The Dark Parade

"Otis, talk to me. Where's Raymond Clarke?"

"He's gone. He went back down to hide."

"Where is he hiding?"

"He's hiding in the night country."

"We're all in the night country now."

"Drop it!"

"Duncan and bo come correct."

So, the person that I work with, like right across the hall from me, is deep into this season of True Detective.

Oh, right. So they're going to talk about it with you.

Yes. As soon as I walk in the door, not on Mondays, like it airs Sunday nights, not on Mondays, but Tuesday morning, because she watches Monday nights.

And so, first thing Tuesday morning, and in fact, for episode five, she was like, "Hey, I almost sent you a text about what was happening in the show, because I figured you had already seen it."

And I was like, "You can't do that shit. You got to give me some kind of heads up if that's going to be the case."

So, at any rate, that is, like I said, I'm not making excuses. This is...

I'm surprised that I have avoided spoilers, if I'm honest. It goes to show how far removed I am from social media at the moment. But yeah, we'll catch up with this pretty quickly.

We record this today, and then we're technically recording Sunday?

Yes.

Yep. That's episode five, and then the following week six we're done.

Yeah. I mean, believe it or not, Duncan, we're almost wrapped up with this season. Which sounds crazy, but it's true.

I know. Yeah. And...

Just like being stuck between the moon and New York City.

You know what? I almost made that same reference, and I was like, "Nah, that's too old, right?"

No, no, no, no.

You can't walk around saying "Arthur song references" in this "The Year of Our Lord 2024," can you?

Yeah, you can. Of course you can.

I believe the kids call that lit.

Oh, is that what they call it?

I have no clue. I have no clue.

All right. I'm sorry. So here's the thing I did. We were off for a few days, and so I'd been having this really nagging problem with my computer, Duncan, that was leading to lots and lots of trouble where it would just pause for a second.

Like, there would be a stutter of like a second and a half where everything just slowed down. Didn't crash or anything, but it slowed down, and it started to fuck with the recordings and that kind of thing.

And so while I was all for a couple of extra days, and maybe I'm bearing the lead, but I also finished all my additional classwork for teaching.

So I'm done going to school to be a teacher. I just have to continue to do the job.

They seem insistent on that part.

But so I took the time to be like, "Fuck it, I'm going to wipe the whole thing and start from scratch." So that's what I've been doing is like, I've got to save everything back up.

You did the alien too.

Yeah. The problem though, Duncan, not really a problem, but an interesting side note as part of that process, is I think I figured out what was causing it. I think it was fucking Adobe.

Adobe? Yeah, because I think there was something that they had installed, like something at the root level, that was doing scans periodically. And I couldn't figure out how and why the scans were happening, and it was driving me fucking crazy.

But now, like, no more. We have apparently solved the problem, and we are all systems go, so I couldn't be more excited.

Yay! Fucking Adobe.

I'm pretty sure, I can't say that with a hundred percent certainty, but it's one of the few things that I haven't reinstalled, and it's the only one that I know is like installing a lot of system tray shit.

So anyway.

Also Duncan, here we are, talking about True Detective.

I'm not sure if you are aware of what we did on the show.

I thought this was like, let's talk about other things, team.

Duncan, as far as I'm concerned, we can talk about whatever you want. I'm just happy to be with you.

What do you have on your mind?

Oh man, I tell you they know a lot, a lot more.

So much.

Anyway, Duncan. So we've been back, this is our fourth episode that we're recording now.

And so the first episode comes out, and I'm like, I'm tracking the numbers because I'm not above it.

Like, you know, yeah, you do it for the love of the game, Duncan, sure.

Always the hustle.

Always like 10% hustle, a little bit of grift, because that's how I like to live my life. Just a hint of grift.

Not a lot. Nothing that could land you in jail, but just a little something on the side.

Like me being in a classroom is a little bit of a grift.

Oh, you have to, you have to.

But so I'm watching the numbers. The first episode comes out and it does really well.

And I like people were still listening. It was really nice. It was like, oh, well, people did care.

And even after being gone for a while, people really showed up for the show.

And that was nice to see.

And then I look at the numbers for the second episode and that's a good Duncan.

I mean, it wasn't terrible, but it wasn't as good as episode one, which led me to think.

Which led me to think that people listened to the first one and were like, you know what?

Maybe I didn't miss them as much as I think I did.

You know what I'm saying?

I love that idea. I wonder what this sounds like in 2024. Nope.

Not for me, turns out. Just not for me.

Maybe that time off matured them.

Nope. No, no, no. If anything, we've regressed.

But here's the funny thing. I only bring that up.

Like if this were just a tale of misery and woe, Duncan, I wouldn't bother to tell it.

Plenty of bad news out there.

Yeah, the entirety of every human interaction in the upcoming episode that we're about to discuss.

The most miserable episode of television I've ever watched.

Yeah, Shit Gets Grim. True Detective Night Country, episode four, Shit Gets Grim.

Yeah, the Christmas episode is the most fucking darkest thing ever.

Yeah, it very much is.

Anyway, so I am excited to jump into that, but more about our tale of woe when last we left our heroes and numbers were down in episode two.

But Duncan, episode three, bigger than both of them.

Like, hey, welcome back, everybody. Yeah, maybe. And here's my theory on that.

Is this like the reverse Star Trek movie?

So instead of all the odd ones being the bad ones, all our odd number episodes are great and all our even ones are shit?

Yeah, exactly, Duncan. Yeah, it's a reverse Star Trek. That's how I've got it in my notes here.

The old reverse Star Trek. I should have led with that in fairness.

Duncan, they pulled the old reverse Star Trek on us and we could have skipped all of this because he would have known exactly what I meant.

But yeah, yeah, yeah. So again, very nice that, you know, people followed along and all that stuff.

So yeah, it was it was heartwarming to see.

Yeah, like Bo can be thankful for you. I'm just going to say fucking pick your shoes up, ladies and gentlemen, and listen to all the episodes equally.

Yeah, yeah, right. What the fuck was wrong with episode two?

Episode two I thought was one of our better ones. It was one of the best shows I've ever done.

Maybe people should go back and listen to it again.

If memory serves, that was the giant stuffed animal in the trash bin story and no one will be seated.

Yeah, it was almost, almost, almost when the show became Duncan and Bear come correct.

Uh huh. Oh, man. If only. What could have been? What could have been?

I'm going to get five nights at Freddy's by this giant fucking thing. But sure enough, it disappeared like so they took it. I did not get it.

Have you seen that trailer for that other Blumhouse movie, which is about like an imaginary like my daughter's obsessed with the trailer.

But I can't remember what it's called. It might be called Imagination, but it's a it's a teddy bear and it's maybe an avatar for something beyond the veil.

And I was watching it. It's like Blumhouse.

And there used to be a time when Blumhouse came up and it would be like the studio that brought you and it was just a list of actually relatively good.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like the list that guy led with five night at Freddy's.

And I'm like, what the fuck are we doing here Blumhouse?

I think the third billing of the movies that I mentioned was Invisible Man, which is a fucking great horror movie.

So sure. I'm like, that's your lead. You lead with that. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, Invisible Man like is like borderline Oscar winning film.

It's a great movie. It's a great movie. And for some reason, Five Nights at Freddy's.

And the last thing you won't be thinking about when that pops up is Five Nights at Freddy's.

Oh, yeah. I've literally just seen a movie about fucking possessed animatronic fucking stuffed animals just a couple of months ago.

Oh, what's that? We've got another one. Yay.

Oh, man, that movie is so fucking bad. So bad. So bad.

Hey, speaking of movies, won't we do our good and bad movies? It's almost like this is a whole thing we talk about.

Yeah. We're not doing Five Nights at Freddy's. We've already talked about how shitty it is.

It's awful. But Duncan, give me a movie, good or bad, that you've been been digging on.

So I've got two goods this week. I haven't actually seen anything bad, which is no fuck. Take that back. No, no, no.

I did see something that I didn't like. So hold, hold the thing that I didn't like for a minute.

Let's talk about the thing that I did like. I got a chance to finally go out and check out the new Jonathan Glaser movie, The Zone of Interest.

I saw that last night and has not been playing in a lot of cinemas over here except kind of art house ones.

But I was working away from home and the hotel I stay at when I work in one of the offices in England is very close to big multiplex cinema,

which was showing it, weirdly enough. And I was in this massive cinema room surrounded by about another three people that I'd went to see the movie.

And it's only showing of the day. So for those that don't know, The Zone of Interest is Jonathan Glaser, director of Under the Skin,

teaming back up with Studio A24 to release another very unsettling bit of cinema. In the case of this one, it kind of semi-documents the real life person

that was in charge of, I think he was the longest standing commander at Auschwitz. So the concentration camp.

And basically what you do in this movie is you spend time with him and his family going through the mundanity of his life, essentially,

and the house that he lived in, which is right against the wall of Auschwitz. So you've got you can over the wall, you've got all the concentration camp buildings

and the sounds. And the sound design in this movie is the most fucking unsettling thing I've heard in a long time. It's the sounds of kind of dismay and despair.

But you have this picturesque garden and this guy who has a wife and four kids and is essentially tending to what looks like a very normal life

as a husband and father against the backdrop of this fucking horrible thing. The movie never takes you inside Auschwitz.

So you never cross the wall. So you're purely with him. And it's easily one of the most unsettling things I've seen in a long, long, long time.

It's just like this guy, almost the juxtaposition of him chatting with his son and then the next second getting ready to go into Auschwitz, which is just next door,

as kind of as galling. And the movie starts off at kind of almost kind of the macro level of him with the family situations. And as the movie slowly goes, it starts to expand out a bit more and a bit more and a bit more.

It's fucking excellent. Absolutely phenomenal. Don't go in expecting any like scenes of torture. Don't go in expecting any. Right. It's not Schindler's List.

No, it's definitely not that. And it's a snapshot of this character at a time. So it's not it's not as if the movie ends with the Americans, you know,

or the Russians liberating the camp. This is just a snapshot of his his life over a couple of months period. And it's it's it's fucking terrifying.

And that's what is do you find. So I assume that it's just kind of the journey of this character emotionally. Well, the thing about him is he I mean, he was ultimately I think like he was executed in 1947 for war crimes.

Like there is no but there's no realization of like, oh my God, this is terrible. You're not you're not at the end of the movie. Like the movie doesn't even at the end come up with he was executed in 1947.

That's just a fact. I happened to know is just that the movie is not even taking a position is just saying, look at this character, look at his family, look at how he is the dutiful husband, the loving father.

But he's also a fucking monster who is like he's been put there. Hitler put him there or Himmler put him there specifically because he just has this incredible fucking gift at being extremely efficient in murdering people.

It's just like he's he's like a bean counter of people. And that that's the line that straddles as this how someone could essentially switch from being one side of a coin to another by virtue of crossing a wall.

