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(Slight spoilers below …)

True Detective: Night Country was the absolute best show going for five weeks. It had atmosphere, mystery, superb acting, amazing cinematography, and a captivating plot that seemed absolutely comfortable with mashing up the true detective/supernatural genres.

The connections to True Detective: Season One seemed to be there if you squinted hard enough, but you could easily watch this show without knowing anything about the previous, largely unconnected seasons.

From the first episode their seemed to be a supernatural element playing a huge role in the town, a mass murder, and people’s individual lives. There seemed to be ghosts, possessions, visions, monsters, and contact from the beyond.

The show hinted that among the very flawed characters within the show, a presence existed, one that inhabited that land long before people ever stepped foot on the ice. And during the time of darkness, it would strike back at those harming its habitat.

And then, in the final episode, it turned its back on all of that.

The show concluded with very real, very tangible, very human reasons for much of what occurred. That would have been okay had the show made it clear from the beginning that people might be imagining the supernatural, that hallucinations could be occurring, that the dark might have been playing tricks on people’s eyes.

But this was not the case. The show depicted men who were possessed. Oranges rolling out of nowhere. Literal ghosts leading former spouses through a snowstorm. It wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t hinted at. It was clearly depicted and defined.

And that’s why, for me, the final episode felt cowardly and disingenuous. I was in. I was there for the supernatural. I stuck with it for the previous five episodes. Yet the show walked it back, walked everything back.

Don’t misunderstand–the acting remained superb. The characters were incredibly engaging. Everything remained superb. Everything, that is, but the story. The story missed the landing. The story ignored the groundwork that it had so wonderfully laid. The story let me down.