Ennis in Alaska, and the true nature of the antagonist this season, so if after the episodes you still have question about what is going on, do not worry, here we are going to answer some of them. Of course, since the season is not over yet, there are some questions…

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I’d like to add that the men at Tsalal didn’t just kill Annie K. They killed so many babies, who were stillborn because of the pollution. They killed people who had no drinkable water. They killed dozens upon dozens and they weren’t ever planning to stop until they got what they wanted. It was a horrible way to die. But everyone else was experiencing a horrible way to live.

Just finished night country and I think all the tumblr girlies need to invade the true detective subreddit like the cleaning ladies did tsalal.

Possibly relevant novel in one of the Tsalal mens' rooms? Not exactly light reading. If you're not aware, Blood Meridian an extremely violent western. In particular it involves violence against Native Americans.

Finally, after a slow night at work and much ruminating, I hereby present my own True-Detective-Night-Country world-famous ramble stew. Tipping my non-existent hat to one Mr @rhavewellyarnbag

Something something Sedna of the many names, Arnarquagsag, Nerivik, Nuliajuk, the one who would not marry, the wife of all.

What's you name, girl?

Navarro, Eve, Angie, Evangeline, Missy, your mother never told you your real name (the one of the Real People) and some think you have forgotten it.

Sedna of the many names many stories Arctic wide, Alaska to Greenland, many stories and in all of them she lives under the sea, in all of them she ends up there because of her father.

Her mother? sometimes a shaman (voices. episodes.) sometimes entirely absent from the narrative (died in chilbirth), sometimes a background character following her husband.

Her father? oh, he always throws her in the sea, sometimes in a panic, sometimes in a rage. She would not marry the man he told her to.

Why?

Well, is that the right question?

She would not marry the man he told her to, because she was already married to her dog who was a man, a shapeshifter, so they kept it in secret.

So many secrets here... do we trust Qavviq the dog-man, the home-brewer? or is he gonna die a terrible death?

i dunno, man. Annie keeping it secret. Danvers keeping it secret. But Everyone here knows.

Sedna whose fingers were cut went she went overboard and she tried to hold on to her father's kayak. Sometimes her whole hands, bit by bit.

So many fathers here, too. Hank, raised by an animal to act like an animal. His son trying to be better than him. The son's son drawing the woman with no hands, no fingers, spooking his father.

What is it with white people getting spooked about other people's religion? Not me, i was raised catholic. A lady with no fingers is no big deal. But maybe i mean white-white. Not opening that particular can of worms right now.

Oh and of course Travis. Fucking Travis Cohle. And his little interpretive dance. That was a man drowning. Or several. Didn't Lund cough up some filthy water when he woke up corpsicled? Cause of death: Spooketh. But also maybe drowned. 

The lady under the sea, the lady with no fingers, cannot untangle her hair. Her hair traps the marine animals and she gets agitated and there is storm and famine. Her hair under the sea, her hair maybe like the sea, and who hasn't dyed their hair sea-blue, sea-green, when they missed so much? i have. Wear the monster's face, wear her hair, whatever you can manage.

The lady with the sea-hair beautifully painted on the door to the warehouse where the people gather. And the people are pissed. 

Something in the water, and no one seems to be asking questions. Not even the wrong ones. Tsalal is the mine is the thing under the ice, now she's awake and y'all done fucked up.

The lady with no fingers that lives under the sea gets pissed off sometimes. Main thing driving her mad is greed and ungratefulness, apparently.Those who take more than they need and those who do not honor their prey. The seals have souls, and so do the whales and the walruses. Those are Sedna’s children, not exactly like children, born from her chopped fingers like Eve from Adam’s rib. 

Sedna (90377 Sedna) is also a dwarf planet hanging around Ceres. This season feels like the Belt. As oppresive as S1 made Louisiana look (humid, hot, that heavy heavy sky) this creeps me out more. What's worse, air thick with miasma or no air at all? Women walking out to the dark, a tiny circle of light and then the vast nothing. Very cosmic horror. Also i miss Naomi Nagata and i miss Camina Drummer. Funny that Danvers' kid was named Holden. But i digress.

You know how scientists are, naming stuff after goddesses. Pieces of rock, sometimes lifeforms. She's awake alright. 

Who are you, girl? Eve? An angel? I am reminded too that Evangelion means Good News. Are you catholic, Navarro? Was your father catholic? What did he drink?

