True Detective: Night Country Episode 4 delivers a brutal blow to Alaska State Trooper Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis). Since the fourth season of HBO‘s True Detective premiered last month, we’ve known that the thing Navarro prizes most in life is her younger sister Julia (Aka Niviâna). Navarro will do anything for Julia, including put her in the Lighthouse, what she hopes will be a safe space for the young woman to battle her mental health demons.
**Spoilers for True Detective: Night Country Episode 4, now streaming on Max**
However, about mid-way through True Detective: Night Country Episode 4, Evangeline gets the call that her sister simply walked out of the Lighthouse and into the bleak arctic landscape. Julia took off her warm clothes and walked herself into the sea, where she drowned.
Navarro gets this news while driving fellow cop Peter Prior (Finn Bennet) home, but when he asks if anything’s wrong, she lies. She drops off Prior and then promptly goes on a bit of a rampage. First, she rushes to the Lighthouse where she tears up the waiting room, coming close to threatening an unwitting (and unhelpful) employee. When that doesn’t help heal her hurt, she throws herself into a fight with the same domestic abuser she cuffed all the way back in her first scene of the series. Navarro instigates a brawl that she knows she will lose because now the guy’s got the backup of his own shitty friends.
“That moment, that’s when Navarro realized that Julia was the only thing keeping her together and that was the only thing she had to fight for,” True Detective: Night Country star Kali Reis told Decider back in December 2023. “She just lost everything because Julia was everything. Because if it wasn’t for Julia, I don’t even think Navarro would be in law enforcement. She’s joined the military, got along, tried to hold it together. Julia is the main reason to keep her shit together.”
“As soon as she heard that, her world collapsed. And what does she know better than to act out? She needs to get that energy out.”
Reis confirmed to Decider that Navarro did “to kill that man behind the desk,” but that she found a better mark to take out her rage.
“Who else could she take it out on now? She saw him. She had to pick a fight to feel the pain that she knows Julia was going through an entire life,” Reis said. “I mean, she probably could have went up there and ran him over, but she didn’t want to feel that she wanted to feel pain.”
Kali Reis also revealed to Decider that what deepened the relationship between Evangeline and Julia was the closeness she shared with co-star Aka Niviâna.
“The relationship with Aka, where she’s like my little sister — like real little sister — was immediate,” Reis said. “There’s a bond that Indigenous people, native people, no matter where we are in the world, we find each other. We have that just that energy between us because we understand community, we understand family, and how close we are to our families and our culture and our beliefs.”
“We immediately gravitated towards each other. I mean, this is her first acting job — to be on this entire huge production! And then her part was so, so heavy and really deep.”
Reis revealed that she went out of her way to make sure Niviâna “was supported through everything that we were doing because it was really tough for her.”
“I have a natural protective thing, especially with younger girls. So we were like, ‘That is my little sister.”
In the end, the connection that Reis and Niviâna shared off-screen served to make Navarro’s loss all the more devastating for True Detective fans.
If you or someone you know are experiencing suicidal thoughts, call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at 988.