True Detective: Night Country showrunner Issa López recalls “awfully close” fan theories making her nervous over the course of the show’s six episodes. After first deputing in 2014, Nic Pizzolatto’s hit crime anthology series returned for season 4 earlier this year, following two detectives, played by Jodie Foster and Kali Reis, as they investigate the deaths of a group of researchers in Alaska. The True Detective: Night Country reviews were generally positive from critics, with praise directed at the season’s performances and twisting central mystery.

During THR’s TV Producer Roundtable, López reflects on the experience of watching audiences attempt to solve True Detective: Night Country’s mystery.

The showrunner explains that she underestimated just how deeply some viewers would dive into each episode, and some fan theories ended up being very close to the truth. Check out López’s full comment below:

“You write a whodunit and you sprinkle clues carefully, so hopefully no one is going to put it together, but when their answer comes they will look back and go like, ‘Oh, it was right there.’ You want that yummy experience of ‘I almost had it.’

“What I was not expecting is the fact that people obsess. True Detective is a beloved franchise, number one, and number two, HBO delivers episodes one a week. At the beginning I was very upset because I wanted people to experience the whole six [episodes]. And then I really came to love the fact that people would watch one episode and think about it and obsess about it and talk to other people and go on social media and blog about it…

‘One of them would find something and another would find something else and they would piece together things that they were not supposed to piece together because they would watch the episode three and four times. So my plan of being super smart and secretive about my very ingenious things that you didn’t really see didn’t happen. People were catching every little clue I left.

“They still didn’t put the whole mystery together at the end, but some people got awfully, awfully close. For six weeks I was biting my nails because I thought that it was going to be all over everywhere who the killer was.”

True Detective Season 4’s Ending Explained

What Happened To The Tsalal Researchers?

The True Detective: Night Country ending leaves some threads hanging, but the final episode does finally reveal what happened to the scientists at the Tsalal research facility, and what happened to Annie K. The two events are, of course, linked, and it’s revealed that Annie discovered the underground lab at the research station. Annie, presumably, discovered evidence that Silver Sky mine was polluting Ennis’ water, which helped soften the permafrost, thus aiding the scientists’ research.

With Annie threatening to expose the mine and the lab, the scientists banded together to kill her. Retribution then found its way to the scientists, however, as employees at a crab factory put the pieces together about Annie K’s death. The two female employees gathered a gang of women and stormed the research station, forcing the scientists out onto the frigid tundra and stripping them of their clothes.

López leaves the storylines of some True Detective: Night Country characters open-ended, like Navarro’s, but the Annie K and Tsalal murders are solved fairly definitively. As she explains above, there are clues scattered throughout the earlier episodes about what really happened, but it’s not until the finale that the truth is finally revealed. With López now set to return to helm True Detective season 5, it’s clear she’ll be thinking hard about what information to reveal to audiences and when.