Opinion | Timetraveling Cave Men, Vikings and Murder: ‘Beforeigners’ is the Most Socially Relevant TV Show You’re Probably Not Watching

“Squid Game” alerted the mass audience to the charms, albeit bloody, of giving a politically charged foreign-made TV series a chance.

The buzz from the South Korean Netflix drama about capitalism run amok has finally died down. But there’s a trenchant HBO Max import that’s at least as deserving of viewers’ time, especially as it barrels toward what looks to be a jaw-dropping season two climax being released on Thursday.

The Norwegian crime-meets-time travel drama “Beforeigners” aired its first season in 2019, and didn't launch season two until last month. It quickly became the darling of critics in Norway, though it’s yet to generate the international buzz of “Squid Game.” That's a shame. It tells a captivating, occasionally shocking, often funny and always socially relevant story of what happens when people from other periods — the Stone Age, the Viking era and the 19th Century — start popping up in modern times.

More than mere period drama gone wild, it is, of course, an allegory about the politics of immigration. Like all good science fiction, it uses the implausible parts of its premise to chime in on debates we’re having in the real world. So it skewers nationalists, yes — sharply and repeatedly — but it also asks liberals if their easy assumptions about immigration and its virtues can really be taken for granted.

By global standards, Norway’s is a tolerant society, and the series shows how hard it is for a place with the best intentions to equitably assimilate newcomers whose beliefs and customs range from quaint to, speaking kindly, unenlightened. The show’s time travelers are dubbed “beforeigners,” a name that already sets them far apart, despite their being almost exclusively white Norwegians. As they surface suddenly in Oslo’s harbor amid bubbles and bright lights at the rate of about 13,000 a year, a complex social service infrastructure arises to aid their, and the country’s, transition to what the show dubs “multi-temporalism.”

“Beforeigners” doesn’t wave its metaphorical meaning around like a flag on a battlefield. Still, the producers, in this first Norwegian series from HBO Europe, are clearly probing Europe’s difficulties in accommodating recent waves of refugees.

Many of these challenges will look familiar to viewers in the U.S. The existence of an event called Rock Against Timeism makes clear that the newcomers, also dubbed “timeigrants,” face widespread discrimination and that the entertainment establishment stands ready to fight it with a few feel-good hours at a benefit concert.

“Beforeigners Go Home,” shouts graffiti scrawled on Oslo walls, while the government employs a beforeigner ombudsman, ready to rap the knuckles of anyone who discriminates against the newbies. Open-air markets develop on city bridges, the old ways trying to reassert themselves. Suddenly, there are campfires seemingly everywhere. Oslo is arguably more vibrant, but it’s also lost that sleek Nordic order.

And unspoken is the great joke behind all of it. People who rail against immigrants often do so in the name of their ancestors and the supposed purity of the society they developed. So what happens when those ancestors actually show up and they are way more different from you than, say, a contemporary family from Syria?

While its central story is ostensibly a crime drama rooted in time travel, “Beforeigners” becomes about something larger in walking the taut wire of the now-vs.-then, us-vs.-them conflicts.

It’s a more relativist, European take than we might see here, where folks long ago retreated into partisan corners. Immigration isn’t the fraught, front-of-mind American concern that it was during the Trump years. But it still percolates and will never not be an issue here.

And even if people at the moment aren’t working so hard to demonize migrating Mexicans and Central Americans, you could argue that the nativist streak has just transferred over to intramural strife among our current residents. The “other” is the enemy. Civil war is under discussion again.

Given all that, “Beforeigners” ought to be resonating here like a cello during the symphony’s final movement. So why hasn’t this foreign import caught fire at even a fraction of the heat of “Squid Game”?

“Squid Game” is more overt in its political messaging: The 21st century robber barons, by hoarding all the wealth, are forcing the rest of us into desperate moves, like joining the show’s main story, the literally get-rich-or-die-trying competition.

“Beforeigners,” by contrast, is more subtle with its ideas, like a professor employing the Socratic method: How would you react to timeigrants bringing their pre-industrial ways to your once-pristine waterfront condo building? Open arms is one thing, but a goat in the elevator? And don’t even talk about property values… And the timing of “Beforeigners,” ironically, was off. It debuted in August, 2019, before Covid, before we were sentenced to home and sofa, before every single conversation had to include the ritual trading of series recommendations. TV was just TV then, not some kind of magical tedium salve.

The season one plot seemed fairly straightforward: The previous-life Viking Alfhildr Enginnsdóttir (Krista Kosonen) joins Oslo police as an equal opportunity hire, “our first employee with a multi-temporal background.” The ensuing semi-hostile reception she receives from her colleagues will resonate with viewers on this side of the Atlantic, especially as the Supreme Court weighs the future of affirmative action.

Alfhildr and her initially scornful partner, the contemporary Lars Haaland (Nicolai Cleve Broch) investigate what looks like the simple drowning of a Stone Age timeigrant. It turns into a murder probe, naturally, and by season’s end it brings in Alfhildr’s memories of her time as a Viking shield-maiden, or warrior, fighting against King Olaf the Stout, an actual historical figure and ardent early Christian who was canonized after his death. And then season two goes well beyond, digging deeper into the story of Olaf himself. Not only does the king want his throne back, but, thanks to Olaf’s celebrity and frequent talk-show appearances, significant portions of society are ready to throw in with a Christian nationalist — sound familiar?

“Beforeigners” is notionally built around a sci-fi mystery: Why and how are these people popping up in the present? The contemporary authorities, we learn, flat out don’t know. But then the show introduces intricacies and explanations that suggest even this strange new world, grappling awkwardly with immigrants who didn’t ask to be there, is more complex than it seems.

Time-travel Olaf is not the most subtle of thinkers above that barrel chest. But he absolutely nails one observation. “Does the s--- never end in this time?” he asks.

He means that there are too many obstacles to him doing whatever he wants to. But the real stuff, the more entrenched, never-ending mess is in the methods human beings find to mistreat one another.

The small glimmer of hope “Beforeigners” provides is that we can be smart enough — some of us, some of the time — to at least want to explore the implications of that excrement.