And it's very, very, very, very good as it was a Jonathan Glaser movie through and through scored by the not that there's much in the way of score but scored by the same artists that did the score for under the skin.

So like that teams there, like the camera work, the way it's shot, just everything about it. But the sound design in particular, I've seen it in a, like I said, big cinema room, and there were points where I was closing my eyes to hear the background noise and it is fucking chilling.

It's like it's like putting an ice cube down your spine. And it's excellent. It's excellent. I, people can moan all they want about A24 and all the rest, but no other studios put that movie like that.

Right, right. Yeah, everything. Right. Curse in one hand praise with the other because yeah, like any other studio would be like, so what's the hook. So how does how does he get his comeuppance.

Right. So, and then he's part of a soccer team, you said, yeah, like, yeah, there's some sort of there's, you know, they want that hook and A24 don't do that. They do character studies and they do it really, really, really, really well.

And interestingly enough, the, the woman that plays his wife is the one that's up for the Oscar for Anatomy of the Fall.

Oh, no shit. She's fucking excellent. She's terrifying in it, but she's terrifying in the way that how she's just normalized everything.

Like her kit, like that's like, it seems like, like the mother-in-law comes to visit, right, her mother comes to visit, but this guy's mother-in-law comes to visit. And she's talking about how well they've done for themselves because they've got this beautiful house and all the rest came from nothing.

And she keeps referring to the fact that she worked for, she worked as a house cleaner for the Jewish couple that owned Simmons, the company, you know, the mobile phone company, all this, them and how, you know, they were Jewish, so they were probably in the camps.

In fact, she might be in that, she might be across the wall. It's that kind of blasey way that they talk about things. And this, this mother-in-law at one point wakes up in the middle of the night and there's a foul smell in the room and the foul smell is the smell of the furnaces burning people that she can see this glow from the lights.

And then our daughter's like up in the morning getting ready for breakfast and she's like, where's my mum and all the rest and they're like, she's gone and they're like, what do you mean she's gone? Fucking gone. Like the bag's packed, no goodbye, no nothing, she's just out there.

But the kids, the kids are grown up with the, the relentless, you hear the sound of more trains coming delivering people and the sounds of people being dragged off and like all locations and gunshots and all the rest. And these kids are just grown up with that as the, as the background noise to their life is.

Yeah, it's excellent. So that's the zone of interest. It can't be that far away. It's up for, it's up for five Oscars. Can't be that far away from being out digitally for people to check out. I would highly recommend it, but it's not a Saturday night, it's not a date movie, let's put it that way.

I can tell you, it is now available streaming. Perfect, perfect. It's only just made cinemas over here. So, yeah, I would, I would highly recommend it, but don't, don't like, if you've just been promoted, don't shove the movie on, you know what I mean? Like if you just got married, don't like, I don't know, you just celebrated the birthday. It's not that sort of movie. It's one of those kind of Friday nights, it's just been the worst.

It's just been the worst week. I'm going to pour myself five fingers of whiskey and sit down and watch something that just confirms my feelings that humanity is a blight.

Yeah, you're a virus. So my good is equally as impactful, Duncan. It's a movie called Thanksgiving by Eli Roth.

This isn't the first time you watched, is it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hadn't watched it yet.

Like, do we have to, like, do we have to like officially say, well done Eli Roth and pat him on the back, because I think it's fucking great.

Yeah, yeah, it's a really fun movie. Yeah, it's the kind of movie he should have been making all along.

All along, yeah.

Yeah, it's good. Like, it's not going to blow your mind. It is what it is. It's a very by the numbers kind of slasher. The thing that I think makes it really fun and the reason that, like, I watched a lot of shit, but of everything I watched, I was like, you know, I probably had the best time watching Thanksgiving.

And it's because it's kind of gleefully over the top.

Oh, yeah.

There's one scene, I think it might be at the parade or something, but it's when the guy is killed in the truck, and the blood keeps spurting on his daughter.

Yeah.

And you can kind of tell that the actress is like, okay. And she's really put out by it. And it's very funny. It's a great reaction from her. Yeah, and it just, it's very gory. It's a lot of practical effects.

And the other thing I really like about it is that leans into that. And I'm, one of the things I want to ask you about is this. It leans into that mass hole kind of cultural thing. Yeah. And does that play for you? Like, do you understand where Massachusetts and, you know, that kind of particular persona?

Is really kind of lampooned? It maybe doesn't transfer fully to the UK, but from my perspective watching it, it was just a big dumb fun slasher movie, which almost kind of reveled in all the, like generally, it reveled in all the things that generally would annoy me about a slasher movie.

In a fun way, and I don't think it was trying to, it wasn't trying to be meta or anything like that at all. It just kind of reveled in, you know what, this genre, for the most part, most of the time, it's kind of fucking stupid.

So let's just lean into that. And the more gregarious and over the top it got, the more fun I had while watching it. And it's really interesting because I think we're in a position now where you've got an Eli Roth making his version of a kind of very late 70s, very kind of early 80s dumb slasher movie.

And you've got someone like Ty West who's done his version of a slasher movie in X, but he's done it kind of more the grindhouse gritty version of that. And those are two filmmakers that 20 years ago, we were saying these guys are the future of horror.

Off the back of the early stuff they were doing, whether it's like a movie like Rooster, I think was the first one I saw at Ty West and you know, Hostel. Or Cabin Beaver were the early ones I saw of Eli Roth. And we're like these are the guys and they kind of, they hit shit for quite a while and they've kind of went back to, I think it's toughened them up.

To be honest with you. I think it has, time will tell because Eli Roth's other movie is about, well it's Trailer Drops Tomorrow, which is that Borderlands adaptation.

Which, that thing has been... That's never a good sign by the way, where it's been gestating for as long, because he filmed it what, three years ago? Yeah, it's been a long time man, and that thing's had reshoots, and I mean not that that's a kiss of death or anything, this thing could come out and be fucking amazing.

But the fact he was attached to that seemed very fucking strange to me, and so the fact he's got that coming out, I don't know if it's a case of I end up being in the same position I was, going from Hostel to Hostel 2 where I'm like, this guy's a fucking genius, what's this guy doing? It's almost as if he didn't understand the point of his first movie.

Right, and then Knock Knock comes out and you're like, what in the fuck, this guy sucks balls.

Yeah, I thought it was... Let me put it this way, the amount of times I've seen a director adapt a short that they've released, Night Swim is a great example of this, Night Swim I saw this year and it was fucking awful and it was based on a what, a five minute short?

And I'm like, why did you stretch out that length, that was never going to fit that. That Grindhouse trailer for Thanksgiving, someone told me he's going to adapt that and make that into an hour and 35 minute movie, I would have said, maybe let's not do that, and then all of a sudden he released it and I'm like, actually you filled it out in a way that I never thought you would.

And it actually turned out to be quite a lot of fun. Some of it, like I see, is wonderfully gleeful to watch.

Yeah, absolutely. It's a super amount of fun. And like I said, especially if you come from the States and are kind of into that whole Boston area, Dunkin Donuts, asshole character. Like Ben Affleck only, his version of the Good Will Hunting character that he did in the Kevin Smith movie.

Yeah, like that is your average Bostonian. And yeah, so like having fun with that was really a good time and yeah, and it's just kind of it's mean spirited and I like the fact that hopefully, Eli Roth is more interested in doing this kind of work than doing that kind of Tim Burton light clock in the wall bullshit.

Yeah, that to me like that's another one where I watched it and I was like, it's a competently made movie, but I don't know why he's doing it. Like you could get an innumerable amount of directors to come in and make that movie. It doesn't feel at all like his voice is in it.

Yeah, right. I mean, it's like I get it like you're chasing the big movie and the big payday. And that's fine. But it's not where his heart is like you watch Thanksgiving, and that's a movie from somebody that gave a shit about the movie he was making 100% and I don't get that feeling in.

Knock knock, you know, or what do you call it he's death wish remake which was, oh boy.

Yes, one of the flattest films you're ever going to see.

Hey, speaking of bad movies, what was your bad Duncan.

So I've got, I've got a two for here and this might upset people, because these movies apparently get

really well received and I am confused as to why. So I've been seeing I've been tracking online.

A trend of people like that. I don't know if you know this bowl as someone who occasionally dabble some found footage movies that like found footage is that there's a little push for it happening. There's a lot of them being kind of produced again, I'm going to say that maybe was due to the fact that we came out a lockdown and people were like, let's just take a camera and go out and film some shit.

And I go highlighted to the fact that there was two and brand new series, which will always get my attention when I'm like that there's more. And the one that was mentioned was horror in the high desert.

Oh yeah, yeah yeah yeah.

Parts one and two. So, like, there's a part three coming, partly, and ground swell of interest for us all that well if it's coming out this year, tell you what I'm going to watch part one and two but what I'm going to do is I'm going to watch the trailer for part one.

Before I fucking commit any amount of time into this because if this is everyone talked about that was that the underwater last year or was it.

Over open what no, oh, uh, the outland that yeah the whatever it was the thing that was in the desert that was awful. Yeah, it was fucking almost unwatchable like a lot of fucking nonsense right just a lot of nonsense and like fucking lighting effects.

And I was like you know what I'm going to check the trailer, check the trailer for horror in the high desert and I was like, this actually looks kind of a little bit. Last broadcast day, like the way it's been delivered actually looks like a documentary.

I will check this out. I watched horror in the high desert, and it wasn't very good. But then I remember the people were like, Oh, got a sequel and I'm like, maybe the second movies better second movie is worse than the first.

And it's not even close it is a big old drop off.

And I don't get it.

This is the thing I don't even if you like film footage movies, even if you're an aficionado of film footage movies. I don't know what horror in the high desert gives you that you haven't seen done infinitely better and movies that aren't that great.

So, I've seen both of these movies. Yes.

I think I do agree with people who say the second is better than the first.

I found the second just really messy. I felt like I felt like the first movie was trying to at least try to tie up answers to questions. I think the second one explodes that mythology that I don't need.

Yeah, I don't. Yeah, I don't disagree. I don't think either of these are great movies. Don't get me wrong. Yeah, I think the second one at least felt like there was more happening.

Maybe that's just because it was so fucking messy. The first movie you are is an hour and 25 minutes long and you are about an hour into that before we finally start to do something.

That is a movie that ends at the beginning of the movie that should have been.

There's a whole lot of it. It has that trope that I find hilarious where it's obviously shot like a documentary and they've clearly never watched documentaries because documentaries are never shot like this.

It's obviously one person telling a whole story and then it's split up into clips and that's how documentaries tend to be shot. You interview someone then you piece it together to deliver your narrative story.

But no one ever gives you the exact cutting point of when to trim off by going like that. And then we thought this was going to happen. We couldn't have been any more wrong.

And then I thought I'd see him again, but I never did. Every character finishes their sentence with that to the point that I was watching it on the train as well. I was watching it on my iPad.

