Imaginary Worlds - Beforeigners

Episode Date: February 17, 2022

In the sci-fi drama Beforeigners from HBO Nordic, Oslo is overrun with immigrants and refugees. But they haven’t come from other countries. They’re from the past. In fact, they’re from three specific eras: the Stone Age, the Viking age, and the Victorian age. No one knows why or how they came, but police detectives Lars Haaland and his partner Alfhildr Enginsdottir – who is a former Viking herself – are uncovering mysteries and conspiracies that might lead to the truth. The show was created by Eilif Skodvin and Anne Bjørnstad, and I was very happy that I got to talk with Anne about how they created the show, and why time travel turns out to be a great metaphor to explore issues of immigration and national identity. This episode is sponsored by Brooklinen and Realm. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. I have become obsessed with a TV show called Beforeiners. It's on HBO Max in the U.S. and it originally comes from HBO Nordic in Norway. Now, this episode will not give away any major spoilers, but if you want to watch the show first, it's a quick binge, only two seasons with six episodes per season. When the first episode begins, we meet a police detective named Lars.

He's called in for what looks like a refugee situation. A small group of people have emerged from the Oslo harbor. They're dressed from a thousand years ago. Lars can't understand what they're saying. And then someone tells him they seem to be speaking in Old Norse. In response, Lars begins to call a mental institution. But then he notices an international news report on TV. Thank you, Kelly.

As we are hearing, these reports seem to confirm that this is happening in a number of locations all over the world. There are still no official explanations, but unofficial observations keep pouring in on social medias. And they all seem to be pointing in the same direction that individuals from the past. same direction that individuals from the past... There's a citywide blackout, and the harbor is filled with flashes of light as human beings pop up out of the water from the distant past. That is the prologue. The rest of the series takes place several years later. We learn that these time migrants have come from three specific

time periods, the Stone Age, the Viking Age, and the Victorian Age, although we don't know why. The Victorians have had an easier time assimilating into modern society, even if they sometimes don't approve of it. Time migration has been harder on the Vikings, and most of the Stone Age people can barely comprehend what happened. The Oslo police force has been criticized for the way they've dealt with beforeiners. So, to appease their critics, they hired a woman named Alfilder, who is the first Viking to graduate from the police academy. And the partner that they assign her is Lars,

the police officer we met in the prologue. It's a classic setup. Two cops from different worlds, in this case, literally different worlds. At first, they don't trust each other. And eventually, they trust nobody except each other because they're uncovering all these mysteries and conspiracies. Now, most of the show is in Norwegian, so I can't play many clips that I would understand without subtitles. But to give you a sense of what they sound like, there are a few scenes in English. Here is Lars and Elfhilder questioning a suspect in a murder case

who originally came from Victorian England. This is Elfhilder. Answer the question, please. And this is Lars. Let's begin by clarifying your whereabouts before you showed up at our offices with Miss Abeke. Let's skip the mundane part. Why don't you ask me about the book? You're being questioned in relation to a murder investigation. I strongly advise you to cooperate. If you continue that approach, you will reap a harvest as barren as the one your colleagues found. Beforeiners was recommended to me by a few different listeners who know that I love a

good sci-fi metaphor. And the show is a really clever way of exploring issues of immigration, assimilation, and national identity with some of the coolest world building and character development that I've seen in a long time. The show was created by Ilif Skodvin and Anna Bjornstad. And I was very happy that Anna was able to do an interview. One of the first things I was curious about is why is the show called Be Foreigners? It's a great pun and a portmanteau, but it is an English language word. The idea to call it Be Foreigners was due to the fact that it's like a global phenomenon, that it is kind of natural to have the English name. It works really well

because the first time you hear about them, I think they're called Before a Nurse, like in the show also. Before a Nurse is not the first big series that they created. In 2012, they launched a show on Netflix called Lilyhammer, where Steve Van Zandt played a New York mobster who went into the Witness Protection Program, and he asked to be sent to Lilyhammer, a place he had never been to, but he thought it looked beautiful when he watched the 1994 Olympics. So they are no strangers to high-concept ideas

or social satire, but Beforeiners was their first science fiction show. We always had like a very sort of soft spot for the grounded sci-fi genre and felt that that would be super interesting to do in a Scandinavian context. And we had been trying several times to come up with an idea or a premise that was interesting enough to go for it.

