Entrapped

This Icelandic detective series marks the mind thanks to different components. The first component is the geographical background of Iceland with its scenery, its landscapes, its deserts, its rhythms and the travel by car or motorcycle or helicopter. The other component is its police team, which is a trio, with a laid-off inspector, a policewoman and an investigator: they are not super-cops. They don't have a technological arsenal to carry out their investigations; and in the course of the different episodes, elements about their personal lives are given, and moreover they make mistakes. And the last one is the plot, a murder, a multitude of stakeholders who could have committed the murder, and we will learn the name of the culprit at the end of the last episode, having suspected many of the characters met during the dramatic progression.

All this is well done and gives a rather slow pace, but which suits well the still inertial movements on the island. And the various stakeholders in this story allow for a variety of social engineering: a cult of enlightened people, bikers, grieving families, a previous unsolved murder perhaps related, the police team. All this gives a whole that has its own rhythm and its own aesthetic.

A series that meets its specifications: keep the viewer captive until the last minute of its last episode.

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.

"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.

Summary:

Entrapped (it is actually season 3 of Trapped) continues to expose the foreign as a threat to island peace and family conflicts as axes of the behavior of its characters, although without the almost Bergmanian depth of season 2. A more conventional crime series , but with all the ingredients to retain the viewer and always with the spectacular and decisive setting of the Icelandic landscape.

Review:

The murder of a young member of a neopagan sect coincides with the arrival in the Icelandic town of Siglufiörður of a gang of bikers willing to dispute the lands occupied by the sect.

The series (effectively a season 3 of Trapped, renamed Entrapped) finds Hinrika (Ilmur Kristjánsdóttir) as the new police chief of the northern Icelandic town and Andri (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) and Trausti (Björn Hlynur Haraldsson) serving as in Reykjavik. The murder case will intersect with others, one of them related to the suspected bikers, which will generate tensions, interference and dilemmas in the respective investigations.

Entrapped recovers in this season a narrative that is generally simpler (although sometimes it is a bit difficult to retain the names of the characters), mostly linear, far from the almost Bergmanian depth and complexity of season 2, but mostly effective. Family conflicts always appear as underlying and in general determinants of the plot and foreign characters as disturbing elements of the island's peace. Although the series (quite short and with chapters of around 40 minutes) continues to take its time, the story knows how to change the rhythm with several scenes of suspense and action, always with the wonderful Icelandic landscape as the determining setting.

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.