I just want to take my shoe off and beat my iPad to death with it. I got to the point where I was like that. No one fucking talks like that. It's never as neat as that.

Like I said my big problem with that movie is that by the time you get to the end of the movie where interesting shit is happening and then the credits roll and I'm like well go fuck yourself.

The second movie gives you two murders and the first one is discussed pretty much for the first 50 minutes with lots of stuff back and then you get the final murder segment as the last half an hour.

And it's the more tense one. It's the woman being abducted and the kind of paramedic guy essentially using night vision. As he tick towards it, it plays with your expectations in an interesting way.

And that interesting way where you expect if you see someone with night vision, camera or whatever and something is in front of them that person is going to be fucked with or die. But you know that character lives so this thing is purely just there fucking with him and doing nothing else.

Which I found interesting but yeah, like not a good movie either. And the third movie where they give you a clip at the end of the second movie as to what the third movie is and it's a fucking a Spanish blogger or something who's going to travel and I'm like I don't want to see that movie.

I see a Spanish blogger going you see but I know where the real place is. And I'm like I don't know. No, no, no. But yeah, those are not great movies and even as you should have just sent me a message.

I should have just sent you, you know what, I will remember that next time. I should have just sent you a message. I've seen most of these and I would have told you. I put my face in the internet bowl. I felt it was time to relax and drop my guard and trust the internet again and the internet fucked me.

Look, if we have learned nothing else in the course of this show, it's that you should be fucking, but also never kiss on the mouth. That's not what we're here about.

I will tell you this. What I was going to mention in my good category along with my good category is I'm halfway through the Flanagan's House of Usher series on Netflix and it's fucking great.

It's so good. He is giving Edgar Allan Poe the sopiest of handjobs I've ever fucking seen in my entire life. I'm there for every second voyeuristically watching it through a window.

Oh man, and you know, I love that whole series. I think it's great. I think Mark Hamill's character is the best character. Oh, like the fucking Pym Reaper. He's fucking amazing in this. The only actor I thought they could have replaced him with, if I was doing slight recasting, I'd maybe put Jeffrey Combs in there, like maybe.

And I feel like we got cheated, although in saying that, I know why, because he fucking misbehaved on set quite badly. But the original role of the head of the family was supposed to be played by Frank Langella. He was kicked off set for inappropriateness.

Oh, right, right, right.

He was originally cast there and I could see that as well. I could see him in that role. But I actually quite like, is it Bruce Geddes? Yeah, Bruce Petersburg? Hold on, I'll look it up.

Bruce White?

Bruce Whiteclaw.

Bruce Whiteman.

Bruce Greenwood is his name.

He's really, really, really good. I'm enjoying all the performances. I've just finished, I've just crossed a halfway mark with the episode called The Black Cat, which was a ton of fun. So four on the back end to go and then that's another one done. So yeah, that's me finally catching up with Flanagan's Netflix stuff.

And having only finished Midnight Mass like a couple of months ago, which by the way, will never leave my mind. That might be one of the best TV shows I've ever fucking seen.

Oh yeah.

And it's not even fair. You know what I mean? It's not even fair to compare anything to it. It just is all the way through.

Right, it's like season one of True Detective.

Midnight Mass.

Midnight Mass. Season one of The Terror.

Oh god yeah. It's just like, hmm, absolutely brilliant. What was your bad point?

My bad? Well this was bad list.

This is one I'd watched before. This is how I fucked myself twice.

But when I went into it, I was like, is it as bad as I remember it?

That's the worst position to go in. I do this all the fucking time where I'm like, I didn't like this movie, but maybe I just wasn't in the right mood.

Right, right. I need to re-evaluate this. And the movie is the sci-fi horror film Life.

Oh, right, the Ryan Reynolds.

Ryan Reynolds, Jake Gyllenhaal is in it.

Yeah, great cast.

Yeah, stacked cast. Rebecca Ferguson, speaking of Mike Flanagan from Dr. Sleep fame.

And yeah, just a lot of really good actors.

And I was like, man, on paper, this seems like a great movie, and I can't remember why it wasn't.

And I need to prove to myself that it really is not very good.

And what happened was, Duncan, it wasn't very good. But now I can tell you why, which is exciting.

It's not very good because every character is constantly sacrificing themselves for the good of the team.

Jake Gyllenhaal seems totally checked out in that movie in a way that's kind of surprising from him, where it's like, I don't know what you're going for with this character.

And maybe it's just badly written, or I don't know. But boy, it was a bad combo.

He slums it in a lot of movies, by the way. I love Jake Gyllenhaal, but he is the Takashi Miki of actors in that you can see, most notably when he is purely in it for a paycheck, and the movies where he is actually really engaged.

And the difference between those ones are a movie like Life on the Ones where he's checked out, or a movie like Nightcrawler where you can see he is 100% in the role.

Yeah, or like Enemy or something like that.

Oh yeah, where he's locked into that performance and that's what you're going to get from him.

Yeah, that was bad. Also, the fact that the alien entity that is killing everybody, they keep calling Calvin, and it's just not a great name for something to be chasing you.

Like, look out, it's Calvin.

I understand that they have to propel the movie across and set danger, but it just does, like to me it's like, oh, it's escaped, it's adapted, it's adapted again, like it's the fucking Borg.

But this thing just understands how to navigate around the ship, how to destroy the exact points. Just a lot of leaps in that movie which to me just feel a bit convenient.

I struggle with stuff like that.

Yeah, yeah, and the design of the creature is not great. It's just, like, there's a lot of little decisions all along the way in that movie that make it fail as a piece of entertainment. I watched it over a couple of days because I got about an hour into it, or like hour 15.

It's long as well. Right, really, there was another 30 minutes left, I was like, what the fuck, what do we do with the 30 minutes?

I'm moving like that which is set up based on the, we find something in space and we are trying to make sure it doesn't get on Earth.

Like when your movie is like, when I'm sitting there thinking to myself, the thing is basically that whole premise but set in an Antarctic, and this is how we link it to our topic of tonight, like it's like that, and it's a slow burning character piece, and it's more entertaining and I never look at my watch and then I've got this fast paced, like, glitchy, smart, like, sassy fucking sci-fi space thing like that.

I should be engaged all the way through, time should evaporate when I'm watching that movie and it doesn't, it drags.

Yeah, it was a real slog. So for those of you who are thinking of travelling back in time to see sci-fi horror movies, my advice, skip life.

Yeah, that's also what I tell all the kids at school, skip life.

Please Mr. Ransdell, will you write my yearbook? Of course I will, skip life.

Yeah, it's almost yearbook time, I gotta come up with my thing this year.

You'll come up with something.

I think what it's going to be is just "They Might Be Giants" lyrics, just to entertain me. What does this mean "I Need a Crane"?

Well see, it's got a peppy beat but it's really about divorce.

You should just quote movies but not the lines that people expect you to quote.

Oh right, right, right. Like if you're doing Jaws instead of the "we're going to need a bigger boat", you want to let it breathe.

Yeah, you just like, to frustrate people. Oh here's Patrick Bateman but it's not "I have to return some videotapes", it's "Oh my god, it's even got a watermark".

Something along those lines where you deliberately, just to frustrate people.

Does Bo know what the popular lines are? Am I wrong? Maybe this line isn't popular.

Trust me, everyone in that school is well aware that I do not know what the cool lines are. That is not in question.

Well they're jealous because they don't have a successful podcast that on every odd episode attracts high numbers.

So strap in folks, it's an even numbered episode.

Strap in listener.

Yeah, Dan.

I just love that you singled out poor Dan.

Enjoy this because you're the only one listening buddy.

So how are you?

Alright, so this is chapter four of True Detective Night Country.

And we open Duncan on Danvers in bed tossing and a turning and finally she decides that she is not going to sleep unless she's planning to fall asleep to the video that we saw at the end of the last episode which is Annie Kay in an ice cave being dragged away screaming on loop.

She also, she's interesting enough, she has one of those kind of white noise machines at the side of her bed, which I have got a theory on for this episode, which might as well just hypothesize here.

Do we think she pleased the white noise machine to silence the sounds of ghosts?

Oh, that's an interesting idea that she's, she's hearing the same things as Navarro, but it's just like...

She had instances where the kids reached over or whatnot and I wonder if she just crams the sound up on that so she can't hear the whispering.

And it would kind of explain why she's so like quick on the trigger to give Navarro shit about it.

Yeah, like she's hitting out and also maybe why Holden has appeared to Navarro previously.

Remember what he said, he said, "You need to tell her something."

Right, you need to tell my mommy something.

Yeah, so almost as if Holden's trying to get a message through and she's blocking it out with a sound.

Just an observation, a weird thing to have at the side of your bed and it's also later on in this when she gets drunk, and we're going to touch on that as well.

When she gets drunk and she falls asleep drunk, Holden does actually reach out and speak to her and she doesn't have the white noise machine on then.

Oh, yeah. Huh, okay. I'm on board with this. I like this.

Cool.

So she gets out of bed, goes to check on Leah. It's a really nice kind of tender moment where it's just a mother looking over her daughter.

I mean, granted, not blood, but still, you know, Danvers.

So Sid, she sees, I think she sees the actions of her daughter as being a mirroring to the demise of Annie Kay.

So she's trying to be wholly overprotective in here and that moment of going through, you know, making sure our cover's over and making sure her hair's out her face and all the rest is kind of her,

it's her maternal instinct that we don't get to see much of at all. We won't again pretty much from this episode. It kind of kick in.

Yeah. All right. So we're, it's December 24th, Duncan. Yep. Christmas Eve. The seventh day of night, we are told.

And so Danvers is on the road now. She's, you know, abandoning any thoughts of sleeping. God only knows what time it is. It's just dark all the time.

Yeah. We don't know throughout this is I'm getting fucked watching it because I don't know what anything's I don't know what's happening. I don't know when it is.

And it never tells you just tells you the day, but never the time. Yeah. Yeah.

So Danvers gets news from Pete that the bodies are being packed up that Connolly, AKA Dr. Who is there to supervise and she's like, fuck it. All right. I'm on my way in five minutes and immediately a sidetracked because on the road shirtless is

Julia Navarro sister walking along the side of the road and it immediately she's just like, ah, fuck. All right. And I got to deal with this now slams on the brakes like is trying to put a coat on her and Julius freaking out and finally gets the coat on her.

And the whole time she's just giving her like, I know, I know, I know. It's okay. Come on. It's okay. And very, very tender with her and gets her in the car and off they go.

And then credits. Yeah. Yeah, this is this. There's no way to put this nicely here. This is Christmas Eve. This this episode will cover Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. And this is that this whole episode is like the allegory and deep in depth meditation and character study on what is to be alone and miserable.

Yeah, just so I do like every every character by the end of this episode is just alone. It's it's a nice counterbalance to the holiday episode of the bear where that is sort of never seen it. Yeah. Holy shit, Duncan.

