‘True Detective: Night Country’ finale: Was time travel involved?

True Detective: Night Country has been a season packed full of mysteries, and the finale finally got to the heart of some of our most burning questions.

But there were also a few left up to interpretation. State trooper Evangeline Navarro’s (Kali Reiss) fate was one of the biggest, but there was something else you may have missed amongst the chaos: the possibility of time travel.

Was it simply another vision, though, or something more? Let’s break down exactly what happened, and what it might mean.

What happens in the finale?

We’re not going to break down the whole finale here — we have a separate explainer for that — but we are going to go over one key moment that seems to answer a question raised right at the start of the show. Remember in the very opening sequence, at the Tsalal Arctic Research Station, when scientist Raymond Clark (Owen McDonnell) is wearing a pink jacket and starts shaking while staring in the direction of the emergency exit doors as if he’s seen something? He suddenly stops, then turns back to his colleague and says, “She’s awake.” Then the power goes out.

In the finale, meanwhile, this scene gets a crucial callback. While Navarro is walking around the Tsalal facility shortly after Clark’s death and the station’s power going out, she turns and is suddenly confronted with this scene playing out again. Navarro’s previously seen the footage of Clark filmed on his colleague’s smartphone, picked up during the investigation, so she’s familiar with the scene. Only this time, Clark appears to be staring at her when he starts shaking, as if Navarro is the figure that’s caused him to be so terrified.

So is she simply having another vision, or is it something more?

Navarro has a number of visions throughout “Night Country”.
Credit: Michele K. Short/HBO

Was Clark caught in a time loop with Navarro?

There’s a strange effect that happens when Navarro sees Clark that makes him look almost like a hologram. After he’s shaking he suddenly judders and almost resets, before turning away from her again and saying the same “she’s awake” line we hear in the first episode. Moments later, Navarro is seen staring at nothing but the dark kitchen of the Tsalal Arctic Research Station. Whatever happened is over.

Now it’s certainly possible, given the number of visions Navarro has over the course of the show, that this is simply another one. In the finale she’s been pushed to her limit, and much of the time she spends in the cold, dark research station with Danvers feels like a fever dream as they get colder and colder.

But is it also possible that Clark actually was seeing her just before the power went out in episode one? That all that “time is a flat circle” talk is literal, rather than metaphorical?

Ultimately, it’s impossible to say. Night Country has been a season that’s walked a fine line between reality and the supernatural. It’s also been a season filled with circularity, including the character arcs of Peter Prior (Finn Bennett) and his dad (John Hawkes), Navarro and her sister Julia (Aka Niviâna), and even the ghost of Travis (Erling Eliasson) and Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) from Season 1. Whether Navarro seeing Clark back in the Tsalal station was a vision or something more, it certainly brings everything back around full circle.

True Detective is available to stream on Max.