True Detective: Night Country recap: The ice men cometh

And things get even bleaker for the ice men during this Sundays episode As Chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and her officers do their best Ellie Sattler impersonation, trying to excavate those frosty fellas from that giant ice cube, one cop gets a bit handsy and rips a victims arm clean off. (Danvers exasperated Wilson, what the fuck?! delightfully adds to the slapstick morbidity.) That accidental amputation unleashes a roar from said victim that horrifyingly signals, no, not all of the Corpsicle compadres are dead. That man is alive, albeit in need of yet another amputation and quickly placed into a medicallyinduced coma, which means he wont be available to answer any of Danvers questions anytime soon, including what the hell those men have been doing out at Tsalal research station in the first place. (Really, outside of, you know, the whole being frozen alive thing, it did seem like those scientists were having a helluva time in their reclusivity, if those drunken karaoke iPhone videos are anything to go by.) For that, Liz heads to the high school where one of her old paramours, a geologist, teaches, and he explains that the men were trying to sequence the DNA of an extinct microorganism that could potentially stop cellular decay, i.e. the kind of thing that would help cure cancers, autoimmune diseases, genetic disorders, you name it. Who, or what, would possibly want to stop that kind of progress? Danvers gets called back to the precinct where she encounters yet another one of her bootycall buddies, Captain Ted Connelly (Christopher Eccleston), the very man who shipped her off to Ennis, Alaska in the first place. He informs her that Anchorage will be taking jurisdiction over the shit bowl Corpsicle case, but she cites a police handbook that says frozen bodies cannot be moved or manipulated until theyre properly thawed (gross), which means she has 48 hours until her authority melts away. The only problem Where to thaw em? An iceskating rink, of course, after Liz begrudgingly gets permission from its ownerwhose husband she may or may not have slept with. (Listen, a girls gotta stay warm up in the arctic, alright?) Cue that giant block of frozen flesh being trucked through town to the Beach Boys jolly Little Saint Nick and installed right there on center ice. Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis), for her part, has been spending time over at Rose Aguineaus (Fiona Shaw) groovy abode, talking about Roses haunting late partner Travis (he disappeared into the ice because he didnt want the leukemia to take him), Navarros sister Julia (who she brought to Ennis a year ago to try and ease her mentalhealth issues, which include having her own Haley Joel Osmontesque visions of their dead mother), and the mysterious spiral symbol that Navarro spotted drawn on one of the scientists heads, which just so happens to perfectly match a tattoo found on Annie Masu Kowtoks body. Its old, older than Ennis, Rose says of the spiral. Its older than the ice, probably. Its not a shock, then, when Navarro shows up rinkside to tell Danvers they need to collaborate on the AnniemeetsCorpsicle case. Everstubborn, Liz refuses but still has Peter Prior (Finn Bennett) look into the symbol. (Its in trying to teach Peter to ask the right questions about what happened to the Tsalal staffwho left their clothes neatly folded by their bodies? Was someone out on the ice with them that day?that we get our first overt invocation of Fosters Clarice Starling, a connection that showrunner Issa Lpez deliberately didnt shy away from, as she revealed to The A.V. Club.) However, asking those right questions leads Liz to discover that, yes, Evangeline was correct in thinking theres a connection between Annies case and the Corpsicle. Digging into the scientists creditcard statements leads her to a tattoo parlor that reveals that Annie and the marked researcher were, in fact, in a relationship during the time of her death and the scientist had gotten the spiral tattoo in her honor. And Navarro gets her own lead at Qavviks tavern, after onehalf of a manonman bar fightan escalation of the tensions between natives and miners over the town water supplyclearly recognizes a photo of the tattooed researcher. She manages to track the man down, and he points her in the direction of an RV that the scientist had purchased from his cousin. Evangeline calls Liz down to the abandoned trailer, which is covered in animal bones (seal and caribou, Navarro surmises), rough drawings, bound dolls, and a shrine to Annie above the bed. And just as theyre contending with that creepiness, they get a call in about another The ice men have thawed, and one of themyes, the tattooed scientistis missing. Hes alive, Navarro declares, just before the credits roll. Hes out there. The second episode had already unsettlingly plunged viewers even deeper into the mysterious world of Ennisthough the seemingly common knowledge that the town will make you see dead people does not seem like a tourism selling pointand the lives and regrets of its troubled inhabitants. But its a whole other thing to have one of said inhabitants roaming around the tundra nude and newly thawed from a human iceberg.