True Detective Season 4: Annie K.’s Tongue, Explained

True Detective Season 4, Night Country, supplies open-ended answers to some of its biggest mysteries – including the truth about Annie Kowtok’s severed tongue. We’ve explained True Detective Season 4’s rational and supernatural accounts of what happened to Annie K.’s tongue below.

Related: True Detective Season 4 Finale’s Ending, Explained

True Detective Season 4: Annie K.’s Tongue, Explained

True Detective: Night Country is intentionally ambiguous about the paranormal’s role in proceedings. As showrunner Issa López put it in a recent Variety interview, “True Detective: Night Country both believes in the supernatural and believes that there is a rational explanation in the everyday world for every single event that you see.” Annie K.’s tongue is a prime example of this. In True Detective Season 4’s finale, it’s equally plausible that human and not-so-human forces are responsible for Annie’s tongue inexplicably turning up at Tsalal Arctic Research Station six years after her murder. Here’s how the two explanations shake out:

What Happened to Annie K.’s Tongue – The Rational Explanation

When Chief Danvers and Detective Navarro interrogate Tsalal scientist (and Annie’s boyfriend) Raymond Clark in True Detective Season 4’s finale, he denies that he or any of his co-workers cut out Annie’s tongue during or after her murder. Instead, he suggests that agents of Tsalal’s financial backer, Silver Sky, did this while covering up the crime. In effect, Raymond is blaming crooked cop Hank Prior, who admitted to moving Annie’s body in the previous episode.

So, did Hank really defile Annie’s corpse? Yes, says actor John Hawkes, who told GQ his character carried out this heinous act to make Annie’s murder look like an anti-activist killing. “What motivates [Hank] to carry out the task of cutting out Annie’s tongue, it wasn’t something he took pride in but needed to be done to send the message,” Hawkes said. López corroborated Hawkes’ claims in a subsequent interview with Slate, while also admitting she didn’t originally plan on explicitly confirming Hank’s involvement. Regardless, so far, so rational.

But things get a bit murkier regarding exactly how Annie K.’s tongue wound up back at Tsalal. If Hank dumped the mutilated organ alongside Annie’s body miles away from Tsalal, why was it back at the station the night the scientists vanished? Well, according to López, if you subscribe to a more grounded reading of Night Country, Tsalal cleaner Bee and her accomplices brought Annie’s tongue with them when they stormed the station.

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“The women, find [Annie’s body],” she told Slate. “They cannot take the body. They cannot protect this woman that has been so abused so horribly, and it’s one of them. The one thing they can do is take her tongue, and keep it in a gesture of kindness for their comrade. And Danvers says in Episode 2, ‘The tongue had some unusual damage, could be from freezing.’ So, in this scenario, the women preserve the tongue, and when they take the station, they leave it there as a sign that the time of changing the story that we tell has come.”

“And then when Navarro, in Episode 6, asks Bee, ‘What happened to the tongue? Did you put it there?’ Bee turns to her and says, ‘That’s not part of her story,'” López continued. “But look carefully at [Bee actor L’xeis Diane Benson’s] performance. You can read it both ways. It’s interesting.”

So, the short, non-supernatural version of events? Hank cut out Annie K.’s tongue, and the indigenous women of Ennis, Alaska found it, preserved it, and ultimately took it back to Tsalal.

What Happened to Annie K.’s Tongue – The Supernatural Explanation

The supernatural explanation for what happened to Annie K.’s tongue in True Detective Season 4 is decidedly simpler than its mundane counterpart. Essentially, it boils down to Annie’s vengeful spirit depositing the tongue at Tsalal during the raid on the station. López detailed this decidedly spookier take on Night Country‘s big mystery in her Variety interview.

Related: True Detective Season 4: What Is the Night Country, Explained

“The other version of events is: Annie is left there, and the tongue is cut and the tongue disappears into thin air,” she said. “And it is Annie who comes with the women into the station, like she’s awake. Clark says, ‘I knew she was coming.’ Annie does visit the station with the women, and leaves her own tongue, because she knows this is how it starts – that she can finally tell her story.”

All six episodes of True Detective: Night Country are currently streaming on HBO and Max.