You've got to get on that. Yeah. And everyone gives. I've only watched Midnight Mass a couple of weeks. Yeah, that's fair. But the bears real fucking what the bear is Midnight Mass good. Yeah. Oh, I've heard. I've heard.

The awards it's got and I'm fully aware that I will love it when I get to but yeah, it just makes you feel good. Anyway, so Navarro. Meanwhile, talking with Jules back at the station, and they come out of like the room where Navarro has been talking to her and kind of doing her thing.

And it really like nice moment but it's also really heartbreaking to is Julia kind of stopping and apologizing to Danvers for what she did and and Danvers again I think it's kind of a hero early on in this episode where she's doing everything.

A turn is coming. But yes, you're right. At this point, she's like, there is something she does. That's the frustrating thing about that character is that she does have a kind of tactile softer side hearing not doing maternal side, but she just tends to give it out to characters who are not the ones that she is in direct care of.

Yeah, Dr. Who is right in his summation of her character later but we'll get to that.

But yeah, it's a really nice Danvers is like don't worry about Dr. Lector I would have done.

And the borrow like things are too. And on our way out though she's like we need to talk about that video right and she's like yeah yeah we definitely need to talk about that video.

And we get a quick check in with Pete, who is at the ring just kind of watching like men work around the bodies as this whole thing is being packed up.

And then we come back to Navarro and jewels and Navarro is like cruiser or like a big truck, and it's just kind of them holding hands and, you know, having this moment between the two of them.

Realizing that the inevitable discussion is going to have to take place again about going to the lighthouse. Right.

So then Pete and Dr. Who show up at the station. And Pete is like, trying to tell Danvers kind of low key like, hey, I've got you know you asked me about getting a lead on desk that are with similar emos, you know, this like ear shit and.

And, and she's like, yeah, keep it on under your hat right now Dr. Lector.

I got to deal with Dr. Who Dr. Lector.

She, they go into her office, Dr. Who and Clarice go into her office and while he's there, I like the fact that during this conversation, he's watering all her plants.

Well, this is a detail that I picked up straight away and it ties into later on. The first thing he does is he opens that flask and smells inside because he's smelling for alcohol, isn't he?

Right, because we find out in this episode, turns out, maybe, maybe Bo, the reason that Jodie Foster reacted in such a way to a certain drunk driver earlier on this one is I think she's a recovering alcoholic.

Oh, do you think she's maybe responsible for the.

I'm not sure if I wouldn't surprise me if that comes out in this one, but I think she and he makes a comment later on and we'll get to that conversation later about her problems existing before the accident.

Yeah, it got worse after it. But the fact he comes in, opens that flask, smells liquid inside and then pours it on the plants to me is him checking.

Okay. Checking to see. Listen, I think as a prerequisite, everyone should have a bottle of Absolut in the freezer at home. It's just the way it should be. Just in case of emergency. But I think I interpreted that straight away as, alright, he knows.

That's why he says that. I kind of, I kind of did a little turn on his character where I actually. I don't think he's a terrible guy. Yeah, I think he really is kind of like I put you in a promoted post somewhere, but I put you in a place that actually the minimum amount of damage you could do could actually happen.

So I weirdly I'm looking out for you, even though I'm also looking out for myself. Well, even in this scene where he says, look, I upfront, I know what you're going to ask. No, I'm not here to take this case away from you.

But with this, plus the protest at the mines and the shooting and all the other just generally weird shit going on in the last three days. Eight bodies are shooting out in the eyes. Stuff that's happened at the mine. I'm just saying I'm just here to help. Right. He's just like, hey, I'm just making sure that everything's cool. Yeah. And that you're not going to fuck this up.

And I was interested in this as well as she is for someone who's scared about someone that's scared about maybe having the case taken off her. She's surprisingly forthcoming with details with him.

Like whether it's the the vet, who she doesn't call a vet, but the vet coming in, you look for that analysis, but also the footage that she shared. So she's obviously told him you had that footage of Annie K, because he's aware of that. Whereas you compare that to someone like a character like Hank, for example, who kept files at home, didn't disseminate information and all the rest.

She doesn't appear to be a trust issue. There appears to be a right trust issue as pertains to who would lead the case, because she's been moved by this guy before, but it doesn't appear that that is impacting in any way the chain of command that is there.

But she's still passing information to him and keeping him up to date with the case without bearing any leads or anything that she's on. He's aware of everything she's aware. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm with you. I think I've come around on him as a character.

And one of the things I've liked about this season is that there are times I've been a little frustrated with like, I don't understand the relationship between these people. But as it's been revealed, it's been like, oh, that kind of subverts what I thought this relationship was.

People are complicated. You know what I mean? I don't like binary characters. I like shades of grey and this show is full of shades of grey, the more time we spend with them. Like, I don't think that I've got a particular feeling about Danvers in this episode where, like, for a big chunk of this episode, I really didn't like her as a character. I found her incredibly manipulative.

And not in a way where in the earlier season, the earlier episodes, I was like, oh, it's really cool how she plays these characters off. She kind of takes ownership. And this one I actually saw as a negative. And I think that's great writing that gives you that idea of, oh, yeah, in this scenario, those qualities are brilliant and they can be seen as playful, quirky and they get the job done.

But actually, those same things on, I don't know, Christmas Eve when a guy's got a young family and wants to go home to them and you are deliberately playing into that, that's where that becomes a bit nefarious. You know what I mean? That's where it becomes a bit like, actually, this isn't cool.

So it's interesting that we can get those things. She's the same. She's not modified her performance at all. It's the scenario around her that colors her observation. And I mean, while we're talking about Pete, just for a second, Pete could put a stop to this at any time.

Oh yeah. Ultimately, he could just say no. He could easily just say no. He is not drawing boundaries. Yeah, right. Just like, no, no, no, no. Like, hey, if you want to do this on Christmas Eve, do this on Christmas Eve. I've got a wife and kid. This case is pulling me away from them at Christmas. She, like, I need to be at home with my family.

Well, even, like, we'll get to, like, there's so many things to discuss. This was a character driven episode. Yeah, for sure. Like, in terms of the actual case, we learn very little about the case. I mean, there's, there's pushes for sure.

Yeah, but not like, this is the back half, like, of the season. This is the episode. There's two after this, right? And we're not learning huge amounts of data, but what we are doing is actually learning a lot about the dynamics of the characters.

And I see Pete's relationship with his partner, wife or whatever is being actually wholly unhealthy. You know, like, this is not, this is not the first time they've had a blowout like this in this episode.

This is just the culmination of many, and like, you could argue that she's being selfish because eight people have died and all the rest. You don't just do that. But that's, that's, that's a lot of, he's been called out, he's not come home, he's put his job over his family.

That's, that, that doesn't just happen on one case that happens over a culmination of a lot of cases. So where they end up in this episode is, you know, we don't need the full backstory of how many times he's not been home when they said he was going to be.

We just know that, you know, for her Christmas day was the last fucking straw, you know.

So, yeah, it's so good. So good. So yeah, so Dr. Who is taking off. They part with some like, oh, and by the way, fuck you. Oh yeah, fuck you too.

Well, he does say something along the lines of, and I thought you'd, I thought you'd be kind of happy that'd be, you know, in the next couple of days.

And we're like, Oh, that's right. Cause she likes fuck as we're going to find out more and more.

I like that. It's just, it's reached comical levels now. But all right. But first, I'd like, I'm now at the point where I don't just think it's the fact that she likes to fuck. I actually think it's the, because her family, her family unit was destroyed.

I actually think she is purposely going around just making everyone's family life kind of broken.

Yeah, I don't know that it's, I don't think she's consciously doing it. Yeah, it's a total subconscious thing.

Right. But it's just like, Oh, there is, there is a nuclear family. I will destroy it or do my living best to do so.

But before we get into that, which, Oh my God, that I love that whole scene. Navarro is with Jules. They are, they have gone to the lighthouse.

Yeah. So we finally made it to the lighthouse. Right. Which is a very like, Hey, it's a voluntary intake kind of thing.

And there's a really nice moment where they're kind of embracing and, and Jules is like, I'm so sorry. And Navarro, her response is no, baby, you're perfect.

You're perfect. It's okay. You're perfect. And she repeats it several times.

And, and then Navarro asks her, like, did you know you were going to come here one day? And she doesn't answer it. But the, I mean, the fact that the question is asked, I think is sufficient.

Right. Like we know as viewers, like, Oh, she's having these glimpses of the future. You know, there's also a part of me that feels like she's tried.

She's tried to kill herself a couple of things now. And people are all over her. Right. But if she's at this facility, her sister's not going to be hyper vigilant about her, which gives her time that she wants to do it again.

Probably get away with it this time. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. It's a situation like we'll get into it, but like, no, there's nothing Navarro can do here. There's no, no. Yeah. Well, I think we'd said on a previous episode, it was a matter of time. Yeah. I mean, it's been this, this, this whole show has been counting down to this. Yeah. For that character, that's just when it was going to happen.

So, we get the information from Pete about the other victim of this kind of. Yeah, so he's been away doing an investigation to find out if there are any other instances, instances and case files of people sharing the same wounds as the people found on the ice and wouldn't you know, Bo?

He just so happened to come across one. A German man. And this German man had burnt retinas, frostbitten retinas, bleeding from the ears, wounds on his arms, and all the rest and then just fucking vanished into the ice, like that guy, that mechanic guy from a couple episodes ago, where he is definitely alive because he was picked up by the police.

He was picked up by the police, two months ago and he's probably on drugs and he probably lives in Nice somewhere, but he has no digital footprint. And actually he's got no footprint at all, like no social security number, no medical records, like nothing to say that he's got a job or he's doing anything.

He just appears and disappears, but it's exactly the same wooden switch to me. I was like that. Ah, welcome to new character into the fold here.

Yeah, this guy is Otis Heiss, who received those injuries way back in 1998.

So a while ago.

And he's just, as you say, he's just a junkie out on the ice somewhere. Danvers is like, well, we need to put out an APB on this icebound junkie.

And he's like, listen, we've already got the guys out there looking for the dude from the Solana station. So they're already looking for him.

And she's like, well, maybe get Hank to look into it. And he's like that. My dad is at the airport right now.

And she's like, why is he at the airport? And he's like, he's picking up his Russian bride.

There's a shot in this where I will be honest, I felt so sorry for Hank. This show made me feel sorry for a character that I do not like.

And it's not the scene that everyone might think it is. It's a scene of this guy standing over a rose petal bed, which underneath the rose petals had camouflage fucking bed sheets.

But that particular thing, I was just like, oh my God. No one should be happy at Christmas.

At that moment, I totally agree that we're almost there.

So, yeah, but Pete is like, we don't have anybody to go look for this guy.

And she's like, well, then just tell whoever is out there that they're now looking for Clark and this Otis Husk guy.

