I’m going to say five words at you, and if they don’t immediately stir your interest, you should move on from this post. No judgment or hard feelings, but if it’s not for you, it’s not for you. So:
Time-traveling Viking solves murders.
Yeah? Fantastic. I need to tell you about a little show called Beforeigners. Why is it called Beforeigners? Because it’s about temporal holes that open all over the world sending inhabitants from earlier times (the Stone Age, the Viking era, and the late 19th century) to the modern day. Also, it’s called that because God is real, knows how I feel about puns, and She loves me. The act of moving through time to the modern era? It’s called a timeigration. Like immigration through time. This show is heaven for me.
But amazing puns aside, the plot is solid and batshit all at the same time. They do the best thing to do when dealing with unexplained phenomena, as outlined in this tweet.
Terrifying and mundane are exactly right. After the first arrival of beforeigners, I imagine the world was scary as hell for a few days. How is this happening? What does it mean? Will it stop? What the hell do we do if it doesn’t? Shockingly that last question is what seems to return the world to normalcy. The influx of beforeigners does not stop, but also never veers out of control. Countries are now faced with a manageable but ongoing arrival of timefugees (I did that one). Then we do what we always do: set up bureaucracies to address the problem. The beforeigners always arrive in water, so you get the Coast Guard to monitor as many areas as possible. You need to give the new arrivals medical care and quarantine them until you know they don’t have plague. After ensuring that they’re physically sound enough to enter society, you need to adjust them to modern sensibilities and introduce them to technology.
And then they need to solve murders. Well, not all of them. But because this show kicks ass, it focuses on the first beforeigner to be accepted into the Oslo Police Academy, Alfhildr Enginnsdóttir (played by Krista Kosonen). I am fond of Alfhildr.
Like, extremely fond of Alfhildr.
The badass next to her is Alfhildr’s best friend and fellow shieldmaiden Urd (Ágústa Eva Erlendsdóttir). Do not sleep on Urd. One, she’s amazing. Two, she might murder you if you tried.
Alfhildr, finding shieldmaidening to no longer be profitable, joins the Oslo Police Department, and is teamed up with Lars Haaland (Nicolai Cleve Broch). Lars is a divorced, middle-aged dad whose wife left him for a Victorian beforeigner and who has developed an addiction to tempoprax (a drug administered to beforeigners to dull their senses and prevent sensory overload) to deal with those facts. He and Alfhildr get off to a rough start, but eventually develop a good working relationship and surprisingly fun friendship.
As much as I’m here for Alfhildr, I’m not not here for Lars also. He doesn’t have the grip on me his partner does, but…
Why do the conspiracy wall and butchered fish make it better? Because I have terrible taste in men and make poor decisions. Also, just a quick disclaimer that Alfhildr and Lars never bang. There’s not even a whiff of banging. It’s a completely platonic relationship, and I love that for us. More platonic friendships between men and women, please.
I genuinely don’t want to say too much more because most of the joy from the show is seeing how well they blend the absurdity of living side-by-side with actual cavemen with using basic police practices to solve crimes. They still have to get the coroner’s report and talk to people who knew the victim, it’s just the people who knew the victim were born 1300 years ago. None of which is to say the show doesn’t get batshit. It leans hard into the batshit potential because it is, after all, about a time-traveling Viking solving the murder of a Neolithic woman with her modern Sad Dad cop partner. Writing those words just made me happier than you can possibly imagine. This is me now. Just screaming “I LOVE YOU” at this TV show.
Seasons 1 and 2 of Beforeigners are available for purchase through Amazon.
