True Detective‘s first year focused on ritualistic murders committed by the Tuttle family, the same powerful religious cult of pedophiles who funds the Tsalal Arctic Research Station. Those followers of the Yellow King branded its victims with a strange spiral that appeared throughout the show’s first season. That unsettling symbol also briefly appeared during the series’ third installment, which centered around a child’s murder. Yet, despite the unsettling swirl’s prominent role in the show’s past, we didn’t know much about it until it reappeared on True Detective: Night Country. Strange deaths in the dark and icy north have revealed that spiral is more than just a cult’s calling card. It’s much older and might prove Rust Cohle’s greatest fears are true, because it might also prove an evil cosmic entity really exists.
“It’s old, missy. Older than Ennis. It’s older than the ice, probably.”
In Night Country‘s second episode Fiona Shaw’s Rose told her friend Trooper Navarro about the spiral found on the frozen foreheads of the Tsalal scientists. Navarro had seen it before, “years ago,” but had no idea what it symbolized. All Rose could tell her was that the swirl is very old.
True Detective‘s spiral is jagged, uneven, and always connected to death, unlike like the many smooth, even spirals connected to life and spirituality found throughout ancient cultures. That swirl also ties the murder of Annie K. with both the deadly events at the Tsalal station and season one of the show. Danvers and Navarro found the spiral on the ceiling in the secret trailer of the still-missing Raymond Clark. He is the prime suspect in both season four cases. He also had that logo tattooed on his chest. Clark got it to honor his anonymous girlfriend days after Annie’s death. She had it tattooed on her back before they met.
Why did Annie K., an Alaskan midwife and political activist, have a tattoo connected to a pedophile cult in Louisiana? Without meaning to, Annie’s friend Susan the hairdresser revealed more about that spiral than we’ve ever known. That information raises all new questions that also connect to season one.
“She showed him her tattoo. He was, like, fixated on it.”
Susan, maybe the only person who knew about Ray and Annie’s secret relationship, said her friend got that bizarre tattoo because she dreamt about it a “buncha times” in high school. Once Annie got the spiral inked onto her body the dreams stopped. It was as though something demanded she carry that spiral out into the real world.
That symbol then played a major role in the connection she formed with the “weird” Raymond Clark. Susan also said it was strange Annie didn’t want anyone to know about her relationship with Clark and that Annie changed once they started dating.
We don’t yet know why Clark found that swirl fascinating or why the two kept their love a secret. What we do know is that without her tattoo Annie K. might never have formed a bond with him. It drew him to her and vice versa. So without those dreams she might still be alive.
Why did she have those dreams in the first place if they doomed her to a horrible death? On True Detective there’s always an answer rooted in reality, and that might still prove to be the case in season four. Maybe the Tuttle clan is even more widespread than we though. B
But the evidence is growing that Ennis might really be as strange and teeming with evil spirits as it seems. Ghosts might really wander there. Monsters might really be on the loose. Voices might really whisper in the dark. If Ennis is a mystic place, that spiral might have power of its own, one that goes far beyond the Tuttle family cult or town. That clan and Raymond Clark might have merely adopted the swirl as their symbol of evil because the spiral itself is evil, an evil that is forever present everywhere.
“I saw you in my dream. You’re a priest, too. I know what happens next. You’re in Carcosa now. With me.”
“Time is a flat circle” is the most memorable line in True Detective‘s history, but Rust Cohle didn’t come up with it on his own. He first heard it from serial killer and followed of the Yellow King, Reggie Ledoux.
The idea of time being a flat circle haunted Rust Cohle. It meant those kids Ledoux and his cohorts killed and tortured would always be in that room, always suffering. It also meant Cohle would forever be discovering them there in “Carcosa.”
The implications of that concept of time and existence are a nightmare for all of humanity. “Everything we’ve ever done or will do, we’re gonna do over and over and over again,” said Cohle. That includes reliving all the death and pain we will encounter in life, which is exactly what is happening to the characters of Night Country. None of them can escape their pasts. The deaths of Danvers’ child and husband haunt her. Just as the memories of Navarro’s mother and Annie K haunt her. There is no going forward for them. It’s like they’re forever trapped walking the same path, like a crooked spiral who has no end or beginning because it goes nowhere.
But time is not the only thing that haunted Rust Cohle, and another one of his fears about our very existence is now a major part of season four and the spiral that transcends both time and space.
“‘I don’t sleep, I just dream’.”
Reggie Ledoux also said he had seen Cohle in a dream before their final encounter. That’s when Ledoux welcomed Cohle to Carcosa, realm of the Yellow King. “He sees you…,” said Ledoux.
The existential angst of Rust Cohle, whose dead father helped locate those frozen scientists, went beyond the nature of time. He also spoke at length about dreams, a frequent season one theme, and how they also condemn us to suffer. This is what Rust Cohle famously said about existence in season one:
To realize that all your life—you know, all your love, all your hate, all your memory, all your pain—it was all the same thing. It was all the same dream. A dream that you had inside a locked room. A dream about being a person. And like a lot of dreams there’s a monster at the end of it.
Annie K.’s literal dreams ended her life. Those dreams about the spiral are why she is no longer a person. There was a monster at the end of it all for her. And that monster might now also be on the loose in Ennis. “We woke her,” said Anders shortly before he died. “And now she’s out there, in the ice. She came for us. In the dark.”
Whoever—or whatever—“she” is came for those scientists found branded with an ancient symbol of evil. “She” might also be the one who told Navarro (via Anders) her dead mother is waiting for her. That presence, just as the Yellow King’s in Louisiana, might also be why the people of Ennis see and hear the dead in the darkness. Something old is in the snow, and, as Rust Cohle feared, if Reggie Ledoux was right and time is a flat circle, that monster has always been there and always will be.
We’re all trapped with it forever inside a never-ending dream. It’s a dream destined to always become a nightmare because it always was.
Night Country has revealed more about True Detective‘s spiral than ever before. It’s not just a symbol of pedophiles in Louisiana. It’s, at least, a sign of evil everywhere, but it might have a power of its own. It might be the manifestation of something ancient that was unleased from the permafrost. That spirit might even be the Yellow King by another name.
Until we get answers to these new questions about these cases and this spiral, though, we’re left to fear that Rust Cohle was right about life, existence, pain, death, and our eternal place in a cosmos we can never fully understand. There is an evil darkness in the world and always will be. Worse, we might be trapped forever walking with it along the same jagged path that encompasses us all.
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Source: Kiat Media
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