It is a rule of Nordic noir that the protagonist has as lousy family life. Here were meet Sanna who is divorced and whose son wants to spend Christmas with his father rather than with her. Cut to the Finnish Coast Guard HQ and we find Sanna and her partner Joonas being tasked with making contact with an icebreaker, the Aura, which has gone radio silent. I immediately took to this idea as it was eerily similar to the Call of Cthulhu scenario" Terror on the S.S. Champagne" which I ran at Gamehole Con this year. And so our heroes head out to the ship in their hovercraft. They find that it is locked in the Arctic ice a la Endurance and seemingly abandoned.
Sanna finds one crewmember tied to a control box thingy on deck. Joonas looks after the guy while our heroine continues her search. She eventually finds most of the rest of the crew, including the captain, trapped in a room below deck with the door having been welded shut. One final sailor is found on the bridge unconscious and bleeding. The remaining crew member, Eemil, has apparently gone mad and his whereabouts are unknown.
A woman, Jaana, is consoling her son Peter in his quarters and speaks in hushed tones about a darkness and how Peter has to fight it. Another couple of crew members, Toni and Martti, do not seem to be on good terms. And so we get an entire cast of sailors whose true motives are shrouded in mystery.
As everyone is recombobulating and plans to get the ship fully operational again are being formulated, it is discovered that one of the crew has taken off in the Coast Guard hovercraft. Oh, and Sanna goes outside and sees Eemil standing over a hole in the ice in which Joonas is struggling to stay afloat and crawl out of. Eemil flees but poor Joonas meets an ugly fate in the icy waters. Sanna is devastated as she and Joonas were romantically involved.
Early on we get introduced to the characters and are tantalized with lots of mysteries and unknowns. Why has Email gone mad? What happened last summer? What is wrong with Peter? When a massive snowstorm rolls in, the ship becomes a suitably cramped backdrop for the action. After enough talk about a darkness and countless scenes of the radio simply not working - they're only 40km from the mainland - it dawned on me that there's something supernatural at play and that this wasn't a more mundane entry in the Nordic noir murder mystery canon.
Suddenly the radio finally comes alive and its the guy who stole the hovercraft. He is calling for help saying that he is lost and can no longer feel his legs. The assembled folks on the bridge see a flare in the distance. Sanna, Toni, and Martti head out on a rescue mission. A fog descends unnaturally quickly and they find the hovercraft covered in frost, the engineer who stole it is found frozen solid, something impossible given the conditions and the short amount of time involved.
Ah, so we now had a strange fog that seems to mess with time and make people hallucinate/have visions.
Icebreaker proved to be perfect Halloween viewing because, in that area of the Arctic, it is the winter solstice during which the veil between this world and the next is opened. And so the show is part ghost story.
We learn that the events that caused Eemil to go mad are related to the disappearance of Sanna's father whom we see in many a flashback.
I appreciated the descent into madness of a couple of the characters as this added some Lovecraftian flavor. Eemil encountered something, a blackness, that disposed of his sanity and I liked how this darkness is never explained away. There are some genuinely spooky scenes such as when Sanna and the crew (minus the captain) attempt to hoof it over the ice to the mainland. At one point they are traversing perilously thin ice and then the fog descends and they find that they are essentially back where they started, not far from the Aura. They are forced to seek shelter at an abandoned home on a nearby island. You know something bad is going to happen when the fire goes out suddenly, a simple but effective way to show that the characters are in deep doo-doo and to take a symbol of hope away.
The show did a fine job of slowly letting me know that it wasn't just a mundane mystery, that things are not as they seem and that there are supernatural forces at work. The isolation, the mysterious fog, and the nebulous supernatural entity here gave the show some LOST vibes. But instead of being trapped in a tropical paradise, these characters are trapped on the Arctic pack ice. The scene in the derelict house brought back the scene in LOST where Ben brings Locke to that spooky cabin to meet Jacob.
One gripe I do have it is that the storytellers went to the Sanna-goes-off-alone well too many times. Once is tense and thrilling but it got silly after 3 or 4 times and just became an ineffective trope. Oh, my other big gripe is that people seemed to recover from what I took to be severe hypothermia in an hour or two. That and recovering from being bashed on the head with a pipe in a matter of seconds.
Nearly forgot. Something else that kind of took me out of the story was that, for the first half or so of it, Eemil, the guy who locked the crew in that room and welded it shut, was loose after the crew had been freed but no one seemed to care that he was below decks doing, well, stuff. No one seemed ill at ease that a madman with an axe was on the loose. It was business as usual. "I'll just head to the engine room, where Eemil worked, by myself to look at the fuses."
I must admit that Eemil reminded me of that water mouth guy from that Doctor Who story "The Waters of Mars".
Not the best screenshots to illustrate my reaction but you get the idea.
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