‘True Detective’: Here’s Who Left Annie’s Tounge at the Tsalal Station

‘True Detective’ Season 4 finally came to an end, and we got the answer to most mysteries that entertained us over the course of the six episodes. We found out what happened to Annie Kowtok and the Tsalal men, and how the two cases were connected in the first place. One thing however that remained the mystery is Annie’s tongue – the clue which pointed that the two cases were connected in the first place. After Navarro and Danvers visited Bee & Hartman, Navarro asked Bee about Annie’s tongue and Bee denied leaving the tongue there, so who did it?

The mystery of Annie’s tongue

In the first episode, we learn about the cruel murder of Annie Kowtok that took place six or seven years ago in Ennis. She was beaten and stabbed 32 times and her tongue was missing. Despite Prior moving her body out of the ice cave, her body was recovered but her tongue was missing. Whoever killed her had it, or so the investigators thought.

The tongue resurfaced numerous years later when Danvers went to investigate the disappearance of Tsalal men, they sent it to Anchorage for DNA testing, and the result was a positive match with the DNA profile of Annie Kowtok. The tongue was in surprisingly good condition, indicating that it was frozen to at least some degree and Navarro and Danvers assumed that the same killer who killed Annie was responsible for what happened to Tsalal men.

The tongue was left by “her” as a clue

In the last episode, Clark came clean regarding what happened to Annie. Annie discovered what Tsalal men were actually doing, they were using the pollution from the mines to soften the permafrost and with this method, they managed to uncover the organism that had the capacity to slow down aging and regenerate pretty quickly, but it came at a cost of the population of Ennis getting sick with cancers and the number of stillbirths rising of the charts.

When Annie discovered this she destroyed years and years of research in a span of a few seconds, Lund discovered her first and proceeded to beat her savagely in the heat of the moment until the rest of the Tsalal men joined in on the onslaught. After Annie was stabbed 32 times with the drilling equipment, Clark proceeded to choke her to death. Clark denied having anything to do with her tongue, however.

After Clark choked her, they contacted Silver Sky Mine, and Hank prior was sent to transfer the body to a different location. Hank could easily remove her tongue yes. But he had no motive to do so. Removing her tongue would tamper with the body even further and would make it easier to piece together what actually happened. He also had no motive to do this, at the start of the season we thought that Hank was a shitty cop because he was sexist or racist, but as it turned out he did it not because of hatred, but because of greed. He was bribed by the mine and didn’t kill or tamper with Annie’s body out of hatred, leaving no motive to cut out her tongue.

Besides, how would Hank be able to leave the tongue at Tsalal at just the right moment?

The tongue was most likely left at the station by the mysterious entity that everyone refers to as “her,” and whose skeleton Danvers & Navarro found in the ice cave.

The biggest clue that led me to this conclusion was the thing that Danvers saw while she was eating an orange in the cafeteria. At one point, orange rolls to her feet and she bends down underneath the table to pick it up and notices a tongue-shaped patch of fresh ice.

She has a flashback regarding picking up Annie’s tongue from that exact location just 2 weeks prior. As soon as Danvers lights up the patch of ice the ice spreads in her direction in unusual ways. In that moment Navarro shows up in the room and calls to her to continue the questioning of Clark and Danvers is so startled she hits her head on the bottom side of the table.

‘Her’ guided the investigation all this time

It’s clear that the mysterious godlike entity guided the investigation all this time. Every time Danvers and Navarro needed a break in the case they would come upon it in mysterious ways. The spiral is a powerful symbol used throughout the show as well as oranges, which is something associated with Navarro personally as she mentions on one occasion how her mom liked oranges and how she liked peeling them in one single stripe. The Tsalal disappearance was framed as having an earthly explanation but it’s obvious that a supernatural hand was guiding Navarro and Danvers the entire time.

Spirals and oranges were present every time Navarro and Danvers came upon an important clue and everything time something bad was about to go down.

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