Recap pages are Spoilers Off per policy and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned
Julia Navarro is cremated. Evangeline Navarro is given an urn with her sister's ashes and hugs it tightly.The Lighthouse. Danvers is given ten minutes to talk to Otis, who is struggling with withdrawal symptoms. She questions him about Raymond Clark (he was crazy and said "she's awake" a lot) and the day he got hurt (there was a blizzard, a cave-in, and he woke up in the hospital). She tells him he will take her and Navarro to the ice caves at Bear Creek. He just needs her to help him (get him some drugs). She refuses.
The Priors' home. Peter Prior is in the kitchen when Kayla drops a packed bag at his feet. She tells him to not come home that night. He protests but she makes it clear it is not up for discussion.
Navarro and Danvers go to the ice caves, but the ice caves are located in Silver Sky property. Worse, the entrance is blocked.
Speaking of the mining operation, there is a protest. Leah is there with her girlfriend Sheri, holding up signs and chanting with the rest of the crowd. Security guards and protestors clash, so troopers (including Navarro) in riot gear are sent in. Things get violent, with Navarro having a bottle thrown at her helmeted head. Amid the mess of people fighting, she sees Annie K for a minute. Leah is grabbed by an overzealous trooper who strikes her with his baton. Sheri gets scared and abandons Leah to get beaten some more. It takes Navarro's intervention and her fists to make him stop.
At the station, Danvers gets a call from Connelly. Mining company owner Kate McKittrick is furious and wants the three of them to meet. Navarro calls to tell Danvers about Leah. Navarro is driving Leah (who has an ice pack to the head) away. Leah wants to go home, but Danvers has ordered Navarro to take Leah to the station and arrest her.
Speaking of the station Peter has been following the money. To put it in simple terms: the mine was bankrolling the "independent" company measuring the operation's pollution levels and producing false results that allowed it to remain in operations despite how it harms the community.
While Leah is hanging out in her cell, Peter brings her some vending machine snacks. She tells him that Kayla has been crying and even brings up what made Kayla fall in love with Peter back in school: a game where he deliberately messed up, so that another kid whose dad had suffered a stroke got the chance to score. Kayla just wants her old Peter back.
The mining company HQ. A rather tense meeting takes place between Connelly, mining company owner Kate McKittrick and Danvers. Danvers denies any responsibility for the violence at the protest, since that was state's jurisdiction. Kate shows footage of Danvers and Navarro approaching the ice caves i.e. trespassing. Danvers points out the conflict of interest in Silver Sky funding the station that measures its contamination levels. According to the Anchorage authorities the Tsalal scientists's deaths were not a murder, but rather they froze to death due to a "slab avalanche", completely contradicting the theory that they died before freezing. Danvers gets off some comebacks ("I'm sorry Bill [Kate's husband] is such a terrible lay. You have my sympathies!"), but Kate leaves Connelly alone with Danvers makes it clear to Danvers that he knows about what really happened when they went to the Wheeler home and the Tsalal case is closed.
Hank meets up with Kate McKittrick at her car, where they chat. Their conversation reveals that Hank has been in Silver Sky's pocket in exchange for money and a promise to be made chief, which didn't happen because Connelly appointed Danvers to Ennis. Kate promises to make him chief. All he has to do now is to make sure Otis Heiss disappears because no one is going to miss some junkie. Hank claims he is not a killer, so Kate makes it clear that she is not telling him to kill Otis.
Navarro is at the laundromat, hallucinating for a second a lock of long black hair in the washing machine. Just then, Qavvik arrives accompanied by someone named Kenny. He has the rock with the spiral that she lost last episode. According to his grandpa, hunters left rock as a warning to others in places where the ice could swallow them whole. But they could get in the underground cave system by getting to the highest point and cracking their way in. She goes to the station to tell Danvers, but the latter tells Navarro that Connelly knows all about what happened at Wheeler's home and that the case is closed. An angry Navarro tells Danvers that she has been carrying Annie's murder all these years, and it is now Danvers's turn. She lets out Leah.
Somewhere along the frozen sea. Rose Aguineau cracks the surface so Navarro can pour Julia's ashes into the sea. But once again she hears a voice calling her and a vision, and she walks out where the ice cracks under her feet. Only Rose calling out to her and telling her to lie down stops her from sharing Julia's fate.
Danvers goes to the Priors' home to talk to Leah, who is on the bathtub. Danvers notices Leah's bruises and Leah brings up that there have been nine stillbirths in the community in the last three months alone. Danvers leaves and notices Hank is following her. First she stops by the cemetery to see a whole lot of tiny coffins awaiting burial, then by the station. In her office, she interrogates Peter to find out who leaked info to Connelly. It turns out that Peter did enough digging to confirm that the left-handed William Wheeler did not kill himself. On top of that, the password to his work laptop was so easy to guess that Hank was able to access all the information and tell on Danvers. She gives him a key to a shed in her yard so he can stay there instead of at his dad's. Learning of his father's actions leaves Peter so broken that when Hank tries to chat, Peter responds furiously.
