What happened to the researchers in the Alaskan facility is still the biggest mystery surrounding True Detective season 4, but the program has already shown a few details that have given rise to suspicions.
Season 4 of True Detective, like its predecessors, capitalizes on the cliché of the hardened police officer by presenting two formidable law enforcement officers: Jodi Foster’s Danvers and Kali Reis’s Navarro. But its snow-covered Alaskan backdrop and the fascinating way that conservative fantasy and true crime realism interact in the main plot allow it to carve out its niche in the franchise.
Season 4 of True Detective does not alternate between timelines like Season 1 did; instead, it largely tells a linear story. But much as in season 1, it introduces a compelling mystery in its first arc, which sets the scene for its murder drama. The enigma centres on the abrupt vanishing of a team of investigators, who are eerily discovered frozen in the snow near the conclusion of the show.
What Became Of The Night Country Researchers?
Danvers is called to the Silver Sky mine in True Detective: Night Country episode 5, where Ted Connelly and Kate McKitterick question her about her actions on the mine’s private land.
McKitterick tells Danvers that she is done looking into the Tsalal case after she admits that she went to the entrance of the ice cave because some new leads indicated Raymond Clark would be there. She said the researchers were killed in an avalanche, according to forensics in Anchorage.
Despite Connelly’s attempts to get Danvers to resign from the investigation, Danvers acknowledges that the deaths of Annie and the researchers were probably related to the Silver Sky mine.
They probably worry that when Danvers and Navarro look into Annie and the researchers’ cases, they’ll learn the dark truths of the mine and how the Tsalal researchers were putting out fake pollution reports to avoid legal trouble.
Therefore, the researchers were probably slain by someone, notwithstanding McKitterick’s confident claim that they were killed by an avalanche. Even though the killer’s identity is still unknown following the second episode of True Detective: Night Country, numerous hints point to Raymond Clark as the possible person who killed his fellow researchers.
To begin with, the instant Raymond Clark announced, “She’s awake,” in the first moments of episode 1, things took a bad turn for the researchers. The fact that Raymond Clark is absent from the frozen researchers’ corpsicle toward the end of True Detective: Night Country’s second episode suggests that he may still be alive.
Numerous Ennis witnesses also assert that Clark was not doing well before the researchers’ disappearance and would frequently grumble to himself while out in the public nude.
The last seconds of Episode 2 also show that Clark had the identical spiral tattoo on his breast that was discovered on the foreheads of the researchers who had been frozen. These hints position him as the main suspect in the crime even if none of them provide proof that he killed his fellow researchers.
Tsalal’s connections to the Tuttle family in season 1 and his obsession with the spiral emblem of the Yellow King cult suggest that Clark was impacted by the same evil powers that dogged Rust and Marty’s investigations.