Warning! Contains major spoilers for True Detective season 4.

has a hidden connection with a hit Mike Flanagan series, which might offer the answer to the show's biggest mystery. Serving as the fourth installment of the HBO series, presents a compelling hook in its opening episode, where it highlights how a group of researchers has suddenly disappeared. Although the episode's end reveals that the researchers were buried in ice by something or someone, the show's biggest mystery remains unsolved: ?

Since it is 's central overarching mystery, many theories surrounding it have already emerged. While some connect it with the show season 1, others point toward Alaskan myths and climate change themes.

Only time will tell what happened to the researchers at Tsalal, but one connection between and a might have some answers.

The Fall Of The House Of Usher & True Detective: Night Country Draw References To An Edgar Allan Poe Novel

's central mystery revolves around a group of missing scientists who worked at an Alaskan research facility called TSALAL. Tsalal is also the name of a remote island in Edgar Allan Poe's , where the titular character, Arthur Gordon Pym, and his fellow explorers arrive during their expedition. Although Mike Flanagan's does not directly adapt , it subtly refers to the book and the island by revealing that Mike Hamill's Gordon Pym had been on a bizarre global expedition and explored obscure parts of the world.

True Detective: Night Country's Tsalal Reference Might Answer What Happened To The Researchers

Edgar Allan Poe's dabbles with themes of survival, isolation, and intercultural conflicts. The story also explores cosmic ideas surrounding humanity's fear of the unknown and, in many ways, serves as an allegory for moral degradation in the name of exploration. While Mike Flanagan's only brushes over the Edgar Allan Poe tale to highlight how Pym became so calloused, seems to be presenting a closer reimagining of the novel's ideas.

In 's Tsalal arc, the central explorers get ambushed by the indigenous people of Tsalal, and many of them even get murdered.

The story uses this clash between the explorers and the locals as a narrative device to highlight the darker aspects of the explorers' unchecked quest for discovery. Something similar seems to be happening in . The researchers at Tsalal were looking for the "" but likely took their scientific endeavors a little too far and gradually descended into a moral quicksand.

As the researchers did more and more immoral things in the name of scientific exploration, the locals of Ennis grew suspicious of their activities. They were also likely responsible for Annie K's murder, which further encouraged the suspicious locals to kill them. Another intriguing connection between Poe's works and the show is that the cry of "Tekeli-li," uttered by the Tsalal locals in , is the Elder Things' primary language in Lovecraft's . Hastur also lets out the same cry in August Derleth's Yellow Mythos from , which links to 's Yellow King cult.