Beforeigners is a Nordic noir that pushes beyond the limits of the police procedural and into the unexpected. This stylish show deftly establishes its odd premise in a matter of minutes: as teenagers party by Oslo’s harbour, the water surface is suddenly broken by people who seem to have appeared from nowhere, flailing in the sea, and speaking Old Norse. They have no idea where they are or why they are there. They are “beforeigners”, thousands of people from the prehistoric, Viking and Victorian ages who have been inexplicably jolted into the modern world.
Cut to years later. That mysterious night, Lars (Nicolai Cleve Broch) was a fresh-faced cop who met with the time-travelling migrants. Now a drug addict living alone – his wife has left him for a pipe-smoking Victorian – he reaches for his first dose of the day as we hear a news report telling us 13,000 “beforeigners” have arrived in Norway in a year.
At work, a less-than thrilled Lars finds out he is to be paired with Alfhildr (Krista Kosonen), a Viking who has been catapulted from her time into the present and who is the station’s first employee from “a multi-temporal background”. As others in the department mutter about the diversity hire, Alfhildr and Lars are sent out to investigate the death of a woman on the beach.
Filled with moody shots of inky black skies and urban streets stained with disadvantage, Beforeigners takes its cues from The Killing, The Bridge and other influential shows from Scandinavia. Alfhildr is particularly indebted to The Bridge’s Saga Norén: another misfit with scruffy hair and leather pants who is good at her job, but has little time for niceties.
The murder investigation unfolds against the backdrop of a society that has chosen to integrate the immigrants (rather than detain them indefinitely on an island). In this world, the prehistoric, Viking, Victorian and contemporary communities live side by side: there are top-hatted dandies in the street, goats in high-rise apartments, and Vikings drinking out of horns in mead halls. One 1,000-year-old king finds himself suffering the indignity of driving with learner’s plates.
The humiliated royal is based on a real Norwegian ruler, King Olaf the Stout, a Viking who was baptised while fighting in Britain and later canonised. He is as surprised as anyone by his unexpected trip to the future, but unlike many others, he has retained his memories and wastes little time trying to reclaim the throne. His adventures in the modern world, often played for laughs, lead to a darker season two.
Beneath the comedy of culture clashes, the suspense of the crime investigations and the dystopian twist, is the ongoing mystery of why people are involuntarily travelling through time. Alfhildr may hold the answer to this, and she is the star of the show. She’s funny, tough, sexy, smart and a little bit annoying. Kosonen, a Finnish actor who speaks no Norwegian despite the script being in the local language, Old Norse and English, inhabits her so completely that it is shock to see her as herself.
The clever storytelling, attention to detail, and crisp pace of Beforeigners leaves little time to reflect on potential plot holes that could be caused by temporal paradoxes. And when a series with such original ideas looks this good and is this fun, you’ll soon be longing to travel to the past so you can watch it again for the first time.
• Seasons one and two of Beforeigners are streaming on SBS On Demand.
