INTRODUCTION

True Detective Season 4 All You Need To Know: Season 4 of True Detective: Every Allusion and Easter Egg You Might Have Missed in Night Country.

True Detective season four, themed “Night Country,” was heavily influenced by two historical mysteries: the Mary Celeste, a 19th-century American ship whose entire crew appeared to vanish while the ship was traveling to Italy, and the 1959 Dyatlov Pass incident, which involved nine Soviet hikers who mysteriously abandoned their campsite and perished in the surrounding wilderness.

Beyond that, though, showrunner Issa López has filled her chilly saga with allusions to real crime, history, and culture that not only accentuate Night Country’s themes but also draw a direct connection between it and the rich history of True Detective, especially the show’s wildly popular 2014 debut season.

Here are a few of the more intriguing references and Easter eggs we could locate in the first episode of the season, simply named “Part 1.” Every Sunday, as new episodes air, we’ll update the list.

The Yellow King

“For we do not know what beasts the night dreams when its hours grow too long for even God to be awake,” reads the bleak epigraph that opens the first episode of the show.

The author of the piece is Hildred Castaigne, a name that fans of True Detective season one may recognize.

The main character of a short tale in Robert W. Chambers’s 1895 collection The King in Yellow, Hildred, was a major inspiration for Nic Pizzolatto’s first True Detective.

The dark epigraph that begins the first episode of the show says, “Because we do not know what beasts the night dreams when its hours grow too long for even God to be awake.

” Hildred Castaigne, a name that True Detective season one viewers may be familiar with, is the piece’s author. Nic Pizzolatto’s debut True Detective was heavily influenced by Hildred, the protagonist of a short story in Robert W. Chambers’s 1895 collection The King in Yellow.

The line that opens True Detective:

Night Country doesn’t really exist in Chambers’s story; instead, it was composed by López, who likely did so in order to introduce the program with a piece that more directly addressed the topics it would be exploring.

The reference to Robert Chambers, however, suggests that even while current iteration of True Detective will take the plot in new places, it will also purposefully reference its predecessors. After all, a flat circle is called time.

The Arctic Research Station at Tsalal

There’s also a literary connection to the name of the enigmatic lab at the heart of Night Country’s main mystery: it originates from Jules Verne’s 1897 novel An Antarctic Mystery, which is set in equally frigid climates. The book is a sequel to Edgar Allen Poe’s classic novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which evidently inspired Herman Melville and horror master H.P. Lovecraft, among several others.

Tsalal, an odd and unusual island described by Verne, is home to ferocious “natives” who, so we are told, have a habit of attacking white explorers. However, after a protracted voyage, Verne’s protagonists discover the island oddly devoid of both locals and the unusual vegetation they’ve only heard tales of.

They first claim that an earthquake devastated Tsalal, but later they find relics that show the Indigenous inhabitants perished before the catastrophe.

 

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They eventually come to the conclusion that the disease that Tiger, Arthur Pym’s Newfoundland, carried to the islanders of Tsalal caused their deaths. It’s simple to make speculative comparisons between this story and True Detective season four because of the complex interactions between the white and native inhabitants of Ennis, Alaska.

Speaking of Ennis

The word itself means “from the island” and has Irish origins. From the Tsalal island?

Lone Star Beer

At the abandoned Tsalal station, did you notice the bottle next to a bowl of uneaten popcorn? It just so happens to be Rust Cohle’s favorite beer, Lone Star. Fun fact: At least in the UK, Matthew McConaughey’s Lone Star-guzzling appeared to cause a jump in sales of True Detective season one due to its immense popularity.

The Blue King True Detective Season 4 All You Need To Know

The moniker “Blue King,” which also seems to be a reference to Chambers, refers to the crab processing business where we first encounter Evangeline Navarro in Kali Reis. The Carcosa Cannery: what comes next?

The Item

If you look closely at the DVDs arranged on Tsalal’s shelf, you will notice that this one is really noticeable. Sounds familiar? The antagonist of John Carpenter’s 1982 horror classic, a shape-shifting alien, terrorizes a party of scientist researchers in Antarctica. Carpenter’s picture has been mentioned by Lopez as one of her favorites.

Is True Detective: Night Country seeing any sort of paranormal activity?

 

 

The supernatural has been alluded to in past True Detective seasons, but the Night Country opener goes beyond mere speculation.

While the actual nature of the events in Night Country remains unclear, Lopez has stated that the narrative was influenced by two unsolved mysteries in real life involving two peculiar and, for some, unexplainable incidents.

One was the case of the abandoned ship Mary Celeste from 1872, in which ten Americans traveling to Italy disappeared from sight.

The other was the 1959 Dyatlov Pass Incident, when nine Soviet cross-country skiers perished in the Ural Mountains under suspicious circumstances. López told Vanity Fair that while recent study has linked their deaths to a potential avalanche, she isn’t sure she believes that theory.

True Detective Season 4 All You Need To Know The Spiral 

By the time the program comes to a close, we can see that Danvers has either purposefully or accidentally placed several pieces of evidence into a gigantic spiral form. It reminds us of the twisted orange peel that appears for a brief moment in the eerie, Billie Eilish-underscored opening credits of the show.

It also reminds us of the crooked spirals from True Detective season three, which were a reference to season one, when the spiral was used as a symbol of the pedophile ring that was at the center of the first major mystery on the show.

The murderer had one seared onto his own back, and we initially saw it etched into the back of the first victim on the broadcast.

Danvers’s spiral could be a clue to the mystery surrounding Night Country. (A spiral may also be seen in the teaser trailer for this season, which includes non-first-episode footage.) It might just be a callback. The spirals are eerie in any case. True Detective Season 4 All You Need To Know