‘True Detective’: What Is the Meaning of Oranges & How It’s Connected to Navarro?

‘True Detective’ is always filled with hidden clues and meaning, and Season 4 delivered in that aspect. From strange spirals and what seems like hidden clues that point toward the awakening of some strange native deity or demon, one symbol that keeps appearing is an orange; we’re still halfway through the series, and we have no idea what the show might throw at us, but let’s see if we can decipher the meaning of oranges & the color.

Oranges or something orange, is in every important scene

Showrunners and filmmakers often use hidden clues to send certain messages even before the mystery is revealed, and ‘True Detective’ never fails in that aspect. One hidden symbol, besides the obvious spiral, is an orange.

We see orange in the opening credits, peel to be more exact. We see oranges rolling on the road. Annie Kowtok is wearing an orange park in a photo that Liz Danvers has, and we know that Annie’s murder is, besides the disappearance of the scientists, the central mystery of the show.

There’s also Rose Aguineau, who wears an orange parka lined with grey fur on the hood, in the scene where she discovers the bodies of the scientists helped by her deceased husband, Travis.

There’s also the fact that Ennis’ police department has the peculiar color of uniforms; it’s not quite directly orange but it’s not exactly directly brown as well. Ennis as a town has a symbol reminiscent of an orange; there’s also the fact that an orange glow is in every scene; I mean, the emergency exit lights are done in orange color.

I’ve probably missed some pretty important clues as it’s really hard to write them all down, but if you focus, you’re going to notice that pretty much every scene in the show has something orange in it, from clues that go straight to your face to the more subtle ones, like orange decorations in the background and a lamp that Peter Prior has in his home.

Navarro seems most connected to oranges

Episode 3 just released, and one important scene leads us to believe that Navarro is most of all connected to the oranges. At the start of the episode, we see older Prior leading the manhunt for Clark, the missing Tsalal scientist who wasn’t a part of the frozen pile of bodies.

Navarro is at the scene, and she can see Hank Prior leading his “hillbilly” buddies to be part of the manhunt as well; one of his buddies drops a backpack filled with oranges as they splatter across the ice. Navarro picks up one of the oranges and plays with it for a second. She ventures alone into the ice fields and throws the orange in front of herself, expecting the orange to be gone forever at that point, but the orange returns just like somebody is playing catch with Navarro; the orange gently rolls back to her feet before she has a vision of a small child running across the ice fields. Navarro falls down, hits her head, and briefly loses consciousness.

We can see that she has some kind of vision that involves a child and what seems to appear to be a burned-down truck. There has to be something connected to the oranges that are related specifically to Navarro and something that happened in her past since visions don’t just happen to otherwise healthy adult individuals out of the blue. There has to be a reason why Navarro picked up the orange in the first place, considering that she never planned on eating it.

The color blue also is a prominent one

Except for the orange color, the blue color also appears prominently but not to the extent of orange. A lot of important things in the show are pale blue or teal. For example, Annie Kowtok had blue highlights, and Navarro’s sister has blue hair as well. The most obvious way to resolve this mystery, however, is that blue represents the water and ice, but I doubt that the show would be as straightforward as that.

So what could the color mean?

We’re still a long way from the finale of ‘True Detective: Night Country,’ but a couple of theories might point in the direction of the Orange color representing rust, corruption, pollution, or something else entirely. It might also represent fire, something that means life and death in Ennis’ glacial conditions.

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