How hard is that? Yeah. And he's like, look, it's Christmas Eve.

And she's like, oh, so do it fast, Dr. Lector.

So, I mean, she is this is the turn like she is just an ice cold bitch for so much of this episode.

But yeah, so Navarro then calls Danvers from the truck outside the lighthouse.

And the thing they discuss about the video, the discussion they have is about how the bones in the walls could be the fossilized whale bones. Yes.

And the other thing they realize it means is like, oh, if Annie was killed there, then somebody had to take her body to town and dump it to send a message.

And Navarro is sorry, not of our but Danvers is like, now you're asking the right questions, Dr. Lector. Yeah. And what do you do in this Christmas?

And Navarro is like, nothing. Fuck Christmas. And Danvers responses. Good. I got an idea, Dr. Lector.

And so before they go off on their adventure, we do get the cut to Hank at the airport as this plane comes in. Poor, poor, silly, gormless fucking, naive Hank. Gormless is such a great word for it.

It's Hank hanging on to this stuffed rabbit, drooped over his arm. It is one of the most sad sack scenes in the history of sad sack scenes.

In the Ennis cold on Christmas Eve, standing at an aircraft, a tiny aircraft, where all the passengers are getting off and guess what? None of them look like a Russian bride, except there's a moment that this is just this show just kicking you in the bollocks.

There's this bit where everyone comes off and he's like, you can see it in these eyes of disappointment. And then this very attractive woman pops her head out the door and you can see the hope in his eyes. Do you think he'd seen her? No.

He's not seen a picture of her. I guess not. That seems crazy to me, but also this whole thing is stupid. So, of course.

There's a question later on about, have you been sending money? And we know for a fact he has been sending money, but he's also not been sending her pictures of him proper. He's been sending old photos of him.

That's right. But this woman comes to the door, his eyes light up, and it turns out she's the stewardess and she just pulls the door up and closes it. And Hank is left in the cold Ennis air on Christmas Eve without his mail order bride.

Just him in a stuffed bunny. Yeah, it's on and down. So it is pitiful.

Look, if anyone can help Hank now, it's gotta be the music of Tom Waits. He needs to crawl into a copy of Rain Dogs and Suburban and you're gonna be fine.

So we cut back to Navarro and Danvers who are driving on the road and they're having a conversation about Jules, about her praying a lot, and more of that business.

And Danvers tells the story about when she was a little girl, her mother was dying. And her father said, well, if we pray hard enough, then we can save your mother.

And she's like, and I prayed so hard, it was so hard until my knees were black and it was also cold, so cold.

But at the end of the day, she's like, no matter how hard I prayed, she died anyway. It was a real lesson. And Navarro's like, yeah, that's real fucked up. But the whole thing ends with Danvers saying, there's still no God, though.

Like, yeah, I get it. This is all miserable and everybody's unhappy. If you think she's putting her foot in her mouth, we ain't seen nothing in this episode. Oh dear God, I never so badly wanted to just jump on the screen and just be like, shh, shh.

No, no, not right now. Not right now. Bedtime, bedtime. But so they end up at the teacher's house that she went to earlier in the season.

And her wife answers the door and she's like that to Navarro, she's like, you need to go up front here and she's got her back to her. And then the woman answers the door and she's like, yeah, can we speak to your husband and you can see, she can't help herself either. This is like Danvers, she's a little bit evil because she didn't have to turn around and make eye contact with her, but she does kind of lean over her shoulder and she sees her and she's like, and then she storms away and then Navarro turns around and she's like, fuck this guy too.

It's a real like, you gotta be fucking kidding me. Everyone, everyone. Literally everyone in this town.

The teacher comes to the door and does the accurate thing by saying that you come to my house on Christmas Eve.

Yeah, yeah. But she's like, look, this is police business, Dr. Lichter, we need your expertise. And so he does watch the video, like they go inside into like his office or whatever, and he's watching the video and he's like, yeah, it could be, you know, prehistoric whale bones. There's probably, you know, and they're like, there are no ice caves around here, Dr. Lichter. He's like, well, there's this place called the Brooks Range and there are ice caves in there.

But they're death traps. Like you could fall through at any second and you don't want to go out there. In fact, the only way you'd want to go out there is if you had the person who mapped the cave system to begin with. In fact, I happen to have his name right here. I don't suppose you'd want to hear it, do you?

He Googles it as well. He's like, I'll get the guy's name and I'm sitting there, got that. Another new character? No, not another new character at all, Bo. A character that we've just learned about. A certain German.

Yeah, so he's like, it's Otis Heiss was who did this. And Danvers looks over at Navarro and is like, oh yeah, I need to catch you up on this thing. So Pete, you know that young man I'm probably going to fuck.

She can't sleep with Pete. Like she can't do it. If it happens, it is going to, like my eyes will burn out of my skull. Not because, look, it'll be glorious. They're both attractive people and I'd be so lucky, right?

Yeah, but it's one step too far, right? That's like somebody fucking the father and the son or something. I mean, because that's what she'd be doing, because we know she fucked Hank. It was in the earlier scene, I think it is where Dr. Who is like, yeah, that Pete, he's pretty sharp and she's like, yeah, well, it just goes to show you how genetics can absolutely skip a generation because his father is a complete piece of shit.

He's standing at the airport now waiting on a woman that's not showing up.

Wait, hey, is the door closed? Yeah, open it a little bit so Pete can hear this. His father is the dumbest motherfucker I have ever known. There is no way he is not getting catfished. In fact, somebody get me the cornbread and start the fryer because we have a catfish broil on our hands.

You want a hush puppy Pete? Yeah, I'm talking about your would-be stepmom, that catfish.

Meanwhile, Jules is haunted by the ghost of the mother, I think. This is the mother. Yeah, the crucifix. Yeah, the crucifix, which we have already seen earlier with Navarro in the car and she reached down and pulled up this spectral fucking crucifix that she threw out the window.

So Claire, our mum, was very much into Jesus and God and all the rest. But we got a link to their shared visions/psychosis in that he orange rolls out from under her bed, which we've seen that before when Navarro on the ice, she leans down and she sees her mother fucking crawling underneath the bed.

This is the last step for that character, to be honest. Here's the question. Yes.

Do we think that they have the ability to see specters or do we think they're crazy?

I mean, that's the million dollar question of this. Rose raised this back in episode two, where she basically said, when they were talking about her sister, don't mistake mental health issues for the ability to commune with the dead.

Those are two different things. And it's interesting because through the lens this show gives us on the sister, on Jules, when we see her, we look at that as, well, she's damaged mental health issues, severe mental health issues that are kind of pushing her towards suicide.

Yet, the vision she's having seemed to be very much the same as what Navarro was having. And Navarro has actually mentioned about walking out into the ice and just keep walking.

And that was the same thing. But when we look at Navarro, the show forces us to almost kind of put that through the optics of, or that she seems to have the ability to commune with the spirits or she's in tune with the spirits.

Yet, it's both the same thing. It's just how the characters manage that. And that Jules can't manage it at all. It clearly scars her wounds or weighs heavy on her soul, whereas Navarro seems to be able to compartmentalize it in a way similar to Rose.

It's like what she said, there's the three different types of spirits. There's the ones that have a message, there are ones that are trying to help you, and those that basically want you to go with them, and you don't listen to the ones that want you to go with them.

And it's almost like her sister is predisposed to go with the spirit, even though the spirit is trying to lead them into danger. And Navarro seems to be able to hold that off, because she sees the same things. She's seeing her mother, she's haunted by the same images.

But we don't look at those two characters the same way, even though we are all but told the family has a history of, whether it's bipolar or schizophrenia or whatever it is, we have that as a character DNA.

It's just really interesting how the show kind of, it has both those characters having a shared psychosis, but it's pivoting one in one way and one in the other way, which I find really interesting.

Yeah, I think the point you made about Rose's three categories of ghosts, and they're the ones that want to take you with them.

Yeah, and I think that's sort of the situation that Jules is in. And again, this is where you get into that gray area of, well, is the ghost real or is the ghost a manifestation of her residual guilt or mental illness or whatever it is? And like you said, maybe it doesn't matter.

But is there a possibility that everyone up here is having some sort of contact with the dead? That delivery driver, he all but said that even the dead get bored.

Like Rose, like I say, we've seen specifically Navarro, Navarro's sister, we've seen Danvers get touched by her child, or have flashbem images as well. So maybe as Rose said, in Ennis, the fabric of what holds together our realm is slowly being pulled apart and it's allowing things through.

I mean, I don't presume that by the time we get done with this series, that there's going to be a clear answer.

Yeah, I also think we're going to get a like, because I was thinking about this, like I read some criticism online, because there's loads flying around about this being too horror and too ghosty. And I was thinking about season one, like specifically, season one plays with a lot of esoteric concepts.

Like Arcosa as an entity is, you know, is this kind of spirit realm and all the rest. At the end of the day, it was a man that did it, whether or not he believed spirits were, you know, or some God was helping him achieve his goals.

At the end of the day, it was a flesh and blood man that did it. I would be surprised if this season doesn't have a flesh and blood killer at the end of this one, but conceptually speaking, it's looking at all the grey that surrounds that.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm very curious. I'm looking forward to when we re-record so that I can watch the finale because I'm jazzed about it.

So Hank is back at the station having a little nip. Walks right in, walks right to his desk, opens the bottom drawer, you know there's a case of something in there, it's a case of Jim Beam, and that goes right in the mug and he starts drinking and he doesn't know that Pete's there and Pete's just kind of watching him, his dad go through all the motions here, can clearly see something's not right.

Does he cough?

I love this scene so much.

Because it feels entirely real, even though the situation is kind of crazy.

Yeah.

The way that they talk to each other is some of the most real shit in all of True Detective. So immediately Pete asks about Alina, the mail order bride, and Hank's like, "Well, she wasn't on the plane."

And he's like, "Oh, okay." And he's like, "Yeah, you know, maybe your mom's sick, she's been sick a lot lately." And Pete goes, "You haven't been sending her money, have you?"

And he goes, "Yeah, yeah. Hey, you know, now that I got the evening free..."

Operation change the subject as a goal.

"Hey, suddenly find myself with time on my hands, how about I come over for Christmas Eve? What do you say about that?" And there's a moment where Pete's like, "Let's circle back to the money thing." And he's like, "You know what? We're just going to let this go."

I also love Pete in this situation where he's like, "Yeah, that'd be great. I'm going to phone ahead though and just make sure it's okay."

Because he's already, he's still at work. He's late for whatever they're doing on Christmas Eve with the kid. He's not home to do any of that.

Right.

And, you know, so already, like, the wife is not happy at home and then he's going to show up with the dad who wasn't expected. It's kind of like, "I'm just going to phone ahead to make sure it's okay."

I'm just going to make sure this is cool before I show up and get yelled at. Yeah, so we leave them to go to Navarro who's showing up at Shaw's place in another banger of a scene in this episode.

