"True Detective": Pop-culture quasi-science informing entertainment
Where they got this twist — but no spoilers!
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So we’ve been watching HBO’s True Detective: Night Country, which I highly recommend. It’s the fourth season of the True Detective series of standalone dramas. It’s set during the perpetual darkness of winter above the Arctic Circle up on Alaska’s north slope. It blends a lot of really well-drawn characters juggling the politics of life in a very small town, with mysterious science research, and some elements that appear to be paranormal.
No spoilers here. The show is generally about the mystery of a bunch of scientists all found tangled together and buried in the ice, in super creepy and bizarre circumstances. Jodie Foster plays the deeply flawed police chief tasked with solving the presumed murder. And later on, we get the fairly standard plot point of people trying to persuade her to stop investigating, and instead chalk it up to some weather-related accident.
Now, there’s not a whole lot of people in the world who would have predicted this, but immediately upon hearing that, I thought I knew exactly what they were going to claim — and I’ll get to that in a moment. Much in the episode is reminiscent of the infamous Dyatlov Pass non-mystery, in which nine Russian cross country skiers all died in circumstances that had a lot of things in common with the True Detective deaths. I would bet money that True Detective writer/director Issa López researched this case. She has openly credited The Thing, The Shining, and Alien as inspirations; there’s a final detail that she got from recent pop-culture news tied to Dyatlov Pass.
The clue is the specific “weather event” that Foster’s antagonists tried to persuade her to go with: a “slab avalanche.” Allow me to explain.
In 2021, authors Gaume and Puzrin published this paper in Communications Earth & Environment: “Mechanisms of slab avalanche release and impact in the Dyatlov Pass incident in 1959.” It proposed that the skiers’ camp had been disrupted by an unusual type of shallow-slope avalanche that triggered them running around half naked and dying in weird circumstances all over the mountain. Immediately, the world press hailed this great mystery as having finally been solved.
Now if you follow Skeptoid or this newsletter, you know I’ve written on this before, most recently in September 2023 when Nat Geo dusted off this 2-year-old story to once again claim that the Dyatlov Pass mystery had been solved.
In fact, as I and other authors have made clear, there was never very much about Dyatlov Pass that was mysterious. Search & rescue had seen it all before. And Gaume and Puzrin did do some original avalanche research; I believe they tied it to Dyatlov Pass simply because that’s a great way to get press coverage for your scientific paper which otherwise would have languished in obscurity. It’s always been known that a minor avalanche, enough to frighten the skiers in their tent, probably did play some role (one tent showed avalanche damage); and avalanche warning signs are all over that part of the Ural mountains where it happened. There have always been two basic types of avalanches: loose snow and slab; but all the contemporary reporting of Dyatlov Pass simply said “avalanche” because the type never mattered. The phrase “slab avalanche” had never been a part of the Dyatlov Pass story until their paper came out.
A Google search or two about Dyatlov Pass is all it would have taken López to get slab avalanche.
The timing works. True Detective started shooting in November 2022, and the slab avalanche paper was published in January 2021, with the world press trumpeting it as “the solution to the Dyatlov Pass mystery” shortly thereafter.
I claim to have solved no mystery today or accomplished any incredible detective work. I just think it’s really cool to see pop-culture sensationalist reporting end up informing the plot of a high-profile series.
Anyway, watch True Detetective: Night Country. It’s awesome.