In the latest issue of Total Film, Foster and López address the elephant in the room, and voice somewhat conflicting feelings about the connective tissue between Starling and Danvers. “Clarice is all about the ethics,” said Foster. “And she’s quiet and reserved and always doing the right thing, and that is not Danvers. I kind of hope Clarice never got this cynical.”
The case Danvers is investigating involves the bizarrely sudden disappearance of eight scientists from an arctic research station. It’s spooky stuff that brings back the cosmic terror of the first season. According to López:
“There’s popcorn made in front of a movie that they’re watching. And there’s the notebooks that were left mid-sentences, sandwiches that were ready to be eaten. There’s a treadmill still running. And they just vanish into thin air. Nobody understands what happens.”
While Foster doesn’t see much of Starling in Danvers, López views her season of “True Detective” as a natural progression from “Silence of the Lambs.” Sight unseen, it at least makes solid thematic sense.
As López told Total Film:
“[Starling’s] just one of these characters. All the lines of that movie just live in my skull. We know the lines, we know the moments, we know the images. And there’s a direct line, I think … ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ mothered [David Fincher’s serial-killer chiller] ‘Se7en,’ and ‘Se7en’ mothered ‘True Detective.’ And this is the child of ‘True Detective.’ So there’s a direct line. That’s why I went directly to the source. And we’re not shying away from it.”