Warning: This publish accommodates spoilers for episode 2 of True Detective: Night Country.

The thriller on the coronary heart of True Detective: Night Country is beginning to warmth up. Literally.

After arriving on the web site the place the lacking Tsalal Arctic Research Center scientists had been discovered frozen right into a grotesque tableau within the season premiere, Ennis Police Chief Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster) decides to have the mass of our bodies transported to the city ice rink to slowly thaw. But not earlier than an officer haphazardly snaps off one of many scientist’s palms, prompting a response that alerts everybody round that he is by some means nonetheless alive.

Night Country‘s second episode facilities on Danvers and state trooper Evangeline Navarro’s (Kali Reis) seek for a connection between Annie Okay (Nivi Pedersen), an area Indigenous girl who was murdered six years earlier, and Tsalal paleomicrobiologist Raymond Clark (Owen McDonnell), the mysteriously convulsing scientist from the season’s chilly open. In the premiere, Danvers found that Clark had been photographed carrying what seemed to be a pink parka that after belonged to Annie Okay. And after studying this episode that he additionally had a spiral tattoo on his chest that matched each the design drawn on the surviving scientist’s brow and a tattoo on Annie K’s again, it appears clear they’re onto one thing.

Some good detective work by Navarro leads her to the conclusion that Annie Okay and Clark had been apparently concerned in some stage of romantic relationship, which they saved secret by rendezvousing in an outdated RV parked at a rundown trailer park referred to as the Nook. When Danvers and Navarro go to research the trailer, they uncover Annie K’s telephone inside alongside a multitude of animal bones, a group of creepy yarn sculptures, a shrine of photographs, and—you guessed it—one other portray of that very same crooked spiral.

Read extra: Breaking Down the True Detective: Night Country Premiere—And Its Possible Supernatural Twist

What’s the cope with the True Detective spiral?

Seasoned followers of True Detective will keep in mind the spiral from the collection’ first season, by which it grew to become referred to as a logo of the sadistic cult on the heart of the neo-noir crime saga.

Detectives Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) and Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) initially encountered the spiral painted on the lifeless physique of Dora Lange, whose homicide set in movement their investigation right into a string of ritualistic killings within the Louisiana bayou. It then continued to crop up in numerous varieties all through the season, each as a literal signal of the cult and a extra overarching motif representing the collection’ occult influences. (The Tuttle United firm name-dropped in Night Country because the company funding Tsalal additionally appears to be a reference to the sinister Tuttle household behind Season 1’s cult.)

While we nonetheless do not know what the spiral means within the context of Night Country, Foster says she believes all of the True Detective tales are interconnected ultimately. “Whether it’s the Louisiana bayou or the big city of Los Angeles or the Ozarks or northern Alaska, how these extreme settings affect the psyches of the detectives is very important,” she informed TIME. “There’s an eerie connection between these places and the detectives’ journeys as human beings.”

Are there different references to True Detective Season 1 in Night Country?

Naturally, the spiral is not Night Country‘s solely callback to True Detective’s authentic entry.

When Rust and Marty study Dora Lange’s diary within the second episode of Season 1, they discover mentions of the “Yellow King”—a title they ultimately uncover refers to a seemingly legendary determine worshipped by the boys answerable for killing Dora and an untold variety of different girls and youngsters. There are additionally a number of strains in Dora’s diary pulled immediately from Robert W. Chambers’ 1895 anthology The King in Yellow, by which a fictional play by the identical identify casts an ominous shadow over the ten brief tales that make up the gathering of “weird fiction.”

In the e book, the play is alleged to lure readers in with an strange first act earlier than driving them mad with a second act that reveals insufferable truths concerning the universe. Nods to the play seem all through the anthology, however it options most prominently within the assortment’s debut story, a story titled “The Repairer of Reputations” in which an unreliable narrator named Hildred Castaigne reads The King in Yellow while recovering from a head injury in a mental asylum.

Those familiar with this literary lore may have noticed that the Night Country premiere opens with an epigraph attributed to Hildred Castaigne: “For we have no idea what beasts the night time desires when its hours develop too lengthy for even God to be awake.”

However, that quote never actually appears in Chambers’ work. Instead, Season 4 showrunner Issa López said she made it up to include another “little wink” to Season 1 for the fans. “I used to be searching for the proper quote to speak concerning the issues that conceal at the hours of darkness and I could not discover it,” she told Business Insider. “So I wrote it.”