Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty/HBO
“Corpsicle.” That portmanteau—coined by Ennis, Alaska’s chief detective Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster)—is the key to understanding and enjoying the strange, atmospheric charms of True Detective: Night Country. In last week’s premiere, we got a taste of exactly how Issa López’s new reign of this anthology would feel. It’s darkly funny and unafraid to deliver a heaping helping of morbidity, made even more blistering by the enduring cold of Alaska’s sunless season.
Danvers’ “corpsicle” finds itself smack dab at the intersection of Night Country’s gallows humor and chilling inhumanity. The term—describing the giant block of ice with eight scientists frozen in it, which Danvers, trooper Navarro (Kali Reis), and the rest of the sparse Ennis police squad found at the end of Episode 1—is inherently funny. But one closer look at the sheer terror permanently fastened onto the scientists’ faces by the subzero winter makes the situation a lot less comical. That doesn’t stop the doltish cops of Ennis from fooling around with it, but it does convince Danvers that there could be something much more sinister afoot here. Once that motion is in place, Night Country officially begins its investigation and sinks us deeper into the muck with a thrilling second installment.
The men in the corpsicle have ice-burnt corneas and ruptured eardrums due to a rapid change in pressure. Some of them have scratched their eyes out. One of them has a symbol—a slightly more angular spiral—drawn onto his forehead. It’s enough for Danvers to think about giving up the case and handing it over to the Anchorage team; Ennis doesn’t even have a proper forensics technician to investigate the flesh once it thaws. But Danvers walks herself back. She’ll keep the case, if only to prove everyone else wrong. First, she’ll have to whip her team into shape, and stop them from taking selfies with the dead men and cutting the ice far too close to their bodies.