And we tried for years and failed. But then one day I just came to our our joint sort of id session and said you know what if people start arriving not from distant locations but from ancient times and it was a huge moment for us because it was so yeah it was right up our alley we immediately started to to see the world of the foreigners you know not only that it's kind of funny to think you know what would it be like to have a stone age neighbor and all that stuff but also the idea that you know how what would they think about us yeah and the And the thing I love, too, about them coming from the past is that it takes out the question of nationality, because very often the backlash to refugees or immigrants is these people are from our other cultures. They don't understand us. And then, you know, they don't understand our deep history.

But what if those people came from your deep history? I think it flips the whole idea upside down. from your deep history. I think it flips the whole idea upside down. Yeah, that was certainly a part of the appeal for us to make a situation where it's impossible to say, go back to where you came from, because we were here first would be like the response to that. And also we felt it was kind of interesting slash ironic

that in this part of the world, people on the far right often get their iconography from the Old Norse times and that it would be interesting to have, you know, real Old Norse people sort of come head to head with this type of person. So when you, now you could have picked people coming from any time period. And it's interesting that you pick three specific time periods that keep coming from the Stone Age, the Viking Age, and the Victorian era. What made you decide to limit it to these specific three time periods that people would consistently come from? You know, at the sort of base of it all,

this show is an allegory for a multicultural society. And in a society where you have people from different places, they come from specific places. So we wanted to keep it similar to that in a sense. So we didn't want everyone to come from one era. So we didn't want everyone to come from one era and we didn't want them to come from just all over the place because we wanted there to be a number of groups that the majority would maybe see them all as one group,

but they will not see themselves as naturally grouped together like the Victorian age people will definitely not feel they have that much in common with the Stone Age people and the vice versa I guess and as for the the time periods you know the Viking age kind of gave itself because I think it's because of the sagas we know so much about the Vikings it's it's so interesting it's so super cool to read the sagas and and just the fact that they came from a time where society was kind of organized and people could read was interesting i guess like also the victorian era was interesting to us because it was the beginning of

modernity in Norway and a lot of stuff happened. And we also wanted like a group that would feel superior maybe to contemporary people. You know, what's so interesting to me too, is that, you know, you could see, I mean, I feel like any other, you know, this premise, you know, you could imagine other countries in Europe having come up with it. But for Norway in particular to have the Vikings, you know, and also to the contrast of the Vikings being the toughest, fiercest, you know, warriors. I mean, people today are still fascinated by Vikings. There are video games about Vikings. And then you have modern Norwegian society, which is, you know, a strong government that's very deeply invested in the welfare of its citizens, that even the cops have to like sign out guns. It's just like, you know, it's very different from kind of the more wild West American sort of, you know, system. And so

that's such an interesting contrast in terms of what would our ancestors think of us to go from the Vikings to a modern kind of socialistic state. Yeah, that was definitely part of the appeal. And when we made Lilyhammer, we were very aware that, you know, on one level, it's just a show about a mafia guy who comes to a very cold place and he doesn't know how to ski. And, you know, it's all kind of slapsticky. But also on a deeper level, you have like this sort of social democracy where the response of the locals and the government is that a newcomer is someone who needs help. We need to help this guy.

So he's labeled like a helpless immigrant, but he's not who they think he is. And you get all these clashes between the welfare state and this sort of very macho character. And you get kind of the same type of conflict between the Vikings and the social democracy. I don't mean to offend mobsters or Vikings. Well, you know, a very high number of my listeners are mobsters and Vikings.

So you need to you need to tread carefully on that. What's particularly interesting, too, you're talking about how, you know, you have like the example of the New York mobster where people sort of see him as, oh, we need to help this guy. And but he's really kind of a predator. I think what's also really interesting with the Viking characters is how they react to being seen as a protected minority, where sometimes they're a little offended by it and sometimes they like it. And then sometimes they use it kind of cynically to their advantage.

And then one of my favorite scenes is where Alfilder tells her, she gets her friend out of trouble at a museum by telling the curators that they should have put trigger warnings on the paintings because her friend recognized people in the paintings. Like, you know, the Vikings were extremely cunning.

You know, that's the type of thing that I think they would do. They would definitely not like to be considered helpless and in need of help. But if it was to their gain, they would probably be happy to take advantage of that because a thing that I maybe didn't get into was that we we wanted to have like a man and a woman buddy cop duo and we wanted the woman to be a viking and the man to be from the present time the woman to be a Viking and the man to be from the present time.