Something in the water, something in the ice. Crabs are bottom feeders, aren't they? How fucked up is an ecosystem where the carrion-eaters die off? Maybe stuff isn't dying at the rate it should. Caribou spook relatively easy, but maybe they know something we don't, too. Micro earthquakes and magnetic fields and shit. Guess we’ll find out.

the last episode of true detective: night country was sooooooo good. issa lópez you have my sword. and my spear. and my axe.

i fucking loved the twist about the cleaning ladies being the ones who killed the men at tsalal in revenge for annie's murder. and that some of the elements (annie's tongue) were never explained. and that navarro learned her iñupiaq name. and that liz and leah seem to be working out their issues. and that rose aguineau knows a concerning amount about how to dispose of dead bodies. i was really impressed that this episode didn't feel overstuffed or like they were trying to tie up all the loose ends at once.

interesting!!! so season 3 of True Detective wanted the audience to believe it was related to season 1 thru misleading imagery only for the big reveal to be that it was not related at all. but this new season is directly related it seems. Fiona Shaw sees the ghost of Travis Cohle. the season takes place in Alaska where we know Rust Cohle grew up. the Tsalal arctic science station is funded by Tuttle United which I'm sure is related to Billy Lee Tuttle from the pedophile cult in season 1 that uses the same spiral symbol that shows up in this season.

So as the show is halfway through, and before episode four drops, I've tried to put together and organize all the information I've gathered so far.

In 2005 (18 years ago), Anders Lund found Tsalal station. Raymond Clark joins. The shots of the website don't show when everyone else joins, but some of them join within the next few years. The source of Tsalal's funding is hidden by several shell companies that link back to Tuttle United.

Seven years ago (or possibly earlier), in 2016, Annie Kowtok insists on joining her friend on her visit to Tsalal station, and immediately starts a relationship with Clark. This behavior is apparently unusual for her. Did she go to Tsalal specifically to meet Clark? Why keep it a secret? Also in 2016, Clark bought a trailer. It's assumed this was used to meet Annie K in secret.

Next year, sometime in spring 2017, Oliver Tagaq left Tsalal for reasons unknown. In April, Annie is killed. She records herself, clearly frightened and afraid of getting caught, on her smartphone in what appears to be an ice cave, saying, "I found it. It's here. I found it, I found it. My name is Annie Kowtok. If anything happens to me please--" she's pulled away from the camera and she is heard screaming. The camera view at the end is on the skeleton of some marine animal encased in ice.

On April 18, Annie's body is found. She was stabbed 32 times with a star-shaped instrument, ribs and teeth broken. She was kicked after her death and her tongue was cut out. Four days later, on April 22, Clark gets a spiral tattoo that match's Annie's. I don't know how long it takes to arrange getting a tattoo, so I don't know if he already had plans to get it, or if he got it because of Annie's murder.

Time passes. At some point, Clark turns the trailer into a shrine of some sort for Annie. The mannequin in the bed is wearing her cardigan, and there are baby dolls and children's toys placed around it, possibly a reference to her role as a midwife.

Clark covers his research notes with writing, including repeated phrases and words such as "her eyes her face," "I can hear her coming/moving outside," "cold," "dark," and "her fingers." It's unknown when this behavior started.

Fast forward to the end of 2023. A few weeks before the show starts, Clark's behavior becomes noticeably stranger. At some point before December 17, he obtains Annie's smartphone, which appears to have video of her last moments, and he is assumed to have acquired her tongue. He could have gotten these at the time of Annie's death, or at any point since. If he didn't take Annie's tongue himself, maybe getting them caused his mental instability to get worse?

On December 17, the last sunset of the year, a hunter watches as a herd of caribou get spooked from an unknown stimulus, and flee. It's unknown if this is connected to the events of the series, or merely meant to be symbolic. On the same day, the water in the villages goes bad, for reasons unknown. The mine is blamed. Also on December 17, the scientists at Tsalal are living their lives, relaxing in the evening, doing chores. Anders Lund is going over old data on a whiteboard (no spiral is visible on his forehead). Molina is filming himself making a sandwich, when he sees Clark, shaking or shivering. Part of Clark's hair is dyed blue, and where his hair touched the parka, the dye has transferred. He has clearly been outside in the snow. When Molina asks if he's ok, Clark turns and says "she's awake," which is immediately followed by a power outage that also affects Molina's smartphone.

