real detective: night country Episode 5 ends with a bloody confrontation between father and son. Good cop Peter Prior (Finn Bennet) is forced to kill his corrupt cop father, Hank Prior (John Hawkes), to “save” Ennis police chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster). So the penultimate episode of real detective Season 4 in HBO It ends with a patricide that is quickly covered up. However, the scene of True Detective: Night Country Episode 5 that has curiously been blowing me away for the past few weeks is one that arrives early. After Danvers is threatened by the Annie K (Nivi Pedersen) case, Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) has a unique reaction. Instead of fighting to keep the case, Navarro passes the burden of solving Annie K’s murder to Danvers.
“She’s yours now,” Navarro tells Danvers.
It’s a brilliant performance from boxer-turned-TV star Kali Reis. In addition, it marks another change in Navarro’s arc. After losing her sister Julia (aka Niviana) to suicide in True Detective: Night Country In episode 4, Navarro’s purpose hasn’t completely changed, per se, but it has changed. Without his sister as an anchor, Navarro is adrift. She is picking fights with the locals, contemplating her purpose and refusing to fight Danvers in this latest development.
However, as Kali Reis explained to Jugo Mobile, by shifting the burden of Annie K’s case to Danvers, Navarro is forcing the police chief to listen to the call to action that has been driving her for years.
“He wanted Danvers to know what he was carrying with him,” Reis said. “Danvers didn’t understand. She always says, ‘Let her go!’ Let her go!’ “She always tells him to let her go.”
-And [Navarroâs] like, ‘Physically and spiritually I can’t let this woman go.’ So now you take charge because you’re trying to close this case to save your own ass. I have nothing else to save. My butt doesn’t matter. Julia is gone. So now she takes this because I’m still going to figure it out. But since you are closing this door, hold on to that.”
“Now you can feel a little of what I felt every day.”
Navarro’s tactics work. Danvers is tasked with continuing to investigate the connections between Annie K’s death, the Tsalal mystery, and Silver Sky’s corruption.
Off-screen, Reis said, this scene also represented yet another instinct in which Jodie Foster was a perfect collaborator.
—Filming that with Jodie? Reis said. “She was so… yuck —I absolutely love her. She is now a good friend.”
“As far as collaboration goes, she really understood what we were trying to achieve in that scene. Navarro was like losing his mind and trying to fix everything and then, but he really realized, oh, ‘You’re abandoning ship now, okay?’ You do that. I’m going to build a raft to continue this. But you cling to your abandoned ship.”
We will have to wait until True Detective: Night Country The finale airs Sunday, February 18 to find out if Navarro and Danvers can navigate the stormy waters ahead.