Because we thought it was interesting that Lars, the man, he is a typical modern Norwegian man. He questions himself. He questions his masculinity. Whereas Alvild, she doesn't really, you know, she just goes for stuff she wants and she doesn't think too much. You know, she doesn't doubt herself like Lars does. But we also feel for her character that it's an interesting choice when you come from a culture where blood is repaid with blood.

It's kind of interesting to choose to be part of the judicial system, to step out of that revenge cycle that makes her kind of stand out from the Vikings. So am I pronouncing her name right? Alfhildr? Is that how I pronounce it? Yeah, I think because we have done very extensive language research in this show, and the right pronunciation, according to my north expert is alvilder i don't know if i'm gonna get alvilder okay alvilder but you know it's kind of a funny thing that it's such a difficult name so hardly anyone in the universe pronounce it correctly like the chief of police constantly says alvildur and, you know, all kinds of different sort of wrong pronunciations.

So you're not, do not feel alone. It's kind of part of the game. Yeah. You know, they're such good actors. We've been so lucky with the actors on the show. And I think they do an amazing job of it. What really surprised me was, you know, Krista is from Finland, and the woman who plays Urd, her friend, is from Iceland. The fantastic thing is that when they two,

and the guy who plays Torhund, who is Norwegian, when they speak to each other in Old Norse, I just feel that they're from the same place. You know, I'm just completely convinced that that is their common language, even though none of them quite understand what they're saying. For us, like the language work was really an important part

of the whole sci-fi toolbox. Because if you are a refugee, you have normally a mother tongue and then there's the language that the majority speaks. And the way you speak defines so much of your character, and that you have a sort of different secret language that you speak with your friends and your family is also like part of that sort of multicultural experience that we really wanted to recreate. Well, you mentioned a few times the research you've done. I'm actually, I was actually really curious. What was, I mean, I know that you said that, you know, generally speaking, you learned so much about the Viking era just growing up in Norway.

But what kind of research did you need to do for the sake of the show that you, and what interesting things did you find in your research that you thought oh we have to use this in the show i guess like the the first thing that's kind of obvious that came from research is you know in in episode one there's this scene where alville has to stop because she needs sanitary pads. And she goes over and picks up a piece of moss. This was straight from research because they did some excavation in Bergen and they found that it was this huge amount of moss that they couldn't quite explain.

And then they realized, oh, you know, that it was used for sanitary pads. And this was, of course, you know, a was used for sanitary pads and this was of course you know a kind of super interesting mundane detail that really sort of stuck with us and we thought that it would be so great to have it in the show yeah it's also a great moment in the pilot where lars and she start to bond and uh he buys her like modern day sanitary napkins and he just leaves it on her desk you know like as a way of saying like that they'reitary napkins and he just leaves it on her desk you know like as a way of saying like that they're starting to bond and trust each other yeah that was uh that was

we felt that was a good good idea what's interesting is that i got the sense that when this show was aired like in spain and um and some other parts of the world, they felt that it was, or it was conceived as more feministic, I guess, than we thought of it. Because people in Norway thought it was really funny. But some people other places felt like it was really sort of bold or like, you know, that it meant something more than we actually, you know, deliberately thought of when we put it in. And I think that's very cool. I was actually going to ask you, did you have any interesting or unexpected reactions to the show in Norway or other parts of Europe?

When the show premiered, it seemed like the countries or the territories that were most directly affected by the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean refugee crisis and by the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, refugee crisis and the European refugee crisis, were the ones that responded most strongly to the show. I just wanted to mention also that very many American viewers react so strongly to the fact that the police are not armed. It's like they feel that that's like the most,

the strongest sci-fi element in the story to them. That's really interesting. No, it's just that it's so fun to see the response like, oh God, is this a parallel universe? You know, where cops don't have to wear guns and they actually arrest people without being armed. And yeah, it's a very interesting response also in hungary we kind of got like great reviews from both you know the the more right wing side of the spectrum and the left wing side of the spectrum like it's interesting to see like how some people feel that, oh, this is like, you know, it's a dystopia that shows how ruined the society is if you allow people to enter. And other people feel like someone said this is a very effective vaccine against xenophobia.

So it's kind of interesting that you can get so different responses from the same show, but I think we kind of like that. The task at hand is not for us to give answers. We're not that smart. What we hope to do is to raise interesting questions. Yeah, it's funny. I thought of another thing about the refugee, a refugee situation or an immigration situation that rang so true to me was the, like Tora was a, he was like a warrior clan leader in his time. I mean, you know, would lead people to battle. And now he's in like an Uber Eats delivery guy on a bike, you know, and it just reminded me of so many stories you hear of people saying, I was a high level engineer in my old country and now I'm cleaning toilets. But, you know, it's I'm doing this for an important reason.

