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 eerie 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.
What Is True Detective‘s Spiral and What Does the Symbol Mean?
“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 the many smooth 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 symbol tattooed on his chest. Clark got it to honor his hidden girlfriend days after Annie’s death. True Detective revealed that Annie had the spiral tattooed on her back before they met.
True Detective’s Spiral and the Ice Caves of “Night Country”
The True Detective spiral then appeared in the abandoned home of former Tsalal equipment engineer Oliver Tagaq. The missing suspect left a drawing of the spiral behind. Prior and Navarro found it on the floor, held in place by a stone that also had the swirl etched into it on top. Danvers and Navarro later also found that swirl painted on a wall of the deserted Dredge where they found Otis Heiss wearing Annie K.’s missing parka. That’s also where Navarro saw the spirit of yet another dead person, her recently deceased sister.
When Danvers found Otis Heiss he also said all of them were “in the Night Country” now. In episode five, we learned what that literally means. Kenny told Navarro how his grandpa taught him to “walk away when” he saw them because people left them behind “as a warning to hunters.” They marked places where “the ice would swallow them whole” into Ennis’ underground caves. When him and his friends would break through the ice to get into them his grandma would get pissed. She warned them “the Night Country was gonna take” them.
So, why did Annie K., an Alaskan midwife and political activist, have a tattoo connected to ice caves and a pedophile cult in Louisiana? Without meaning to, Annie’s friend Susan, the hairdresser, revealed more about the True Detective spiral than we’ve ever known. That information raises all new questions that also tie Night Country 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 some force in the universe 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. 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 thought.
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 True Detective‘s Ennis is a mystical place, that spiral might have power of its own, one that goes far beyond the Tuttle family cult or any one 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 follower 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 tortured and killed 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, Annie K., and now her sister haunt her. There is no going forward for them. It’s as though 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 in the first season of True Detective, 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, the 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 in the world of True Detective. 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 later found branded with an ancient symbol of evil. “She” might also be the one who told Navarro (via Anders) that 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. Far more terrifying is that it might have a power of its own. The spiral might be the manifestation of something ancient that was unleashed from the permafrost. That spirit might even be the Yellow King by another name.
Until we get answers to these new questions about Night Country‘s cases and this spiral, 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. Even when we do get answers it won’t change something that has always been true: there is an evil darkness in the world and always will be. And we might be trapped forever, walking with it along the same jagged path that encompasses us all.
Originally published on January 29, 2024.
Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. You can follow him on Twitter and Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.