What happens to Navarro at the end of True Detective: Night Country?

The final episode of the six-part series features an ambiguous ending for Trooper Navarro

True Detective: Night Country aired its season finale on Sunday (18 February) after a critically acclaimed run of six episodes.

*Warning: Spoilers follow for “Part Six,” the True Detective: Night Country season finale.*

The last episode reveals once and for all who killed Annie K, but provides a much more ambiguous ending for Alaska State Trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis).

What happened to Navarro?

The last scenes of the show see Jodie Foster’s police chief, Liz Danvers questioned about the murders of the scientists at the Tsalal Arctic Research Station. We learned that the scientists were responsible for the death of Annie K after she found out they’d been deliberately polluting the town to further their research and destroyed their years of work.

In an act of retribution, a group of local women, known on set as the “Justice Ladies”, rounded up the scientists and sent them out naked into the ice fields to die.

Kali Reis in ‘True Detective: Night Country’ (Michele K Short/HBO)

In Danvers’s interview, it’s made clear that she and Navarro have decided to cover up for the women; however, it’s also revealed that Navarro has disappeared, although there have been sightings of her around town.

We see in a flashback that Danvers went to Navarro’s house to find her dead son Holden’s polar bear toy and Navarro’s cell phone but there was no sign of her.

The audience is shown Navarro walking off onto the ice – as she threatened to do throughout the series – presumably to join her mother and sister in the beyond.

It appears she’s died until the final scene, in which Danvers walks out onto the porch of a cosy lakeside cottage and is joined by Navarro. Is Navarro merely a vision or is she alive?

According to showrunner Issa López, there is no right answer.

Jodie Foster in the series finale of ‘Night Country' (HBO)

“I’m not saying that she’s alive, and I’m certainly not saying that she’s dead,” she told Deadline. “I very carefully crafted this as an ink block test for you to discover yourself as an audience member.”

“... The Aboriginal people in Australia go and walk about, find themselves and then come back, which is I think is what Kali embraced [for the character],” she added. “However, there is a chance that she is also going to be with the women before her to visit them. You can read it both ways and it’s up to you to interpret which one fulfills your heart.”

Similarly, Reis told Today: “If she did follow in her sister’s footsteps or she is finally at peace in her life, can live her life and go off, then maybe come back... the only one that she definitely would see would be Danvers.

“If she did follow in Julia’s footsteps, sightings of her just match up with Ennis. We see things sometimes. So is it real? Is she not? Did she come back? Did she not? It’s like that on purpose. You get to choose what you want to choose.”

‘True Detective: Night Country’ (Sky)

She also threw in a curveball, asking: “Did Navarro die when she went out into the storm and then she’s a ghost who’s trying to help her homie and talking to the women? There’s all kinds of different suggestions.

“Was Navarro ever alive in the first place? Or is she a figment of everybody’s imagination? There are a lot of different ways you can go. Was Navarro just sent to Danvers to get her through what she got through? Now she’s gone. So, there’s just a lot of roads that you could take, but they’re all tangible,” she continued.

“That’s the beauty of what Issa (López) created. She didn’t tell you what to think. She’s presenting all the evidence and going, ‘You choose.’”

Another important factor to consider is that Navarro’s Iñupiaq name means “the return of the sun after a long darkness”. Could it be symbolic of her return after the long night?

Foster, at least, is more definitive in her conclusion of events.

“On purpose, you can think whatever you want to think. Everybody has a choice,” she told GQ. “I'm a logical person, so I think she's definitely there. It reinforces that idea that Navarro is somebody who's torn between two things: torn between the real world and the spirit world, torn between two cultures, the Inuit and the Dominican, torn between being a police officer and the community that she’s policing.”

True Detective: Night Country is available to watch now on Sky and NOW