And it was so interesting to see, you know, or King Olaf, you know, from the 11th century has to take a driving test. You know, it's like it's so many things that they feel is beneath them. And yet, as they're trying to adapt to modern society and there's nothing they can do about it, I think is so fascinating. Yeah, and that also goes to, because we, you know, the beforeners, when they arrive, the time travel does something to their memory.

So you have some people who remember nothing from the past and some a little bit and some remember quite a bit about who they were and where they come from and we felt that this you know that all the different uh before and a characters have their own strategies for survival and it has to do with you know the type of identity that you form in a new country like tori he remembers nothing he He has even forgotten his mother tongue. He just wants to be a regular

guy who leads a very normal life here and now and no questions asked. And then you have Urd on the other side. She is so disappointed by this time and the society now. She only wants to go back and she feels that the past

is what matters and the past is where it really worked and then you have Alvild in the middle who feels like you know okay so there were good things and bad things in the past and there are good things and bad things now and try to sort of balance out her attitude and we also try to reflect that in how people dress, you know, that some people will sort of embrace modernity and others will stick to their traditional clothing and so on. be the people that actually kind of look down on modern society. I thought it was fascinating how many of them refused to adapt and insist on still wearing Victorian clothes as a statement of disappointment with modern society to some degree. Yeah, they definitely feel like, you know,

the people who were, maybe they were at like the opening night of Ibsen's Place and now they come to Oslo and they feel just disgusted by the whole thing and everything is kind of ruined and they feel that you have to cling to certain standards and just don't let go of your corset because that's the last thing holding you back from being, you know, just an animal or something like that. What kind of choices did you make in terms of the Vikings? Because I think with the Victorians, it's a pretty simple choice in terms of, well, you know, they just decide to keep wearing their Victorian clothes. But with the Vikings, you know, they're not full on Viking clothes, but some of them have come up with sort of like halfway Viking clothes, or they've found modern clothes that feel Viking to them. Like what kind of choices did you make around that costume design?

We felt like the Vikings probably were very proud. So they wanted to keep like part of their, you know, the clothes that they were used to wearing, but also that they were quite pragmatic. pragmatic so we felt like for some reason we felt that like you know the what you call it like a parka vest is something that a viking would probably like so we had like um some guidelines but it's also quite sort of intuitive for you know just what kind of things would this character fall for for instance we have also like the Stone Age people are really into fleece and, you know, crocs, the very sort of practical plastic shoes. I did notice a lot of the Stone Age people were wearing crocs.

Yes. And that feels, you know, because it feels almost like being barefoot. So it's like the least amount of shoe that you can have and still, you know, have the benefits of a shoe. The first two seasons of Before Nerves has each ended with a huge plot twist. And what I love about these big reveals

is that they're not there for shock value. They open up a whole new world of story possibilities. And since I just did an episode about headcanon, which dealt with stories that were not planned very carefully, and so the endings were unsatisfying, I was curious, did they know how the show was going to end? Did they have the whole story mapped out already? We'll find out after the break. Introducing Tim's new Infuser Energy Beverages, made with natural caffeine. They come in two refreshing flavors, Blackberry Yuzu and Mango Starfruit.

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run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. One of my favorite things about Before a Nurse is the opening credits. It's usually Lars or Elvild that are, still don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, driving to work. And as they look around, we see all these different shots of Beforeigners on the streets of Oslo mixed in with the mundane aspects of modern day society. It actually reminded me of the montages in The Wire and the opening credits of The Sopranos. And I wondered if those were their influences.

Maybe not so much The Wire, but definitely The Sopranos. And also the song was in the script. Kylie found it and we just fell in love with it. And it was so important to the whole mood and the feeling. And that was kind of very important for us. I also love with the opening credits that they change a little bit every time. It's always some variation of them getting somewhere and I just love the way it all the different variations of the opening credits. Oh yeah, we really put a lot of work into that

because we felt that we really love this world. We think it's so interesting and we want to show as much of it as possible. So that was how it was decided. But okay, we make a special one for every episode just to get the chance to show a little bit more of this universe. It's great to be able to show the world

without having to have like a big plot thing about every little idea that you have. You can just sort of let your characters see how it unfolds. Because it's so relatable because we've all had that experience of driving to work and you go through all these neighborhoods

