We’ve arrived at the final episode of HBO’s True Detective: Night Country and we’re finally getting answers as to what’s really going on in the town of Ennis, Alaska. More importantly, episode six revealed exactly what happened to the researchers, the whereabouts of Raymond Clark, and who was responsible for Annie Kowtok’s death.

Episode six begins on December 31st, the 14th day of night, with Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) making their way through the ice caves. When Liz hears whispers, Navarro asks, “You feel it too, don’t you?” Navarro thinks she sees something – a body, perhaps – and leads Liz toward it, insisting “it’s here.” Unfortunately, they’re met with blocks of ice.

Suddenly, Navarro falls through the ice and when Liz says she’s going to get help, she falls through as well. There’s no time to think because Navarro spots Raymond Clark (Owen McDonnell), and he runs off. They find equipment with running power, and when Liz looks up, there are bones in the ice. They match the bones in the video Annie K shot while she was being murdered.

As they look around, Liz finds a drill press with a star shape at the end – the same shape as the wounds on Annie K’s body. They also discover how Clark has been getting in and out. There’s a manhole that leads up to the Tsalal Research Station.

Episode five featured a shocking scene of Hank Prior killing Otis Heiss and then Peter killing his own dad when it looked like Hank was going to shoot Liz. The first we see of Peter (Finn Bennett) in the season finale, he’s cleaning up the blood and loading up the dead bodies.

Leah (Isabella LaBlanc) shows up to see Liz but finds Peter there instead. He convinces her to let him give her a ride back to his house.

Kayla (Anna Lambe) stops Peter from leaving and wants to know what is going on. She wonders if Liz made him do something. Peter assures her he needs to do just one more thing and that after he’s done, he wants to leave together. Kayla indicates she agrees by giving him a kiss.

Meanwhile, Liz and Navarro are doing a sweep of the facility and split up. Navarro sees wet footprints and follows them. Clark locks Liz into a cold storage room and as Navarro is still sweeping the halls, Clark surprises Navarro by smashing her in the head with a fire extinguisher.

As Liz is trying to break the glass, Navarro is being dragged by Clark while she’s beginning to wake up. Liz finally breaks the glass and discovers Navarro has now gotten the upper hand and is beating Clark. Liz stops her.

With Clark now taped to a chair, Navarro shows him the video of Annie. She then puts earbuds in his ears and plays the video on a loop, forcing him to hear Annie’s scream over and over again.

After grabbing a snack, Liz and Navarro check on Clark to see if he’s ready to talk. Clark claims he wasn’t there at first when Annie was attacked. He blames himself for what happened because Annie found his notes and figured out what was going on at Tsalal. They were looking for the DNA of a microorganism that could save the world and actually found it. However, they needed the pollution from the mines to make it accessible to extract. The more waste in the ground and in the water, the better the permafrost was for their work. They were pushing the mines to make more pollution.

Clark thinks Annie was trying to find a paper trail to prove the mines were paying them and she destroyed their work. Anders Lund caught her and snapped. Clark tried to help her, but Annie hit him. The rest of the researchers helped kill her while Clark stood by and watched.

A flashback shows Clark believing Annie was dead and taking his shirt off to wipe her face when suddenly she gasps for air. Clark suffocated her with his shirt while crying. Of course, he leaves out the part about being the one who killed her when telling Liz and Navarro what happened.

Navarro informs him that Annie was stabbed 32 times and her tongue was cut out. He swears the researchers didn’t cut out her tongue. They called the mines for help, and he says they sent a cop (Hank) to move her body. He thinks the cop must have cut out her tongue.

“Tell me again that you loved her,” says Navarro. After he does, she pulls her gun on him and Liz leaves the room. Navarro asks if she’s going to stop her, and Liz says no. However, Navarro doesn’t shoot him.

Liz has a flashback of the Wheeler case, and when Navarro joins her in the hallway after deciding not to shoot Clark, Liz admits she was going to kill Wheeler, but Navarro beat her to it.

Minutes later, an orange rolls toward Liz, and she bends down and sees ice on the ground.

Navarro and Liz return to Clark to ask more questions. He claims Annie killed the researchers. He says he kept seeing her and hearing her voice and knew she would come back. The night they all disappeared, Clark yelled, “She’s here! She’s come back!” and took off to the manhole and left the others to hide. Seconds later, a researcher started screaming, “No! Please!”

He continues to insist Annie killed them. Liz questions what happened to Otis then because Annie wasn’t even born when he was attacked. He says that was Annie, too. He claims Annie has been hiding in the caves forever and believes time is a flat circle.

Liz takes a break and leaves Navarro and Clark alone. He begs her to kill him or let him do it himself because he’s tired.

Liz is walking the halls when the lights start to flicker and there’s a whispered, “Please.” She lays down, finds a necklace tangled in her hair, takes it off, and throws it. Strangely, she falls asleep and has a dream about her son. Liz wakes with a jerk and discovers the facility is freezing cold and the power’s out.

Liz finds Navarro outside, standing a few feet from Clark, who’s now dead and frozen solid. They head back inside, and Liz is upset that their only witness is dead. (She was okay with Navarro shooting him earlier but apparently changed her mind.) She blames Navarro for allowing Clark to kill himself and for cutting the power. Navarro claims she didn’t have anything to do with the power going out.

Navarro volunteers to try and get the backup generator started, and as she’s working on it, a ghostly figure of a woman appears in the distance behind her. Liz also works on getting the power back on, using her headlamp to examine an electrical panel. Suddenly, her light goes off and a hubcap rolls by her in the hallway.

Weird things are also happening to Navarro. She hears her name whispered and follows the sound until it tells her to stop. She then experiences a vision of the researchers’ last night and sees Clark seizing and hears him say, “She’s awake.”

