Night Country, the fourth season of HBO’s acclaimed dark mystery anthology series True Detective, came to a close this weekend – but left some viewers still seeking answers. Showrunner Issa López, however, is keeping her cards close to her chest. The sixth and final episode of the Alaska-set series featured two interlinked cases – the disappearance of a local woman, Annie K, years earlier, and the gruesome mass death of a team of scientists, who were found frozen together in a horrific “corpsicle”.

The finale reveals that the two cases were intimately linked – the scientists were Annie’s murderers, and Annie’s community killed them in an act of revenge. In the end, detectives Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) and Evangeline Navarro (Kali Reis) close the case without making any arrests – or without figuring how one grisly piece of evidence – Annie’s severed tongue – made its way to the scientist’s installation.

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, López says that not revealing where that clue came from “was a fight, because so many people working with me were like, ‘No, really? You’re not going to give that to us?’ And you know, in life, you don’t always get all the answers. Some of them are for you to figure out. I’m not going to do all the homework on my own for you.” Could the explanation be supernatural? The series has often hinted at such things, especially in its cosmic horror-tinged first season, while refraining to confirm it; López is similarly taciturn, but she leans towards the paranormal. “I’m Team Navarro, so I absolutely believe the supernatural [is real]. There’s the dark, the atmosphere, Alaska itself, the cultural connections, the Indigenous people, and the idea that the land does not belong to us, we belong to the land.” Navarro’s fate is left ambiguous as well – she disappears after walking out onto the ice. López is staying mum on that one, too, as she tells Deadline: “I’m not saying that she’s alive, and I’m certainly not saying that she’s dead. I very carefully crafted this as an ink blot test for you to discover yourself as an audience member.”

How Were the Ratings for ‘True Detective: Night Country’?

The reviews for the icy fourth season of True Detective may not have been as strong as they were for the show’s inaugural outing with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, but viewers didn’t seem to mind. As reported by Deadline, Night Country is the most-viewed season of the series to date, averaging 12.7 million cross-platform viewers per episode. The finale, which was released yesterday, attracted 3.2 cross-platform viewers, a season high. The finale performed 55% higher than last season’s finale, which featured Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff as a pair of investigators over a decades-spanning missing-persons case. It has been the top title on Max since its debut last month, which bodes well for a fifth season of the anthology series.

All six episodes of True Detective: Night Country are now streaming on Max. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates, and watch the trailer for Night Country below.