She's just like, "Mmm, chef's kiss in here." She might be the only character in this episode who has made peace with loneliness and is actually flourishing in it.

Every other character is having the most miserable Christmas being alone, except Rose who's made a bounty of food, is drinking martinis, is living her best life, and is comfortable with being herself.

She's dressed to the nines, the spread is incredible, and Navarro is like, "Hey, you are not just some random weirdo who ended up in Alaska. This probably isn't even your name. Who were you before?"

She's like, "Oh, years ago I was a very serious professor, and I was doing very serious work, and one day I was editing an article that was so important, and she just has this existential crisis, man, where she's like, "What is the point of any of this? This is all bullshit."

And she changes her name and heads north. And she says, "You know, I love it. I love the quiet, except for all the fucking dead."

Yeah. Well that's maybe how she's made the peace with the loneliness, is that she's never alone.

Maybe so, or it's just whatever her life was before, and she is living whatever authentic life she feels like she needs to.

Yes. And she's made peace with that, and that's the difference. Everyone else has not made peace with who they are.

They're trying to cling on to something, whatever it is, and she's the only one that seems to have, and as a result she seems to be able to cope with where she is, where everyone else is kind of wrestling with why they've ended up in Ennis, doing the job they are, if you know what I mean?

Are they running from something? She's not running, she chose to go there.

I'm just thinking about her at that moment of crisis, and I wonder if it was as simple as, "I'm just going to point north, and I'm going to go as far as north lasts, and I'll stop there, and whatever my life is."

She doesn't even live in the town, she lives remote from everyone.

Right, she's killing and eating her own shit. It's not only that she went north to a town, she went north to that town, then further outside that town.

Went into the suburbs of the middle of nowhere. Yeah. She's so good. I love that character.

Such a good character. Such a good character.

Alright, so we leave them to get a call with Danvers, who gets a call from the woman who we last saw when she was asking about using the rink to store bodies.

So we know already she is talking to somebody whose husband she has fucked.

Yeah, this is the woman that owns the mine. She's in charge of the mine, and where they end, this is the mining office that she gets called to go to.

Right, the Silver Sky Mines, the woman's name is McKittrick. Yeah.

And we get there, and we don't realize at first why Danvers is so staunch about not pressing charges. Yeah.

And then Leah gets out of the security car.

So they vandalized the front entrance by writing "Murderers" with a skull and paint, which once again, if this isn't just like flashbacks to Annie Kay, I don't know what is.

Like she's, the more Danvers pushes against Leah doing something, the more she is becoming Annie Kay. It's almost as if all the effort to try and, you can't force kids to do something, you really can't.

Like when you push one way, they will instinctively do the thing you don't want them to do. Yeah.

It's just the way it is, and Danvers is not equipped in this situation.

It's a real like, "Well, we're going to press charges, fuck you, no you're not." And McKittrick is like, "Why not?"

And Danvers has to get very humble for a second where she's like, "Listen, Dr. Lichter, just please, alright, it's Christmas, and she's a young girl, how about you don't book her this time?"

And McKittrick's response is like, "Hmm, interesting." Yeah.

Well, just that she has something over Danvers. She can call on a favor at some point. She may still do it before the season's out, but she has that over her.

Yeah, and so off she fucks. And Navarro calls Jules, because she's also on the road. And Jules is like, "Yeah, everything here is fine. I'll talk to you tomorrow."

And the camera pulls back, and we realize that Jules is having this conversation in the wreckage of that boat on the ice that we saw her earlier.

Yeah, she's made her way out. Yeah. And she removes all her clothes and walks into the darkness. And that is the end of Leah.

Something interesting about that as well as a kind of death, that's how Travis Cole died.

Yeah. Same thing. Wasn't he undressed and walked out into the ice and then into the water? Died. So, I don't know, maybe that is a thing up there.

Maybe so. Or just, I mean there is something poetic about it, right? Just walking into the sea. That's very Kate Chopin.

Yeah. But yeah, so Leah is trying to, or I'm sorry, Danvers is trying to talk Leah at home into staying for Christmas there.

Not in a way which is helpful in any way, shape or form. They've clearly had what we would class as a Barney in the car going home.

And it's spilled into the house. And I love Danvers thinks, "This scene is so weird." She just thinks that they're going to sit and have Christmas dinner together with this turkey that isn't even in the fucking oven yet.

Which would feed a family of ten, which is going to take about five hours to cook in an oven. She's like, "Yeah, we'll have turkey dinner." And she's like, "I don't want fucking turkey dinner."

And I think when she essentially packs up her stuff to go with Laundromat Grandma over at Pete's house, which is ultimately where she's going to go.

There's a part where I think even Danvers reconciles the fact that she spent time putting up the decorations. She spent time buying the turkey and all the rest.

But I think part of her has also resigned herself to the fact that she was never really going to do any of it.

Huh, really?

Yeah, that turkey goes in the bin very quick and is replaced very quick with the bottle of vodka.

There's a difference between going through the motions of doing something and actually physically doing it.

And I actually think she's went through all the motions of creating a Christmas for Leah, who wasn't interested in any of it.

I think she felt she had to do it.

And I think she's almost at that point looking for an excuse when confronted with an arender to get out of doing it and drink.

Which leans into my, "She's a closet alcoholic."

Right. Well, because eventually she's just like, "Yeah, just fucking go."

Yeah. And, you know, "Go on and get out of here. Go to Pryor's."

And yeah, like you said, she throws the turkey away and then starts drinking and watching the N.E.K. video.

She goes straight for that freezer, opens it up, a bottle of Absolut comes out, "Women after my own heart. Love me some Absolut."

And then she just starts drinking it neat. Which, once again, "Women after my own heart."

So yeah, she goes right on the booze straight away.

We cut over to Navarro, who arrives home to find a Christmas gift waiting her on her doorstep of toothpaste.

To go along with the toothbrush that she has stolen.

So it's SpongeBob toothpaste.

It's a nice gift.

It's a great gift. It makes her happy.

Yeah. Meanwhile, back at Drunky McDrunkerson's house of murder, Danvers is connecting the images of the initial,

like what we saw at the very beginning of episode one, like she's awake, that business.

We see that, and then she's also comparing that to the N.E.K. thing.

And she's like, "Oh, the power is being turned off in both of these cases."

I don't know if I agree with this. This to me feels like a drunken stretch.

And the reason it feels like a drunken stretch is that, right, in the N.E.K. video, yes,

it's very clear that the power gets switched off because the phone is still on.

But in the Solal Station one, everything goes out, including the phone.

And the phone is not plugged in or anything like that. It has its own battery source.

Why would the phone cut out at the same time as the lights? You know what I mean?

If you film in something, you have to physically hit stop on the phone or it has to run out of battery.

It's a weird jump for me on that one. She's like, "Oh, yeah, the power has been cut out."

Which leads you back to human element, which obviously leads her back to someone

that would have an understanding of power supplies and the generator system at the Solal Station,

like a certain guy that lives out on the ice boat.

Right, so she calls Navarro and is like, "Listen, we got to go..."

"Listen, Dr. Lecter, we got to go get this Otis Heiss fella."

And immediately Navarro is like, "Are you drunk?"

She's like, "Shut up."

She says that she's only drunk a little.

Right, and she's like, "Look, we want to see Tagaki. He's defensive and he's hostile."

And Navarro is like, "Yeah, why is there power in the ice cave?"

And she goes, "That's the right question."

And then Navarro is like, "You're not going to come pick me up. You're drunk. There's no way you're coming."

Plus, why would she like the shit that she's going to get in a minute of Dr. Lecter for driving drunk?

Especially after what would seem how she reacts to drunk drivers.

Which once again makes me wonder if there is maybe a bit of that.

Was her drinking responsible for her family?

All this seems to be circling some ideas here and we may hopefully get some kind of resolution to that.

Some real like, "I'm angry at you for engaging in behavior that I hate in myself."

Yes, oh, 100 percent, yeah, yeah.

So after debating who's going to go pick her up, she's like, "I'll call Pete."

And then she does, and so Pryor is going to go pick up Navarro.

Hanks in the background saying, "Jesus Christ Danvers, it's fucking Christmas Eve."

This is really manipulative as well. This is what I was talking about, this manipulation.

She basically tells Pete, "I cannot do this without you."

Right.

She leaves it in thick with him and then she sees something like, "That's my boy" or "Good boy" or something.

Which once again is just, that is head fucking of the highest order.

Talk about playing on a maternal role. She's just, "I'm your mom, I tell you what to do and when to do it."

Yeah, it's real fucked up.

And tells him, "You need to be back up for Navarro going out to them nomad camps."

And so that's what he's off to do and we get this overlaid with some music but it's Navarro and Pete heading out and Leah at Pryor's learning how to cook native dishes.

And sure enough, Navarro and Pete end up at Tagaks, back at that nomad camp and they go into his place and they find the place is empty, his gun is sitting across the arms of the chair he was sitting in.

Yeah, and everything is hella frozen.

Everything's frozen but there's food in a bowl with a spoon still in it.

And I think it's Pete who's like, "This remind you of anything?"

Yeah. This confused me a little bit as well in that I'm assuming he means the Salal station.

You would think so, right? Of just, "Hey everybody up and left."

But that's not where my brain was going when I saw this at all. I wasn't going there although there was part of me that did think was the mention of when they went out, because you find out basically within a couple of minutes here that after their visit he was like, "Fuck this," and he was gone.

And I remember his reaction when they mentioned everyone at the station was dead or being found dead and he reacted in a particularly strange hostile sort of way that did this trigger something in him to do the same thing or is he like, "Whatever happened six years ago is going to come for me."

Is he responsible? Could he be the person that was ultimately responsible for Anike's death and he's like, "Oh, they're onto me."

We don't know. All we know is that cabin is frozen now.

He ain't there and the people that are right outside the house are fucking furious with them. He left, he was supposed to come and hump with us. How dare you come back here? That's that man's private property.

And yeah, he's gone.

Well, we do have some decorating inside, namely a big spiral.

A giant spiral and a spiral on a stone carved into each stone, which is the barrel pockets.

Right, and they take it outside and sure enough one of the dogs seems to bark at them when she holds up the stone and is like, "Hey, what is this?"

And they don't answer. It's just that the dog barks at it and then they leave.

I have a question for you, Beau. Why is Navarro still trying to find out information about this symbol?

Why is she not pushing Rose?

It's a fine question.

It's confusing. The longer this is going on with this symbol, the more I'm like, "Rose clearly knows what it is. She's pretty much all but said that, yet there's no kind of push for an answer."

How do you know that? She was a very important person that studied things in a very important university. Could it have been ancient symbols, ancient civilizations? Could it be any of that? Maybe that's how she knows it.

Why did she rub it off the ground this quick? Is it a portal or something? We physically don't know. All we know is people seem to act very strange to this symbol when they're around it.