Danvers bribes Otis with heroin so he will guide her and Navarro to the ice caves. At her house, Otis gets busy smoking while Danvers calls Navarro (at the moment, cuddling with Qavvik on his bed) and tells her to come over. On her way, Navarro sees a child crossing the street with her mom, who does the pointing thing she has seen in her visions.
Danvers hears knocking and opens the door thinking it is Navarro. But I is Hank, claiming Connelly ordered him to take Otis in on an outstanding warrant. Danvers sees right through this and tries to call Connelly, but he slaps away her phone. Otis tries to run, but Han shoots and kills him. He then points the gun at Danvers and blames her for Peter hating him.
Except Peter heard the gunshot from the shed and he shows up, pointing his gun at his father. Hank claims that he did not kill Annie, he just moved her body and "blood is blood". Before Hank can kill Danvers, Peter is forced to shoot his father. Just then Navarro (who on the way, sees a child pointing at her like other ghosts have) shows up, finding two dead bodies and Danvers and Peter in full Heroic BSoD mode. Navarro calmly lays out a plan to make Hank's death look like an accident. Peter is to clean up and take the bodies to Rose Aguineau, with explicit instructions to say to her, "Take me to Julia". The last scene is Danvers and Navarro going to the ice caves.
Tropes present in this episode:
- Armor-Piercing Question: Fittingly, since she keeps telling people to "ask the right question," Danvers is on the receiving end of one of these when Prior finally pulls on the thread of the Wheeler crime scene.Prior: Did you know Wheeler was left-handed?
- Broken Pedestal: Peter learns that Hank used his computer to get the truth about the Wheeler case and passed it to Connolly.
- Cluster F-Bomb: Danvers, known for her temper, tries to be professional while meeting with Connelly and Kate. But when Danvers hears that the official version of the scientists's deaths was that they froze to death due to a "weather event", she responds with "Fuck you and your fucking weather event."
- Dirty Coward: Sheri, Leah's girlfriend. They both attend the protest against the Silver Sky mining operation. The protest turns violent, and a trooper starts beating Leah. She looks up and calls out to her girlfriend, who runs off and leaves her helpless.
- Evil, Inc.: The Silver Sky mining operation. In addition to being Toxic, Inc. (there have been nine stillbirths in the community in three months), they were funding the "independent" research that verified the pollution levels were at acceptable levels. And their owner has Hank Prior on payroll to block the investigation on Annie Kowtok's murder.
- The Killer Was Left-Handed: How Peter figured out the Wheeler case was staged to look like a suicide, since the bullet hole was on the right side of Wheeler's head.
- Never Suicide: The truth of the Wheeler case is fully revealed. Danvers and Navarro had already gone to his home multiple times for domestic violence complaints, and on the last time they found he'd finally beaten his girlfriend to death. They shot him and made it look like a suicide.
- The Password Is Always "Swordfish": Danvers interrogates Peter Prior to figure out how Connelly figured out what happened in the Wheeler case. He denies saying anything to the captain. She asks if his laptop's password is his birthday, which he denies, as he used his son's. This allowed Hank to access incriminating info.
- Police Brutality: The protest gets violent and the state troopers intervene. One of them strikes the teenaged Leah. Navarro screams at him that Leah is just a kid, but he continues until Navarro punches him.
- The Reveal:
- The stones with the spiral are an indicator left to warn hunters to stay away from areas where they could fall through the ice and into the "night country".
- The Wheeler case not only ended with Danvers and Navarro shooting him after he killed his girlfriend, but they also altered and destroyed the evidence to make it look like a Murder-Suicide.
- Spotting the Thread: When looking into the files of the Wheeler case, Peter notices the crime scene pictures show the dead woman's birthmark above her right brow. Her yearbook picture shows it was above her left brow. He realizes the pictures have been flipped, plus the forensic report supposedly got lost to a flood.
- Trauma Conga Line: Peter Prior. His wife Kayla has his bag packed and kicks him out of their home. He ends up staying at his dad's. Shortly after they have a Pet the Dog moment, he learns that Hank hacked Peter's work laptop to collect incriminating information on Danvers. At her place, he sees Hank has killed Otis and is holding Danvers at gunpoint. Despite Danvers begging him to "think", Peter is forced to kill his father.
- Wham Episode:
- Hank Prior is revealed to be in the pocket of Kate McKittrick and the mining operation in exchange for money and being elected chief of police, and to have revealed to Connelly the truth about Wheeler's case. He was the one who moved Annie Kowtok's body from the caves.
- Before Otis Heiss can take Danvers and Navarro to the ice caves, Hank shows up and kills Otis. Peter shoots his father before he can shoot Danvers.