While all this is going down, Peter arrives at Rose’s with Hank’s dead body. (He left Otis’ in Hank’s trunk.) He explains that Navarro sent him and asks that she take him to where Julia is. They head out onto the ice, and Rose cuts the air out of Hank’s lungs, so he doesn’t float. However, Peter needs to put his father in the water himself to finish what he started and to close the door.

Back at Tsalal, Liz and Navarro are trying to keep warm when Navarro says there’s something out there calling her. She brings up Holden and claims it should be a comfort to know he’s out there. She’s about to tell Liz what Holden said to her in a vision when Liz orders her to shut up. Liz is furious that Navarro would dare bring up his name and even threatens to shoot her if she doesn’t leave her kid out of it. She wants nothing to do with Navarro’s spirits and ghosts, and no one knows what her son felt while he was trapped in a car and dying.

“I’m not merciful. I’ve got no mercy left,” snarls Liz before walking off.

Liz doesn’t know it, but Leah is leaving her a message telling her not to die out there as she’s finding anything to pile on top of herself to get warm. She spends just a few minutes under the blankets before giving up and going to search for Navarro.

Navarro’s no longer seated by the fire and has walked outside into the deadly storm. Liz steps outside, battling the storm with only a small flashlight to pierce the dark.

Navarro is walking off into the storm while experiencing a vision of walking through the desert. She hears screaming and her ear begins to bleed. She hears, “Come, Evangeline.” A hand reaches out to her as the voice whispers, “Your name is Siqinnaatchiaq.”

Liz continues to track Navarro, calling out her name. She struggles to keep her eyes open against the wind and snow and then hears Holden say, “Mommy.” When she looks down, she believes she sees him under the ice. She breaks through it and falls into the water.

Liz starts to sink and then struggles to get to the surface but can’t. Just as she stops moving, a hand reaches down and pulls her out of the water. Navarro gets to her in the nick of time and brings her inside the facility by the fire. As Navarro tries to get her to breathe, memories of Holden and her husband fill Liz’s head.

Finally, Liz returns to the living and asks Navarro what Holden said to her. “He says that he sees you. He sees you, Liz,” replies Navarro.

It’s now January 1st, the 15th day of night and the storm is over. Liz reminds Navarro she once said she wanted just to walk away and tells her to come back if she does. Navarro references something Clark said about holding a hatch and being in the dark and admits that’s what she feels like she’s been doing for so long.

The mention of holding the hatch gives Liz an idea. She pours chemicals on the hatch to the caves and Navarro holds a UV light over it. Different handprints show up, but one stands out. The pinkie and ring finger are missing from it. A matching handprint was discovered on the researchers’ clothes when they were found dead. And the woman who was the victim of domestic abuse in episode one was missing those fingers.

They were asking the wrong question. The question isn’t who killed Annie K, but who knows who killed her.

They visit Beatrice Malee and Blair Hartman (the missing fingers woman), now armed with the right questions. Beatrice reveals that for six years they believed the mine killed Annie but one day while they were mopping the Tsalal floors, they found the hatch that led to the ice caves. That led to the discovery of the star-shaped murder weapon.

As Beatrice is telling the story, the room behind her fills with women.

Beatrice continues with her story, revealing that after discovering the researchers killed Annie K, a large group of well-armed Native American women went into the facility and forced the researchers into a truck. Only Clark escaped by climbing into the cave and holding onto the hatch from underneath.

Beatrice, who claims this is just a story, says that when they arrived at their final destination, the women ordered the men out of the truck and into the freezing cold darkness. They were told to take off their clothes and walk into the darkness.

Beatrice says the men did this to themselves when they dug in “her” home in the ice and when they killed Annie in there. If she wants the men, she could take them. If not, their clothes – folded and carefully placed in piles – would be there for them.

They died, which means she wanted them. “I guess she ate their f**king dreams from the inside out,” says Beatrice.

Again, Beatrice says this is just a story. The close-knit group of women asks what Navarro and Liz are going to do about it. Navarro says a story is just a story, and Liz says those men died from a slab avalanche. Navarro wonders if they left Annie’s tongue there, and Beatrice claims she doesn’t know what Navarro is talking about.

Fast-forward to May 12th and it’s the first long day of the year. Liz is giving her deposition on the ongoing investigation into the disappearance of Hank Prior. She says Otis’s body was found in Hank’s car and that the bullet was from Hank’s gun. The investigators point out she was the one who checked Otis out of The Lighthouse.

They want to know if she finds it odd that Clark died the same way the researchers did, and she agrees it is odd. They also want to know what happened to Navarro. A flashback shows that at some point, Liz went to Navarro’s place and she was gone. She left behind the stuffed polar bear with one eye and her phone. The phone contained a video of Clark admitting to what he and the mining company had been doing.

Liz is asked who leaked the video, which led to the mine shutting down, and she claims to have no idea.

As True Detective: Night Country draws to a close, Liz is asked once again about Evangeline Navarro’s whereabouts. Liz tells the panel that she believes no one will find Evangeline out on the ice.

We see Peter lying in bed with his son and a happy Liz and Leah driving together. The final scene is of Liz at a house we don’t recognize. She walks out onto a deck and sits down. Navarro comes and stands outside with her as, in a voiceover, Liz wraps up her deposition by admitting sightings of Navarro might be true.

”Well, this is Ennis. Nobody ever really leaves.”

• True Detective: Night Country Episode 1 Recap
• True Detective: Night Country Episode 2 Recap
• True Detective: Night Country Episode 3 Recap
• True Detective: Night Country Episode 4 Recap
• True Detective: Night Country Episode 5 Recap
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