True Detective, Season Four: I Want (You) to Believe
True Detective: Night Country has been airing on HBO MAX (or whatever the hell it's called anymore) and doesn't seem to be setting the couch potato world ablaze...
...but it seems to be getting True Detective and X-Files fans all riled up, since it's pretty much a pastiche of old TXF plots.
The Jodie Foster-led fourth season of the crime drama has been praised for its spine-chilling Alaskan-set story, and, naturally, the performances of its Oscar-winning lead and her costars. However, that is only half the story, as some fans feel that it has strayed too far from its roots, leaning more towards supernatural elements reminiscent of The X-Files rather than maintaining the gritty realism of its predecessors.
Among the first 250 reviews to hit Rotten Tomatoes, one viewer commented, "It's like they've crossed over into X-Files territory, with actual ghosts."
Mashable called the parallels in the first TD:NC episode with this XF ep:
Here's the set-up in "Ice," Season 1, episode 8 of The X-Files.
Everyone's favourite hot FBI agents who regularly dabble in the unexplainable find themselves with a humdinger of case on their desk. This time, the truth is way out there, in Icy Cape, Alaska, at a research facility 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle. The members of the Arctic Ice Core Project, responsible for drilling into the ice sheets to extract cylinders of ice for climate analysis (kind of like the scientists in True Detective), have been found strewn about the halls, brutally killed.
A bloody lone survivor has left a message. "We're not who we are," he broadcasts. "It goes no further than this. It stops right here, right now."
What exactly did the team extract in those ice cores? And what's affecting the members of the investigation team one by one?
The episode shares a lot with True Detective's first episode, including the remoteness of the location, scientists scrambling to unpack the mystery of the outpost's fate, and the self-recorded videos of the team goofing around before their untimely demise.
Which is all fine and good, only "Ice" is pretty much a low-budget rewrite of The Thing AKA The Thing from Another World AKA Who Goes There?
A fact which the writer seems to have gleaned from a quick Wikipedia run. So good on her, I guess.
But let's go a little deeper...
I pointed out the rather startling visual similarity between the True Detective trailer and the criminally-undervalued The X-Files: I Want to Believelast June. The setting, direction, and cinematography seemed nearly identical, right down to the blue/green color filters.
The Secret Sun - always ahead of the curve. For all the good it does me.
As it happens, you even have the same plot device in both - a grisly discovery of mutilated bodies buried in the snow and ice.
Not exactly a trope, if you will.
As you can see the shots and the setups are highly similar, so much that you probably wouldn't know they were from different films had I not told you.
I don't blame director Issa Lopez for lifting so much of Carter's style here - whatever else one might say about I Want to Believe, you can't say it's not brilliantly directed and filmed. But it would be nice to hear her cop to it.
We even have the same plotline where said grisly discover comes about through finding the victims, their faces frozen and their mouths agape in pain and horror.
And we have the same plot-point where the remains are pulled out of the snowy earth in a giant block of ice and placed in a facility to thaw.
We even have a severed forearm to compare. Again, not exactly a common trope out there. It feels like a tribute, truth be told.
But wait! There's more!
Even the concept of the "corpsicle" comes straight out of The X-Files as well. It's right there in the 2010 comic miniseries, The X-Files: 30 Days of Night. Which also takes place during winter in Alaska.
Go figure!
They even use the term "human popsicle."
That said, "corpsicle" is snazzier name, so you have to give True Detective props for that.
The 30 Days of Night story even has a victim who is hideously maimed but it is somehow still alive! Wild! Shocking! Improbable!
Seriously, what are the odds that the True Detective team didn't study on this comic series rather closely, my friends? Pretty damn slim, I'd say.
Back to True Detective - like I Want to Believe, there's even a Connolly.
OK, a Connelly. And it's a character, not an actor. But still. Stop being so churlish.
Moreover, Jodie Foster's character ("Liz Danvers") even ends up in bed with Connelly (nicknamed "Daddy Connelly") just as Dana Scully (originally inspired by Foster's depiction of Clarice Starling) ends up in bed with Daddy Connolly.
OK, it's Father Joe, played by Billy Connolly. And the context is very different. But still, that screencap has both characters sitting on a bed. Stop being such a nitpicker.
True Detective even has Liz Danvers pining for a lost child, just a Scully pines for William in I Want to Believe.
REMEMBER WHERE YOU ARE
OK, so what's the big deal? Just more evidence that Hollywood has become a wasteland of remakes and ripoffs. That's no newsflash these days. Why do we care?
Well, I guess I forgot you're on The Secret Sun, didn't you? So you KNOW what's barreling towards you at the speed of sound...
"Bury a Friend" by Billie Eilish: Billie Eilish's "Bury a Friend" is the opening theme in True Detective season 4's episode 2.
"Song to the Siren (Take 7)" by Tim Buckley: In True Detective: Night Country's opening arc, Navarro visits Rose's home to learn more about her visions of Travis. Before opening up to Navarro about her supernatural connection with Travis, Rose plays Tim Buckley's "Song to the Siren (Take 7)" in her room.
So in other words, the song is playing while we hear about this Rose woman's supernatural visions. About a Travis, no less.
When will you believe already? Now's as good a time as any to start.
(Note that Billie Elishabeth's mom appeared on an episode of The X-Files about - you guessed it - a lost child).
"Daddy Connelly" couldn't be played by a more resonant actor in the context of Fraserology. OK, he could, but Christopher Eccleston is way up there. Press play on this vid and see if you hear a familiar voice.
This is from Cracker, starring Hagrid himself, Robbie Coltrane. This series made names of a number of up-and-comers, including Eccleston, Susan Lynch, Robert Carlyle and Samantha Morton.
But there's even more...
Eccleston was the star of the show in an episode of The Leftovers called "It's a Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt World." It had a very Jeff Buckley-adjacent subplot as well as a storyline centered on a "Frasier cult."
More importantly, it aired about 76 hours before Chris Cornell (who intimately linked the Sibyl and her Shepherd Boy, of course) died in Detroit.
What a week that was. Future historians will see it as a turning point.
Anyhow, the Frasier cult in question was a sex-orgy club dedicated to the real-life Frasier the Lion, who lived to be a ripe old age. One of Frasier's fictional offsprings ends the episode by mauling a murderer who claimed to be God.
And here's the logo for the hotel where the Horned Christ swam to the Siren, so to speak. At the end of West Elizabeth Street, if you'd like to make a pilgrimage.
Stop by the Siren Hotel while you're there. And the Fox (Mulder) Theater.
Do note the leads in the new True Detective are Liz, Evangeline and Rose (a name very familiar to the initiates). For future reference, I mean.
Speaking of the initiates, there's even a polar bear subplot, of which men shall know nothing...
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