Entrapped

"Trapped" season one was fantastic. It wasn't just the novelty of a crime drama taking place in Iceland, it was also the setting, the atmosphere, and especially the characters principally the chief of a small town police force Andri Olafsson.

Unfortunately, season 2 was much weaker and less interesting. And now "Entrapped," which is basically season 3, sadly continues the decline of the entire series from its excellent and hopeful first season. And I think I know why.

For season 1, if you remove Iceland, with its harsh and stark environment and nearly perpetual darkness, as the drop, the story would still stand up. The characters were well-designed and the protagonist and his small team quite interesting.

Season 2 didn't make such good use of the environment, and there were really no good character developments among the main ones who we follow. Also, the story was too far-fetched and thus not very engaging.

Come to season 3, what made the original so engrossing has completely disappeared. The series has become just another run-of-the-mill police and drama drama. The story could have taken place anywhere, and that's the shame of it.

A missed opportunity to showcase Iceland and its people.

As someone who really enjoyed Trapped, I was looking forward to this. Sadly, it is not as gripping a tale. Even the Icelandic landscape and weather seemed less fascinating and forbidding. Trapped involved lots of artic ice and blizzards, whereas this is set mostly in a biker gang's hideout and a pagan cult's compound. There's lots of back and forth between the two on a coastal highway. Bikers and police, back and forth, back and forth. Every time a new issue came up, there was a road trip to one or the other.

The show attempts the obligatory task of making every character seem like a potential suspect for at least five minutes, but not all of these attempts succeeded. Without giving any details away, I didn't find the resolution very satisfying or worth the time I had invested.

It's a police procedural that is actually a six-episode third season of "Trapped" that I reviewed a little while back. It remains set in Reykjavík and more remote areas of Iceland. It follows two police detectives and a local police chief as they solve three murders, one of which occurred seven years earlier.

Andri Ólafsson (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), the older detective, and Hinrika (Ilmur Kristjánsdóttir) remain the core of the story. Trausti (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) is another detective from the earlier series who had conflicts with Andri, but now they're working together. Andri gets pulled into a crime from his past that seems related to current crimes in his old town.

The plot involves a group living communally and engaging in nature worship and a local motorcycle gang that joins a Danish motorcycle gang involved in drug smuggling. There are family relationships between the two groups and conflicting claims on the land's ownership.

This season, we learn much more about Andri's background and the murder case that he botched years earlier. His suspect in the earlier case has now been murdered, and both murders seem linked to the current commune-motorcycle gang conflict. By the end of the series, Andri faces a full reckoning for his actions while he and Hinrika also solve the current crimes.

It was good to get more depth on Andri's background, though some of the complexities of the commune/motorcycle gang storylines were a bit complex for a short series. The series also introduced some new characters who begged for further elaboration. Still, it's a worthy successor to "Trapped."

"Trapped" was a pleasant surprise: A taut, emotionally-driven series with tight plots and engrossing environments. Sure, it was slow in parts but still amazing that a country of 400K residents can come up with something that blows much of Netflix programming away.

Saying that, this series lacks some of the tight scripting of "Trapped." Too often my mind wandered when it should have been glued to the TV. There just too much superfluous stuff, too many soap opera moments that the previous series avoided.

Still, it's an admirable show. I stayed with it and felt fully engaged with the characters. Perhaps a little too much at times as I would lose my place in the story. Thankfully, the ending neither disappoints nor insults the audience. Respect.

Well, it should be Trapped and Season 3, but someone somewhere decided that "a new start" would attract fresh audience? The number of episodes is also smaller (6 vs. 8), but on the ground of the story here, it could have been easily 5... Everything is slower, the star Ólafur Darri Ólafsson spends less time on screen, and the inclusion of otherwise great Danish actor Thomas Bo Larsen did not provide much value, as his character has a few dimensions only... The beautiful nature of Iceland is yet visible, but the distress and dreariness are more or less gone or in the far background.

Still 7 points from me as I was unable to surmise the wrongdoer and the reasons behind the crime was a nice twist.