I agree. Why not chase that symbol? Has she talked to Kavik about it?

She shows him later on. Very briefly.

That kind of stuff. Why is it not everywhere? Why are we not asking everyone what this thing is?

Danvers is still drinking at home. Then she grabs her keys and decides she's going to go fuck Doctor Who, who is watching the movie Elf and whitening his teeth, which is the most hilarious combination of things you could be doing on Christmas Eve.

You're going to get two shades of Elf in this movie. One with a guy who's whitening his teeth and running for mayor, and another guy who has just had his heart broken by his mail order.

Yes, the parallel Elves in this is pretty good. They're going to get down.

You need to set her up for driving drunk.

She's like, "Have you been drinking?" She's like, "So what? I'm getting naked. Shut up. I'm about to throw a fucking on you, Doctor Who."

This is where we get some home truths.

This is where they start talking, like we talked about this earlier, but it's the whole, "I sent you to NS because you were a fucking mess."

She says, "You knew I was a better cop and I was going to get your job."

He agrees, "You were a better cop, but you were also a mess and you were also shitty to people."

"You were terrible with people." He says, "You would never have my job because you were terrible with people." He's like, "You were a mess, and yet some of that certainly happened after whatever partner's name was in holding the kid passed away, or the accident happened."

He's like, "But you were also a mess before that."

You were a mess before that, you were shittier after the accident, and you're still a fucking mess.

You're still a mess now. That hasn't changed. She's like, "I don't have to put up with this."

"I came here to deliver you the sacred bimte of my beautiful virgin, and you have decided to throw it back in my face with wild accusations about my drinking? I'm going to get in my truck drunk. How dare you speak about my drinking?"

She basically tells him to fuck off. She goes into her vehicle to drive angry and drunk, which is a combination that doesn't go well together at all.

We'll check back in with her. Hank, this is the scene that you were talking about earlier, because we cut to Hank at home. He is also watching Elf just continuing to drink alongside this stuffed bunny.

Yeah, he decides to go to the fridge, and there's a nice bottle of champagne in the fridge, and I'm going, "Oh, this man's misery and grief."

He doesn't bother to open it, just leaves it there. This is when he goes into the bedroom, and we see that he has put rose petals all over his camouflage.

His camouflage sheets for a start, right? In the blue room. There's rose petals out there, and it is one of the most tragic scenes I've ever fucking seen.

You know someone is going to get the dull side of Hank in the next episode. That sort of thing is...well, you've seen the next episode.

In an upcoming episode, there's a bluntness going to come out, where he's just going to take it out on someone else, because that's what Hank does.

I don't think that's incorrect. Pete and Navarro are on their way back when Navarro gets a call from the police about Jules, and we hear, "Oh, Jules has been found dead."

Coast Guard found her very fucking fast, but we'll overlook that narrative detail, which seems very bizarre to me. How the fuck did Coast Guard find her out on the ice, in the water, hours after she walked out, on Christmas Eve?

It's a fun question. I don't know, Duncan. For narrative purposes, I understand we're doing it, but also it's one of those things where I'm like, "Really?" Seems very quick.

Pete asks her what's wrong. She won't tell Pete what's happened, because I'm assuming she didn't want to destroy Pete's Christmas.

Well, she's sending him inside. She's like, "Thanks for picking me up. Thanks for all of this. Now go home, go to your wife, do Christmas." Which Pete does, but things are not going well at home.

How big is their bed, Bo? You could park a tank between them.

That's how we do it in America, baby. Good old US of A size bed. It's enough for two chubby people, a couple of dogs, a pizza.

The gap between them and that bed is fucking huge. This is, once again, just to stamp the fact down that everyone's fucking miserable at Christmas.

Ennis rolls into his home, rolls into the bed and apologizes to her. She's just like, "Let me sleep." Out of nowhere, Pete throws a little bit of shade and resentment at her by basically saying, "Just say what you want to say, that I trapped you here with a kid that you didn't want."

Which, where the fuck did that come from, Pete?

Pete throwing some heat. Throwing the fastballs.

If anything, Pete is a little bit of Danvers here.

Well, yeah, but Pete needs to understand he has fucked up. He has done wrong.

Yes.

We'll get back to that later. So, Navarro shows up at the lighthouse and makes a fucking scene, Duncan, with some poor bearded asshole.

This is the most incompetent ordeley I've ever fucking met. He doesn't even know she's left.

Yeah.

He's like, "I'll just check the computer to see where she is." She knows she's dead. And nowhere near the lighthouse, though.

Yeah. And she's like, "Look, you didn't know my sister was even gone yet." And he's like, "Lady, this is a voluntary facility. People can come and go as they please. We do not lock folk up here. If she left, she left. We're not in charge of keeping your sister under lock and key."

I mean, he's not really saying all that. He's just like, "What? No. What? What?"

There is, there is like, she, there's a, the, the kind of leans in my theory that this was deliberate from, Jules was on the way out. And I think she just did this to give her the opportunity to get the time and space to go and do what she wanted to do. I mean, you know what I mean? Yeah. If this was a lockdown facility, ain't no way Jules is going at that. You know, if it's strictly monitored, bars on the windows, all the rest. But, like, Navarro is not done here.

Like she, she like throws, like she kicks a binge, throws some stuff around. And this isn't giving her the buzz that she wants. So she decides she's going to pick a, pick a fight. And if only, if only there was a character out there who I don't know to join beating up women that maybe Navarro could find.

Yeah. And as she drove by, like we see them outside the, it's like three dudes.

There's a kind of like head tilt.

Yeah. It's, I mean, they're like flipping her off as she passes by on her way to the lighthouse and that kind of thing. And it's one of those like, not today fellas. Like this is not the day to pull that like xenophobic bullshit. Because Navarro is not in the mood. And by the way, is played by a boxer.

Someone that did beat up people for reals.

Right. And, but as it turns out Duncan, one boxer does not a victory make because she shows up and she gets in some good licks. No doubt about it.

Still three against one.

But yeah, then they end up beating the ever living fuck out of her.

Yeah.

And so we cut away from that ass kicking.

Once again, is that deliberate? Does she pick a fight with three men because she expects to get a couple of punches in, but she also wants to kind of punish herself as well.

I think so. Yeah. I definitely think there's a little bit of, I need to.

I need to feel something else.

Right. I need to put on that hair shirt. Like if I had never taken her there, she'd still be alive. Like that kind of stuff has to be running through her head.

And so, yes, somebody like she can't beat herself up. Yeah. You know, not physically.

I'm kicking my own ass like that.

You stuffed her like a Thanksgiving turkey.

But yeah, so while she's getting her ass kicked, we go back to Danvers who like swipes her truck into a snowbank. Yeah. And inside avoid the polar bear with the missing eye. Yeah. And ends up face to face with him through the driver's side window of this one eyed polar bear, much like Duncan, a certain stuffed animal.

Almost as if, I don't know, the dead are trying to communicate with her.

Almost. And yeah, so she comes face to face with this thing.

Meanwhile, Navarro has made her way to Kaviks and has just made like walks in and makes herself at home and starts cleaning herself up.

I think she assumed he wasn't there. Yeah, because she says lately in this conversation, she asked him, she thought he wouldn't be there on Christmas Eve, but she is like she's patching herself up. He comes down. He's an interesting character. He's a very interesting character.

Go on.

He could be a killer. Right. I think I'm just trying to put my true detective hat on and think about who is the least likely person to do something, and he's there.

But at the same time, he's been shown in the past to be weirdly nurturing towards his dogs. Clearly cares a lot for Navarro and uses a little bit of kind of dog psychology on her in repairing her. If you are taking it like, boy, you've got a dog. If you are taking a splinter at a dog's paw, you distract that dog first before you do it. Otherwise you get bit.

He's like patching her up. He's helping her. Navarro's broke her finger or dislocated her finger, one of the two. I love this. This to me is like fucking great scene because he has to distract her and in order to distract her, he fake proposes to her to take her mind off it and then sets her finger.

Which in some ways you get this kind of howl of pain and screams of fuck, fuck, fuck from her, which is part of her being in pain. I also think there's part of her that may have said yes.

For sure. Certainly would have thought about it, right? Because Kavik seems like a good dude. There's that moment at the end of the scene where as they've been talking, she's talking about how I'm alone, you're alone, Danvers is alone. We're all alone.

He tells her like no, no, no, you are not alone. I'm here. You may feel that way, you may think that way, but you are not. You are not alone. And then yeah, he does the whole like well there's something I've got to ask you and gets out on it.

Yeah, that's great. He sets her finger, but also in this scene, she removes the stone from her pocket with the spiral on it. He specifically asks her what it is and she's just like something or whatever. She leaves it there and then later on can't remember where she's left it.

And once again, just in the back of my head, because I'm clutching for anything at this point to try and work out who the killer is, he seemed very interested when he saw the symbol.

Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think there is something between or up with him and that symbol. He knows more than he's letting off.

He knows something. Yeah, definitely. So yeah, so fuck's sake.

All right, well let's get to Christmas Day, aka the eighth day of night. Also the day that everyone is miserable. Everyone is waking up in the worst possible way, including Danvers who has the hangover from hell.

I feel this hangover by the way. I felt it through the screen. And Danvers has immediately a dream of this lost kid. Yeah. And Navarro shows up and first they're fighting over the polar bear, the stuffed polar bear that she had.

Her kids and she makes a big scene of throwing out the door in the snow. Are you happy now? And then she moves into the most ill timed monologue ever about how there is nothing after death and we are just sacks of meat and then we don't exist.

There is no fucking God. There are no spirits. There is no afterlife. There is nothing. There is nothing there. And of course, that's when Navarro's like that. Sister killed herself last night. And he's just like, oh yeah.

The dead are dead, Dr. Licker. My sister's dead, but not your sister. Your sister is a spirit hovering around. I can almost see like an aura of sorts. She's going to take care of you now.

Go on now. Go on now. Go on now. Your sister's ghost is going to take care of you now. It's just such a fucking awkward scene. It's very funny. It's not funny. It's just one of those things. God damn it. Danvers, you're just like... Eat your shoe. It's easier. Eat your shoe.

Dr. Ru is right. You're just shitty. You're a shitty person and you say shitty things to people and then it blows up in your face. And Navarro, meanwhile, is like, there's something in my family. It's a curse. We all have it. And now it's calling to me and I can feel that.

And Danvers is like, you saw something on the day that that dude got shot, didn't you? And Navarro's like, nah. But we also get this image of like a straight up... So this is the Waller case, isn't it? Right. Yeah, it's the Waller's case. I can't remember what that is.

A screaming, pointing ghost. Straight up just howling. We still haven't seen who shot, though. The guy who killed the guy. No, no, no. We still don't know that. That's still to come out. But ultimately she was spooked there, seeing this. But Navarro is like, no, I didn't see anything. There was nothing there.