that you've never gone through and you see people on the street that you realize, wow, that person's from a whole different world than me. So it's so interesting the way that they kind of, when they're driving to work, you know, the way they're kind of glancing out the window and you see the Stone Age people foraging for berries along the side of the highway. And they all wear those suits. You can tell that the government has issued these suits, these sort of jumpsuits the minute that you arrive. Like if they're still wearing them,

it shows how little they've been able to assimilate to modern culture, which is never established. Nobody ever says that, but I have completely absorbed that by watching the opening credits. Yeah, that's really cool. We also made like a dictionary for the universe that we used like when we worked with season one and i don't remember if it's actually in the dictionary anymore but we had this slang

word for the vikings used to call it like the armor that tracks it that they got when they arrived but it's great that you that you get all that just from watching with the keen eye. At the beginning of the pilot, we learned that this phenomenon is happening worldwide. And then in the second season, we start getting a sense of how it's playing out in England.

Are we going to hear from other countries, do you think, in future seasons, how it's playing out there? Yes. That would be part of a part of the fun um one thing that's particularly interesting is that um there were a lot of people uh from scandinavia who emigrated to the states in in victorian times you know and of course the foreigners in the states would be super interesting and very sort of, I guess, extremely topical in a different way than it is here. Well, yeah. I mean, if you have people coming from a thousand years ago, the United States, they're going to be Native Americans and that's going to be a very different storyline.

very different storyline. Yeah, so that would be the case in many places in the world. I think it would be, it's kind of an interesting prism that would work almost everywhere. Yeah.

So the second season got a lot more into science fiction and fantasy. Is that something that, I mean, without giving away any spoilers of what happens is that something you thought about as you went into the second season that you thought you know we could actually go much deeper into the fantasy sci-fi elements or uh did you always know from the beginning like as you progressed you've got a much bigger plan in mind uh we knew from the start you know that the sort of main engine of the entire series is the mystery of time migration why does it happen and in season one

we focused very much on like what happens to the present society when the past comes along sort of stumbles in. And we knew that we would want to go a bit deeper into it in the second season, but we didn't know exactly how and why. What I am actually curious about is, again, without giving any spoilers, you seem to know, like every season, especially this season, seems to give more and more hints

as to not only why this is happening, but how many people out there seem to know a lot more than our than our protagonists about why this is happening. And our protagonists need to find those people and learn from those people what exactly they know that they're not telling everybody else. they're not telling everybody else. Do you know, do you have the whole thing mapped out in, you know, the two of you in terms of what everything is and, you know, how you're going to get there eventually and how much information the protagonists and the audience are going to learn over subsequent seasons? I think, you know, different writers probably work in different ways. And I wouldn't say that we have the whole thing mapped out, but we have a number of alternative maps that can be followed. So it's not like we have... I've read some writers who say that, oh, I knew from the start where it was going to end. And we don't really know exactly,

because then it would be really easy. It perfect you know you can just sit down and just write it but to us it's more an exploration and we had like from the starts we have an idea where it's going to go and we have like a number of different theories and we have like our favorite theories, but it's not like we're dead set on... It's still evolving. We have plans, but we don't always follow them. you think is going to make you commit to one over another is it are you going to see uh how storylines evolve how the actors inhabit the characters like what are you what gut instincts are you going to be following as you keep going it's it's definitely the the how it all evolves because when you have when you start writing and you have a number of ideas for different plot lines i don't know if this is like common but this is how we experience it and sometimes when you start writing you're so surprised by how it kind of explodes when you start writing certain types of storylines and

you get like millions of ideas and it's so much fun it's so interesting and then other lines that you had high hopes for you feel like oh but this doesn't quite you know it's kind of isn't this a little bit i don't know dull or wrong or something like that and then then we tend to sort of follow follow the stream or follow you know where we feel that the life is in the plot lines that we have planned. So do you have a set amount of seasons in terms of like, you know, some people say I can only, this is, this storyline couldn't go beyond four or five seasons and then I'm done. Or do you feel like there's so much to explore that you can kind of,

as long as the show keeps getting renewed, you can kind of keep, keep exploring it. I think there is no definite end to it. It's not like, like it has to be two or three or four i think it's more like as long as the it feels like fresh to us we can keep going because there are so many doors to open you know that sometimes when you work with a different type of show you will feel like oh my god how are we going to make another season out of this? But this is, you know, it's not the case at all with foreigners

because there are so many ways you can go, so many places you can go, times you can go to. There are a lot of ideas that are yet to be explored. I can't wait to see them. Well, that's it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Anna Bjornstad. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman.

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