On December 22, the delivery guy arrives and finds the place empty. A figure moves inhumanly fast through one corridor, but no other sign of life is present. The TV is playing "Twist and Shout" in repeat. He finds Annie's tongue on the floor underneath a table (several feet away from where Clark had been standing) and calls the police.

The next day, Rose finds the bodies of the scientists. They are frozen together, almost completely buried in the ice, bodies twisted in agony. They are naked, with burnt corneas and blood from their ears. Some have scratched their eyes out or bit themselves. Lund has Annie's spiral drawn on his forehead. Somehow, he is also still alive. (I don't know if this is important, but Danvers had to brush snow away to see the spiral, but Rose knew about it and told Navarro. Maybe it was more visible when she found the bodies and snow covered it before the police arrived, maybe Travis told her.) The scientists's clothes were found folded neatly near the corpsicle. The shoes look like indoor slippers, and it's likely that the clothes match what they were all wearing the night of December 17. A single handprint was taken from one shoe. It appears to be missing part of the ring and pinky fingers on the right hand (or they just couldn't get the print of those fingers).

Lund wakes briefly. He tells Danvers and Navarro, and I quote, "we woke her. She's awake. And now she's out. She's out there in the ice. She came for us in the dark."

Those are all the relevant facts concerning the main murder case (to my knowledge) as of episode three. I suppose I could have included a picture of Annie's stab wounds, but I couldn't make any kind of pattern out of them, or take a guess at what the weapon was. There's also the snow Navarro hit in the first episode, but I couldn't tell what it is, or if it's anything more than dirt and snow piled on the road. Personally, they do not suggest a microbial origin or cause. Diseases take time to infect, and they don't progress in everyone at exactly the same rate. The scientists were found together, practically climbing over each other. They died at almost exactly the same time, apparently in abject panic. I don't think a disease can kill that precisely. How did Clark avoid getting infected, since he lived with them all? Plus, whatever happened to them happened shortly after the power outage, since Molina' left his sandwich behind. One would assume he meant to eat it, since he went through the trouble to make it. The death of the scientists, the power outage, and the water going bad are all too closely linked in time to be unrelated. I wish I had a map of Ennis. I'd like to see how close these are in physical distance.

I also don't think there are any real clues to be found in the website. Their bios look about like what you'd get if you asked someone to come up with backgrounds for people studying ancient microorganisms in glacial ice. Plus, I think most of the scientists are ultimately going to be unimportant as individuals. Out of all eight men, Lund and Clark are the only ones focused on by the narrative. When interviewed, the cleaning ladies only mentioned Lund (yelled at them for touching his stuff) and Clark (his crying, probably over the brutal unsolved murder of his girlfriend kept them from being able to clean his room) by name. Lund survived (for a while, at least). Clark is missing and is closely connected with Annie's case. Oliver Tagaq mentioned Lund by name when he learned the scientists were dead. (On a side note, I really wish Danvers and Navarro (mostly Danvers) hadn't been so hostile when questioning him. They might have gotten more information from him if they hadn't gone at it like assholes. Granted, that's practically an impossible task for Danvers.) The rest, sadly, don't seem to be important. They are effectively ignored and dismissed, much like how they ignored the cleaning ladies.

So what could have happened on December 17, and how is it tied to Annie's murder? Honestly, I don't know yet. I'm not sure there's enough information given to answer those questions. Lund's speech and the way the scientists died suggest a supernatural explanation, but other details surrounding their murder seem to suggest more prosaic, human causes. There's no sign of a struggle at the station, but maybe someone cleaned up after themselves. The way part of the note at the bottom of the whiteboard is erased looks unusual, like it could have happened accidentally. Maybe someone got knocked against it, or their coat brushed against the board when they were writing the message. It's also possible the murderer was able to make them all leave without a fight. The power had just gone out, so maybe they all gathered together to put it back on? Where's the circuit breaker or generator for the station? Maybe that's where the actual crime scene is. The folded clothes feel like something you'd make a person do right before you execute them, sort of like making your victim dig their own grave. It could also have the opposite motivation: I could see a person not in full possession of their faculties (like Clark, or maybe one of the cleaning ladies in a fugue state) instinctively trying to straighten things up. Both feel like very human actions.

Finally, who is "she"? Is that even the right question? When did "she" wake up? The scientists didn't seem to be doing anything that would trigger her awakening on the 17th, so it must have happened before. I wish I knew more about what made Clark's mental illness ramp up in the weeks before sunset. It feels like there could be an important clue there. Too bad Clark is missing and anyone else who could answer the question is dead.