True Detective: Night Country: What are dredges? What is a dredge?

The latest episode of True Detective: Night Country, "Part 4," ends with lead characters Kim Danvers and Evangeline Navarro heading to "the dredges" outside the town of Ennis, Alaska to track down a person of interest related to the deaths of several scientists at the Tsalal Arctic Research Station. The dredges don't work anymore, but apparently back when they were in operation, they were amazing.

But what exactly is a dredge? Well, civilizations have been dredges rivers, lakes, and other waterways for milennia. Essentially, dredging is the process of removing earth from a waterlogged environment. This can be done for all kinds of reasons, whether to create canals or harbors, create new pieces of land elsewhere, or to harvest gold, fish or anything else people think might be in the wet sediment. The machine that does the dredging is called a dredger.

Apparently, at one point, Ennis had a bunch of dredgers at work, probably out on the ocean not far from shore; we don't know why the waterbed was being dredged, but it sounds like the dredgers haven't worked for a while. And the dredgers are still out there on the frozen ocean, providing convenient places to squat for potential suspects. Danvers and Navarro don't find who they're looking for — Raymond Clark, the only surviving scientist from the incident at Tsalal — but they do find a creepy drifter who tells them that Clark is hiding out in "the night country," which is almost as good.

True Detective: Night Country number of episodes

True Detective: Night Country only has six episodes total. We've already seen four, so there are only two left.

This is the fourth season of True Detective, and the only one to get its own special subtitle. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 all had eight episodes apiece. They're cutting back a bit this season. Hopefully that won't hurt the series when it's time to roll credits on the finale in a couple of weeks.

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