Review: Time travel and murder combine in HBOs riveting Beforeigners series

Two police detectives from wildly different time periods must learn to work together to solve a murder in Beforeigners, a riveting blend of science fiction and police procedural from HBO Europe that is already poised to become one of the standout shows of the year. Like Netflix's Ragnarok, it is a Norwegian TV series that draws heavily on the history and mythology of the region. But Beforeigners eschews the supernatural, and the campier teen soap elements, to deliver a thoughtful, moving, and often quite ribald and funny tale of various worlds colliding.

(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

Series creators Eilif Skodvin and Anne Bjørnstad wanted to follow up their successful series Lilyhammer with a science fiction story built around the idea of refugees arriving from different historical periods rather than different countries, and they combined the concept with a hard-boiled murder mystery. They've cited District 9 and The Leftovers among their influences, along with classic novels like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984.

Set in Oslo, Norway, the pilot opens with detective Lars Haaland (Nicolai Cleve Broch) and his wife Marie (Agnes Kittelsen) purchasing a condo in the heart of the city's posh Barcode financial district. A sudden series of flashing blue lights in the nearby ocean, accompanied by a power outage, is followed by the equally sudden appearance of people calling for help in the water. Lars helps fish them out, only to find they hail from another time.

Five years later, the blue flashes have become a common occurrence, with some 13,000 "temporal refugees" (known as the titular "beforeigners") arriving in Norway each year. All hail from three periods: the prehistoric Stone Age, the Viking era, and the 19th century. None can remember anything about their passage through time, and as they struggle to assimilate in this confusing new world, modern residents are divided between those who encourage "temporal diversity" and those who exhibit strong anti-refugee sentiments.

Lars is now divorced and addicted to temproxat, a drug administered via eyedrops routinely given to the refugees to ease their sensory overload. His posh neighborhood is now a beforeigner ghetto, his ex-wife has remarried a 19th century beforeigner named Gregers (Kyrre Haugen Sydness), and his teenaged daughter Ingrid (Ylva Bjørkås Thedin) is preparing for her russefeiring (a Norwegian tradition akin to senior spring break).

Then a female body with Stone Age tattoos washes up on the beach, showing evidence of strangulation. Lars must solve the case with his new partner, Alfhildr (Krista Kosonen), the first Viking beforeigner to join the police force straight out of the academy. Their investigation brings them into contact with a sex club operated by a gang of Bohemians, a community of "trans-temporal" people (modern residents who join beforeigner communities and adopt the dress and customs of their chosen period), a Stone Age crime lord named Navn (Oddgeir Thune), anti-technology "neo-Luddites," and a beforeigner who just might be the great Norse pagan warrior Thorir Hund (Stig Henrik Hoff), among others.