HBO, the esteemed home of prestige television, released the trailer for their new series Beforeigners, about modern-day Oslo suddenly finding itself overpopulated with time-traveling visitors from the past. Specifically, vikings.
You’d think after that truly slam-dunk portmanteau of a title I would’ve been prepared for this trailer, and let me assure you that I was ridiculous to believe that. Beforeigners follows in the time-honored tradition of shows like Lucifer by selling an aggressively batshit premise as a procedural cop show. That’s right – one of the time-traveling vikings joins the police force and solves mysteries.
Vikings aren’t the only visitors (politely referred to in the series as “people with multi-temporal backgrounds,” and pejoratively as “beforeigners”) roaming the world after being inexplicably displaced from their own time. We see Dickensian orphans roaming the streets, as well as 19th century gentlemen in carriages and a stone age man on a bicycle. So it appears that people throughout three separate eras of human history have found themselves mysteriously stranded in the future.
Nicolai Cleve Broch stars as Lars, a grizzle police detective working in Oslo five years after the unexplained event. Lars gets teamed up with Alfhildr Enginnsdóttir (Krista Kosonen), a Viking shieldmaiden from the 11th century who is the police department’s first “multi-temporal” hire. Predictably, Alfhildr’s Viking sensibilities clash with her duties as a modern-day detective, which result in hilarious exchanges with Lars as well as her beating the absolute shit out of some bad guys.
Beforeigners was a 6-episode Norwegian show produced by HBO Europe in 2019, and the network has gallantly decided to release it in North America for the benefit of all mankind. The first episode is streaming on HBO Now and HBO Go, with new episodes scheduled to be released every Tuesday. Check out the banana sandwich trailer below.
