Stories are stories. That was the mantra of the final episode of True Detective: Night Country which aired on Sunday, dividing a fanbase even further as it answered many of its questions, and avoided answering others.
One of the strangest mysteries that was left unresolved was the appearance of Annie K’s tongue in the Tslal station. Even as we learned what happened to both Annie K and the scientists, there was no clear picture of how the tongue got there. It was so weird even the characters asked about it, with Danvers relaying the question to the women who just confessed to a sextuple homicide. They said they didn’t know what she was talking about.
Well, that question was posed to showrunner Issa Lopez by Variety, and I was surprised she went into as much detail as she did. She pulled a “Life of Pi” and told two versions of what could have happened, and only one of them involves ghosts.
The first version she pitches is the “rational” one. Lopez says that since Hank moved her body, he was the one who cut out her tongue and left it by her as Hank has a bit of a psychopathic streak, even if he’s just playing the mine grunt doing what he’s told. This served as a message about not messing with the mine.
Then, the women of the village find the tongue when Annie K’s body is found, and as an act of reverence, they keep the tongue on ice for years, freezing it somewhere. Then, once they realize the scientists killed her, they bring the tongue to the raid and leave it there, connecting the killings to Annie K, even if it took forever for Danvers and others to figure out who the scientists were actually killed by, and that they killed Annie K in the first place.
The other explanation is…ghosts. That the tongue disappeared into the ether, and then the ghost of Annie K comes with the women and leave it there. Here’s Lopez:
“It is Annie who comes with the women into the station, like she’s awake. Clark says, “I knew she was coming.” Annie does visit the station with the women, and leaves her own tongue, because she knows this is how it starts — that she can finally tell her story.”
Lopez then says it’s up for us to decide. She actually does this with several of the show’s mysteries. It’s up to us to decide whether the scientists were killed by weather or a vengeful spirit in the cold. It’s up to use to decide whether Navarro actually died in the end or survived and was literally standing on Danvers porch.
I want to choose the rational side for all of these because I feel like if this story was supernatural, it really, really does not work very well, especially for a True Detective series, but that seems to be a big point of debate. The supernatural aspects, which I don’t think you can write off entirely, make it feel like an entirely different show, which I mean, it originally was.
So, those are you tongue answers. Satisfied? Probably not.
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