‘True Detective’: Who Is Annie Kowtok & How Is She Connected To Tsalal Station Disappearances?

‘True Detective’ Season 4 leads to a chilling location in the fictional town of Ennis, Alaska. There’s not much there except for ice, night, cold, fishing, mining, and a case of strange disappearances and murder years old that has shocked the entire community. When one cryptic clue is found at the scene of the most recent crime, Liz Danvers and Evangeline Navarro are quick to make the connection. Annie Kowtok was killed some time ago, and yet one piece of evidence found at the scene indicates that the two crimes are connected. Let’s see who Annie Kowtok is and how she’s connected to eight men who disappeared.

What happened to the men at the Tsalal station?

The first episode of ‘True Detective’ season 4 was just released, and the case that this season will be dealing with is the disappearance of eight researchers from the nearby Tsalal research station. When Liz Danvers arrives at the scene of the disappearance, everything seems undisturbed and like the men have just gone to take a break or something.

But, upon further inspection, Liz notices that the contents of the sandwich on the table are far too old for the disappearance to be recent; the men have been missing for at least 48 hours, judging by the state of the mayonnaise. What they also find is a human tongue, one scarred by the constant motion of working on the fishing nets, which leads the detectives on the case to believe that the person whose tongue they have found is a local, someone from the native population of Ennis since they are the only ones that work on the nets this way.

Things get complicated when Annie Kowtok is mentioned

It’s only later that we learn about Evangeline Navarro and her obsession with an old cold case related to the girl named Annie Kowtok. She was a protester a girl with a spirit that meddled with the wrong people. She disturbed some pretty powerful spirits around the city, those involved with the mining company that basically runs the town.

What sets Annie’s murder from the rest of the crimes in town is the fact that she was stabbed by unidentified murder weapons dozens of times, her tongue has been cut off, and the crime has never been solved. For whatever reason, Evangeline has gotten emotionally connected to the case, and as soon as she learns that a tongue has been found in the Tsalal station, she vehemently insists that the two crimes are connected since the tongue has to be Annie’s.

Ever since Annie’s case remained unsolved, Evangeline started dealing with cases that involved abuse against women, and she dealt with them quite harshly.

So, how are the two crimes connected?

It’s quite possible that the same person, or persons, are behind both cases of murder, as by the end of the episode, Tsalal’s researchers will be found frozen solid in the snow. It’s possible that researchers have discovered damning evidence in the ice cores that the mining company is impacting the environment of Alaska in a negative way too severely, so the mining company got rid of them in the same way that they got rid of Annie.

It’s also quite possible that someone at the Tsalal station murdered Annie for whatever reason, both because of the protesting or because the two were romantically involved in some way.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments below!