True Detective: Night Country episode 5 solves one mystery and opens up a few more

polygon.com:

There’s nothing on television quite like the moment in a thriller when a character finally breaks and does something even they didn’t know they were capable of. For True Detective: Night Country, that moment arrives late in episode 5, and it hits just about every character at the exact same time.

Night Country’s fifth episode mostly follows Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Navarro (Kali Reis) as they continue their investigation. Danvers, having sussed out the mine’s connection to the whole affair, suddenly has a target on her back by harboring the missing scientist, and Hank Prior (John Hawkes) is revealed to be the mine’s go-to problem solver. On its face, this all seems to clear up a question or two about Annie’s death, but the show refuses to let the answer be that simple.

While it’s clear that all of this is pushing the season’s action to a head, it isn’t until Pete Prior (Finn Bennett) gets kicked out of his house and has to move into Danvers’ shed that we really get a sense of just how much the season is contracting in on itself, bringing all of its major players into one place and applying pressure until something pops. And boy, does it pop.

But any show can bring its characters to an explosive head. What makes the climax of “Part 5” so exciting is how much you can feel the tension: No character in the scene wants to be there, or knows what to do next. Hank is standing in the kitchen, backed into a corner by Kate McKitterick (Dervla Kirwan) and the mining company, Pete is literally forced to choose which mentor figure will live and which will die, and Danvers would always rather hold the gun than have it pointed at her.

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But every choice we’ve seen in the series so far has pushed these characters to this one spot. This is what TV does best. We’ve spent almost five full episodes with these characters, and we know them better than to think that this situation would explode into violence right away. But we also know that they’re each stubborn and resolute