HBO HAS A pretty good track record when it comes to making quality mysteries. The Night Of, Mare of Easttown, and True Detective are three of the premium cable network’s repertoire that have had audiences waiting patiently each week to lean more about whodunnit. In 2024, True Detective: Night Country, the fourth season of the anthology show, is here to deliver a mix of horror and mystery to kick off the year.
Starring newcomer Kali Reis and famed actress Jodie Foster, the season is set in the fictional Ennis, Alaska, where the small community thrives thanks to its mine, which employs much of the town. The town is shocked when a Native woman, one who was against the mine is found brutally murdered. The case is unsolved, until much later, when one of her body parts is found at the scene of another grisly crime.
In case you missed it, the show isn’t for the squeamish. But its dark tone and setting is exactly what’s so intriguing for viewers. And for the season’s showrunner, Issa López, the idea for such a macabre plot didn’t come from nowhere.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, López revealed some of the references she used for the show. Two mysteries apparently haunted her as a child, but served her well when it came for Night Country: the case of the Mary Celeste and the Dyatlov Pass incident.
If you don’t know anything about them, here’s a short explanation.
What happened to the Mary Celeste?
On December 5, 1872, the British brig Dei Gratia spotted a ship off the coast of the Azores region in Portugal, according to Smithsonian Magazine. The ship should have set course for Genoa, Italy, but was nowhere near its destination. When the crew boarded the ship, they found the entire crew missing, although all their belongings and cargo were still intact. The ship’s only lifeboat was missing, though.
The Mary Celeste was an American registered ship with a ten person crew who went missing, never to be seen or heard from again. While theories have arose from time to time, there’s still no definitive answer as to why the vessel was abandoned, or where any of the crew went.
Part of the mystery’s ongoing fame is thanks to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote a sensationalized story in 1884 theorizing about the fate of the ship and its crew, called “J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement.”
What was the Dyatlov Pass incident?
In 1959, nine Soviet hikers died under suspicious circumstances in the northern Ural Mountains. Sometime after midnight, something caused the hikers to cut their tents open and escape toward a forest. None of them had proper clothing for the freezing temperatures.
After search teams found their bodies, an investigation began. According to Nature, the main cause of death was hypothermia, but four of the hikers had severe skull or thorax injuries, two were found with missing eyes, and one with a missing tongue. Some of the hikers were mostly naked or barefoot and trace radioactivity was found on some of their clothes as well.
While a 2019 report from the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation said the most likely explanation was an avalanche, the search team that found the hikers saw no evidence of an avalanche when they arrived on the scene.
To this day, there’s no certain answer as to how the group died, or why they left their tent.
How do they connect to True Detective: Night Country?
López doesn’t dive into what parts of these two true crimes relate to Night Country, but there are clear parallels. Night Country‘s premiere episode centers on the deaths of a group of scientists, who seemingly disappeared from their base and all froze naked outside.
When detectives go to the research station where the scientists live, they find nothing amiss… aside from a severed tongue on the floor.
Since both the Mary Celeste and the Dyatlov Pass incident remain unsolved, there’s no hints there to tell us who could have killed the scientists or why they left their research base. If we want answers, we’ll have to watch more of True Detective: Night Country to find out.
Milan Polk
Milan Polk is an Editorial Assistant for Men’s Health who specializes in entertainment and lifestyle reporting, and has worked for New York Magazine’s Vulture and Chicago Tribune.
