Review of 'Beforeigners' seasons 1 and 2

I just binged the first two seasons -- twelve episodes -- of Beforeigners on HBO Max over the past few nights. On Jackie Reich's suggestion. She was Chair of my Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, and is now Dean of the School of Communication and the Arts at Marist College. She told me on Twitter, "I think about you when I watch it — all that time travel!" She has my number. As Ricky Nelson almost said, "I am a [time-] travelin man."

And, in addition to having a clever title -- the series is mostly about people who travel to the present from earlier times, i.e, before -- there's indeed plenty of time travel in this Norwegian show. And it's served up in a refreshing, unique way, with lots of humor along with the lethal breakneck situations.

[Some mild, general, situational spoilers ahead.]

The first season starts much like La Brea -- no explanation of why people from the past (in Beforeigners) -- two pasts, Viking times a thousand years ago, and Victorian times some hundred and thirty-five years back -- start popping up, thrashing around, in today's waters off Oslo. In La Brea, people from the present travel back to the past, and I'd also say that that very popular network series in the U. S., which I liked a lot, doesn't hold a candle to Beforeigners. Which means I really liked the first season of Beforeigners a big lot. And I liked the second season even more.

Both seasons are not only refreshing, but fresh, in both the common and romantic/erotic senses of the word, with all kinds of nudity on the screen. Alfhildr Enginnsdóttir (the last name translates as "no one's daughter") comes from the Viking past, and has almost no inhibitions in what she says, does, and is willing to do in the present. She is partnered with Lars Haaland, a detective with the Oslo police. So what we have in Beforeigners is a science fiction/police procedural hybrid, also one of my favorite genres, as a reader/viewer as well as an author (for example, The Silk Code).

In the second season, things get even more complex and interesting. It turns out that travel from the present to the past is also possible, with disastrous consequences in some cases, including the appearance of one of the all-time infamous serial killers in our reality, and the possibility of alternate realities springing forth before our very eyes ...

But I'll say no more, other than excellent acting by Krista Kosonen and Nicolai Cleve Broch in the lead roles, great theme song "Ain't No Love In the Heart of the City" (sung by the late Bobby "Blue" Bland, written by Dan Walsh and Michael Price), kudos to creators Anne Bjørnstad and Eilif Skodvin, and if you have any time at all and are even the slightest bit like me regarding time travel, see Beforeigners as soon as you can.