And Pete calls and is like, hey, I've got a picture I need to send you. And off a picture goes, we don't see it. Yeah, well, Navarro at this point is like, fuck you. And she's out the door heading into her car and Pete sends it to her photo. And isn't it a guy, any pink parka, walking on the ice ball?

Right. It is the parka that we have been searching for. And so Navarro and Danvers now hit the road and go on the search for this man in the picture that Pete sent.

And they go to the dredge. The dredge, yeah. Which is this giant industrial fucking gold mining facility. Some giant mining rig in the middle of nowhere that's like this big piece of machinery slash Quonset hut slash.

Yeah, so basically to what a dredge is, because you Americans just go fucking crazy when it comes to industry, is a giant machine that does what a ye old timey fucking gold miner does. It sifts the ground for gold, like a prospector would, but on a massive industrial scale.

And apparently when, I did a little bit of reading here bro, apparently when, because I was like, I've never fucking heard of a dredge before, where the fuck is that? And according to Wikipedia, there's a lot of references in Wikipedia to this episode, apparently people weren't talking about dredges until this thing came out like me.

Now America's gone dredge crazy. Yeah, like, but apparently like the companies that built them, like essentially when they became too expensive to run, i.e. the yield of gold they pulled from them didn't surpass the cost of running them. You just left them. You switched them off and left them.

Sure. So apparently America is just, like Alaska is just dotted with these. Right, yeah, I mean it sounds like they'd be expensive to move, yeah.

It'd be irresponsible to, I don't know, move them. Right, right. So they're just left there. So there's this facility called the dredge, and that's where this guy, who we assume is the Salal guy, was heading. So we are now on our way to the dredge.

The dredge, and they get inside this thing and immediately see a spiral on the wall. They're like, all right, we're in the right place. We're in the right place, yeah.

So as they're hunting through this place, it's like multi-story. There are all these like gangplanks and catwalks and real thin stairs running all over the place, and Navarro sees beneath her like jewels floating in water beneath her, and so she runs off to chase the ghost of jewels while, and with these wet footsteps, by the way.

Yeah, and Danvers hears a noise, so she pursues... Right, and they think it's Clark. They're like, Clark, Clark. And so Danvers chases who she thinks is Clark up to a higher floor in this big dredge.

Very much so, yeah. He turns around and it turns out, oh my god, this isn't Clark, this is Otis Heiss, wearing Clark's coat. And we cut away from that revelation to get down to Navarro.

Who's screaming, Mike, Mike! And right, there are handprints of children all over the ice in this dredge. And so she finds this Christmas tree hooked up to a car battery in the middle of this place, and then turns around and gets another ghost scream right in the face.

Yes. And I think it's Jules is the ghost that is screaming at her face. It's Jules this time as she sees her sister again, but then we're going to pause on that. Meanwhile, Danvers has a German that she's questioning who is not with us.

He's clearly on drugs for a start because there's a lot of drugs paraphernalia. And she asks him about the jacket, and she asks specifically about Clark, and he says that Clark has went back down underneath. He's went into the night country.

We're all in the night country though, and I was like, oh, that's for the trailer. Love it.

We're all in the night country now. And then Danvers goes to find Navarro.

We're assuming Danvers has handcuffed this German man up. Otherwise she's just like a mad German, but she goes to find Navarro, and this is the cliffhanger of the episode, Bob. Where Navarro is sitting cross-legged by this tree, strangely calm, and when she looks up there is blood coming out of her ears.

She is bleeding from the ears.

Yeah, just like people do in the night country, Duncan. And that's it.

So now, Duncan, the question is, what the fuck is going on with Navarro? And what the fuck is Hank going to do now that Alina is no longer part of the picture now that he has been appropriately catfished?

I don't know why he's going to take it out on someone or everyone. All it takes is a snide comment from Danvers and this is going to go sideways quick.

So yeah, to me, what's really interesting is we have a cave network somewhere around where they are. It appears to be referred to as the night country, maybe, question mark. They've got the German guy who understands, who's still alive, who's close, survived it, so he understands the route down there.

And so let's go find a killer.

Yeah, let's go find it. Is there anything more fucking carcosa, fucking hedge maze, but in Alaska as the ice cave network?

Well, I'm Oliver Dreper.

Can you imagine if this ends with Jodie Foster limping through this ice cave?

Navarro! Dr. Lecter!

And a picture in the gold room.

To be honest, I think this is the episode that needed to happen. We have two episodes and we have to have this case wrapped up. Like I said before, you've seen episode five, I haven't yet, but my best friend who is notoriously difficult to please for television sent me a message saying episode five.

She's saying episode five was fucking amazing. So I'm all in on this now. We've got two episodes left to fucking tie up this mystery, find out who the killer is and see what happens to our characters now.

Like Navarro is at the end of this episode, by all intents and purposes, damaged goods. Plus, she just fucking beat up some people on the street. It's a good chance.

But the head guys there, can she be pulled off the case? Like Danvers drunk driving, can she be pulled off the case? Can the case be taken off them and they have to go rogue like season one of True Detective? Who the fuck knows?

All I know is we have two hours left and we will be done with Night Country. And I am still fucking loving it.

Yeah, I'm having a real good time with this season. It's been a lot of fun.

The writing is so good. See the character writing is so good.

Well, you know, the characterization in this season, I think has been, you know, look, the first season is always going to be the first season.

But I think the characterization in this season, and just like I was saying earlier about, like the fact that as they're peeling the onion on this, characters do things that surprise me in a way that also makes sense for their characters.

Yes.

And that's a real neat trick to pull off.

Yeah, at no point has anyone done something that feels like a stretch for me.

Right. And also, it's like, oh, now I understand, like, going back to Jodie Foster maybe being a racist and you're like, oh, wait, no, that's not true.

Yeah, it's just that she is awful at communicating concern for people that she loves, and it turns into this forceful kind of angry thing because she's angry at herself.

She is angry at, like, this goes back to a case and blah, blah, blah. It like all of that stuff.

It just informs the characters in a way that makes them feel not just three dimensional, but really real and more so than, like, as much as I love the third season, the third season feels like we're dealing with archetypes in a lot of ways.

Yeah, and this just feels like, oh, Danvers is a person that's a real mess, so is Navarro, so is Doctor Who, so is Pete, like, everybody is kind of a fucking mess.

Yeah.

And it's fun to be in the presence of those characters and feel like it's going somewhere.

Yeah, I think the big thing for me is I actually am kind of glad there's only six episodes in this season. I would much rather have a six episode.

I wish more shows did this. I wish Netflix would take this idea of sometimes less is more and apply that to a lot of the programming because I feel like I watch some of these true crime mini-series that they put out and there are three episodes and by the end,

halfway mark at episode number two, I'm like, we're stretching the story really fucking thin, you have to make three episodes. Like, she's obviously got, she's planned this out, she knows what she's doing.

This episode, there's a lot of character work, but I feel we need that character work to kind of springboard into what is ostensibly the last third.

And landing, like, the dismount of the episode is back in horror with this creepy dredge and all that stuff. It's one of my favorite things to do in the course of my week is to sit down and just, especially the first time I watch it, just kind of give myself over to True Detective and just be like, all right, well, what is, like, where is it going to take me this week because I don't have it figured out and that's fun.

Yeah, I think so as well. I'm not usually someone that enjoys watching things week to week. I'm just, my mentality now, I just like to binge things, but this is one of those ones where I do, like yourself, get excited that, you know, we get to talk about episode five real fucking soon and then I can put this to bed with episode six.

Yeah, and this time, Duncan, you have my pledge. Yes, I have seen episode five. I will not have seen the finale.

We don't have long, like, for the listeners out there, we're recording this in an irregular day and a mere couple of days we'll be recording episode five review and then we will both have seen episode six.

It can't happen soon enough.

Probably right after recording.

Yeah, like I, the job I have done of not referencing or talking about the fifth episode.

You've done very, very, very well.

Thank you. I accept your apology.

There hasn't even been a gleam in your eye when I've said something that's clearly not going to happen.

Yeah.

So.

Look, I always have a gleam in my eye because that's, that's because a lot of times I'm thinking about cookies.

Oh, some of those are good.

Duncan, between now and then, if someone were to want to pursue more of your expertise in the field of entertainment, where would they do such a thing?

Yes. And so podcast under the stairs doesn't put anything out in about two weeks because I've been traveling for work a little bit.

My wife has also been traveling for work, which has afforded me zero time to do anything with like stuff that I don't have to edit.

So I've been doing plenty of other recordings on things I don't have to edit.

However, it will be returning by the time you hear this episode.

The next episode of podcast under the stairs should be out, which we'll be looking at Cannibal Holocaust and its 4K UHD release from 88 films as part of the Italian collection.

I've got about four of those titles banked up.

So we'll probably be over the next two weeks doing back to back Italian collection reviews before I slip back into a sense of normalcy with just regular horror reviews.

Turns out there's not a lot of new stuff out at the moment that I can get my teeth sunk into.

So I need to inspire myself with something older, I think, to get to get into with those Italian ones, which are always fun to do because you never know what you're going to fucking get.

But in terms of like the actual like cinema horror releases, not a lot.

Although Fright Fest for Glasgow is happening on the 8th and 9th of March and I will be there as I always am.

But even then the film list isn't, there isn't anything even on the film list day where I'm like that sounds fucking amazing.

So I'm kind of hoping for the indie gem of something like a Tigers are not afraid.

That blows my socks off so I can gloat about I've seen something that no one else has.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, you're a jerk like that and that's fine.

Yeah, it's tputscast.com for everything or podcast under the stairs where you listen to podcasts or YouTube.

Yeah. And if you want to hear more out of me, you can always go to legionpodcasts.com where you can find the entire backlog of this show as well as the dark parade, which is everything that I do that is horror related, sometimes not even horror related.

There's a whole crocheting thing that we do.

We're talking a lot about hooks and yarns.

So if you're interested in a good crochet broadcast, as well as a podcast that might talk about the witchcraft movies, then please.

The dark parade I think fills a very, it's a very specific niche by the crocheting horror fans.

But for those out there, there's no podcast like it.

There's just nothing that's going to fill the need.

I believe we call them the few and the proud both.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the dark parade crochet army marching forward and knitting socks and hats never to be worn, but will be given as Christmas gifts.

Don't worry about it.

You're going to get one of these things.

You're never going to wear it.

You're going to like and you're going to have to trot it out about once a year when you when you see one of the relatives, one of the many fine people that listen to the show and.

So Duncan, there is nothing left to you in the show, but for me to say to my good friend, Duncan, say goodnight to my good friend, Duncan.

Say goodnight, Duncan.

So about this crocheting.

It's all in the wrist, baby.

It's all in the wrist.

All in the wrist.

It's all in the wrist.

It's all in the wrist.

You.

You.

You.

You.

You.

You.

You.

You.

You.

You.

You.

(eerie music)

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