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Meanwhile, Danvers’s younger protégé, Peter, has one thing else to point out for all of the arduous work that has lastly gotten him kicked out of his home. After delivering data on Otis final week, Peter gives one other file definitively connecting the mine to the Tsalal Research Station, which had been receiving funding in change for dubiously rosy air pollution information. When Danvers will get known as to a gathering on the mine workplaces with its proprietor, Kate McKittrick (Dervia Kirwan), and Ted, Danvers’s overseer and third-rate occasional intercourse associate, she assumes it’ll be a dressing-down a few protest that had turned violent, though policing the scene was not her duty. She tucks the file away like a gun in an ankle holster.
Danvers was proper to anticipate an ambush. First, Kate presents surveillance footage of Danvers and Navarro scoping out the mine entrance and pumps her for data on why they had been there. Then she cheerily gives the excellent news that the forensics workforce in Anchorage decided that the scientists had died en masse due to a freak climate occasion that kicked up after they had been maybe catching the final sundown earlier than the lengthy night time. Danvers is aware of sufficient concerning the case by now to roll her eyes at this rationalization, and she or he confronts Kate with the incriminating file, however Kate and Ted have one other card to play. Ted is aware of the Wheeler case wasn’t a murder-suicide and means that Danvers and Navarro can be sensible to cease snooping.
It’s an ideal character second for Danvers, who has been extra snug than Navarro in mollifying the powers-that-be. Though Navarro was stunned by how a lot Danvers knew about Annie as soon as she took over as police chief, the case file had been sitting in Hank’s home, like a Pandora’s field Danvers had determined to not open. And whereas she’s conscious of the air pollution that has resulted in lots of stillborn deaths of Indigenous youngsters, Danvers has been aggressive in protecting her stepdaughter from getting concerned within the protest motion — ostensibly to guard her, however maybe additionally to suppress her personal guilt. The mine employs half the city. Part of her job has been about sustaining the established order.
Navarro gained’t let her off the hook this time. In the episode’s strongest scene, she performs to Danvers’s conscience: “You carry her now,” she says of Annie. “Like I did all this time. You carry Annie day by day. You’re leaving her alone in that cave, in the dead of night.” It is moments like this when the casting of Jodie Foster pays dividends. It is sort of inconceivable to look at Foster investigating murders in “Night Country” with out recalling her efficiency as Clarice Starling in “The Silence of the Lambs,” however the ethical distance between the 2 ladies is putting — it’s as if Starling has aged right into a compromised model of herself. Now Kali Reis’s Navarro, together with her pugilist scowl, is pleading together with her to rediscover her sense of justice and do proper by Annie.
Yet the tip of the episode muddies the trail. It seems Hank has been doing Kate’s soiled work, with Danvers’s present put up because the carrot on the finish of a really lengthy stick. Now Kate is suggesting, none too subtly, that Otis may want to fulfill with an accident earlier than he can present Danvers and Navarro the caves. The scene at Danvers’s home, ending with Otis and Hank each shot dead — the latter at his son Peter’s palms — represents one other ethical crossroads for Danvers and her companions.
