Beforeigners Season 1 Review: A Thrilling, Thoughtful Romp
HBO’s first Norwegian series, Beforeigners, considers how a country might fare if travelers from the past began arriving in the present by the thousands.
Picture goats living in the elevators of modern high-rise apartment buildings, Vikings swilling mead inside clubs pulsing with electronic dance music, and a shaman eating potato chips on the side of the highway.
These visual gags are inherently funny, but they’re also imbued with a deeper sense of meaning — a Viking warrior delivering food by bicycle is also a refugee trying to assimilate into a new culture.
In that sense, the show’s high-concept premise also functions as a metaphor for the European migrant crisis.
There are intake centers where newly-arrived refugees are held in quarantine and children who come without parents to a place where no one speaks their language.
It’s a show full of camp and satire, but one that also explores the trauma of being plucked from one reality and landing in another.
The story at the heart of Beforeigners is a classic murder mystery, with a veteran detective and a rookie cop investigating the death of a woman who washes up on the shore.
The investigation darts playfully between genres — it might feel like a tense conspiracy thriller in one scene, and a campy buddy comedy in the next — but these tonal shifts make sense, given that that the list of suspects is as varied and eccentric as a mustachioed sex club owner from the 1850s, a wealthy caveman married to a social media influencer, and a former NATO drone pilot now embedded in a neo-Luddite cult.
The narrative, in short, has a little bit of everything — and it all comes together around Lars and Alfhildr, two characters who make for enjoyable renditions of familiar archetypes.
Their dynamic is reminiscent of the relationship between Mulder and Scully in the early seasons of the The X-Files — Lars plays the skeptic to Alfhildr’s somewhat fanciful theories about sea monsters and evil spirits, but gradually learns to trust her instincts and unorthodox methods.
Alfhildr is a quippy warrior in the vein of Xena, Buffy, and Wynonna Earp before her, but she also possesses a charming naiveté and a boundless appetite for both joy and pleasure. It helps that actress Krista Kosonen exudes such effortless charisma, and has great chemistry with absolutely everyone who appears onscreen.
Lars Haaland is the prototypical detective with skeletons in his closet, and an addiction he keeps secret from his partner. Yet he’s also a distinctly gentler personality than most characters of the genre. He doesn’t try to threaten or intimidate, and he rarely raises his voice. He embodies a different kind of masculinity than American audiences are used to, one that’s considerate, introspective, and emotionally attuned to the people around him.
All of this makes for a thrilling romp, but also a brilliant piece of satire about the complexity of our modern era.
As the beforeigners encounter the drudgery of service industry jobs, the expense of diapers, and the burden of student loans, these modern fixtures start to seem as ridiculous and arbitrary as the appearance of the time travelers themselves.
Ultimately, the show is about reckoning with feelings of powerlessness. It’s about how people search for purpose and dignity within the confines of a new life, having been stripped of their rank and station by circumstance and made to start anew.
These six episodes are so densely packed with ideas that, logically, this show shouldn’t work — and yet it does, and the execution somehow feels effortless.
It’s a marvelous hat trick of a show, one that warrants a second viewing, if only to try and figure out how on earth they pull it off.
What did you think of this season of Beforeigners? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Beforeigners is now available to watch on all HBO streaming platforms.
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Ariel Udel
Ariel fell in love with storytelling on the night Flight 815 crashed on a mysterious island, and has been blogging about television ever since. She has an affinity for messy female anti-heroes and an enduring love of Battlestar Galactica, Xena: Warrior Princess, Lost, and Halt and Catch Fire.
3 comments
Amazing show and being set in Oslo don’t ever make an English version. I’m an American who loves foreign films especially SyFy. I’m binging on this show and The Boys. I lost it The Viking Maiden Police Officer stops gets out and puts moss down here pants for a substitute tampon. She is awesome!
What a brilliant idea to turn the topic of migration into an unconventional science fiction plot for a TV series! Norway’s society is derailed by the migration of people who do not come from other countries, but from other times. The clash of cultures turns into a clash of epochs. The focus is on a grandiose investigator duo: an experienced investigator and a multitemporal young professional. Together they have to solve the mysterious murders of time travelers and “transtemporals”. Both have secrets that can cost them their jobs. To solve murder cases, they have to pull themselves together. The humorous and subtly politically portrayed study of the “immigrant society” is at least as fascinating as the crime thriller.
I’m a novelist who writes thriller mysteries about an archaeologist. I love this story. One of my favorites. I’m jealous it didn’t come to me first.
What a unique and innovative premise. I was reluctant to share this discovery with my friends, most if whom are very serious types and might think this show too fanciful to be taken seriously.
There are very few storylines we can tell and the challenge is how to present old ideas in imaginative ways.
I can’t wait to see the next season.
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