It was day 91 of lockdown. I just finished an episode of My Favorite Murder. If you haven’t listened, well, buckle up and enjoy that gift to us all. The women, Karen and Georgia, tend to skid off the rails at the top of each podcast episode, full throttle improv, and that is when they spout my favorite riffing. And because I listen in the car, I’m always scrambling for a pen and piece of paper, gum wrapper, receipt, back of hand, to write down the great recommendations for content the two fluently exhale. Pretty sure they would call this ‘spewing’. The ladies seem to have about ten extra hours per day to watch and listen to EVERYTHING.

This day, Karen (Kilgariff) mentioned Trapped. My husband and I tried it out and caught the bug – together. Sheltering in place all these months hasn’t changed that we rarely agree on what to watch. But this we did. From the meaty, full bearded, bearish Icelandic lead detective to the small, steady brains of the female partner, the fearless use of the Icelandic language moving fluidly into English and back when necessary. And then the awe-inspiring, lunar-esque landscape, a lead character in the ensemble.

The story is murder. And some.
There are the usual tropes: first, well, murder. Side stories of marital problems, loves lost, money, drugs, obstinate generations, pain in the ass children. But because of Iceland, well, a cliffhanger doesn’t have to be a metaphor. Neither does an avalanche. And while there is real brutality (these ARE Vikings), a gun does not appear until the final episode in Season One.
Take that America.

We liked the show. Good characters. Interesting story. Fun puzzle to unravel. But there was something more.

We got transported. At a time when we are sealed in. (Alert the production companies! GET US OUT OF HERE!)

And there was this.
Spoiler alert: my family traveled to Iceland. We fell in love the first time. And returning there, we keep deepening our relationship. Trapped, tangles uniquely with the naturalness, isolation, and the weird combination of Iceland’s grit, ruggedness, and raw sweetness. Like sugar cane, pulled with dirty, rough paws from the stalk and passed into your hands to simply gnaw. No processing involved. Glazing our hearts with nostalgia for the place and people.

I remember many years ago when I was studying in Prague one summer, catching a couple random episodes of Seinfeld. I lived in New York at the time, and watching something so purely American, so purely New York – connected me to a place, my home, that I loved. Just as Trapped transported us to a place we love.

Trapped made us feel.
Trapped brought us fully to Iceland. We felt longing for the feeling of sharing a place that is brilliantly new on every level – the air, the rugged weather, the language that seems an island itself disconnected from any relationship to another country.

Or pulling over to watch our daughter, hands stretched out to a herd of Icelandic ponies, all trotting to greet like a litter of carefree puppies, unafraid, lacking any bashfulness.

Filling our minds with the black, hard volcanic landscape, just 828 miles at its widest point (roughly the size of Portugal), with what felt like a volcano in any direction (there are thirty active volcano systems to be exact). We hiked into, back up and around, and together we stood at the rim of two. Imagining a world of fire and ice.

We swam in waters where the two tectonic plates of the earth meet, stretching our arms to bridge the divide. We hiked through the cliffs of Pingvellir (“assembly fields”) where parliament was created beginning in 930AD and duked out by the Vikings – literally, blood, guts and brains. When we stood at the site of Pingvellir, our first reaction was ‘how the hell did they survive getting here??’ In the middle of nowhere, trapped (that word again) until they figured government out?

The bad assery of the Vikings.
That’s how. Up to seventeen days on horseback. Don’t cringe when you see the lead detective in Trapped go out in an Icelandic night with no hat, coat unzipped. We had to remind ourselves, they are made of something different. Fire and ice.

And there are the women of Iceland. The women were crucial to Thingvellir and the formation of parliament. So much so, that of the seventy executions, eighteen were women put to death in the Drowning Pools (that’s 25% of all executions). We assume they were just that dangerous to ways of men.

Flash forward in history, and there is the legend of Sigridur Tomasdóttir. Do yourself a favor, read everything you can about Sigridur. (Hello? Disney? Are you listening? Princess of the Falls?) The story goes that Sigridur often walked or rode on horseback to Reykjavik (120km away) from her home of Gullfoss (Golden Falls) to petition to save the waterfalls and gorge from foreign investors who wanted to dam the falls for hydroelectrical production. Her father’s response when a lot of money was offered, “I do not sell my friends.” The legend told to us by Icelandic friends goes a bit further, describing Sigridur’s walk to Reykjavik, arriving with bloodied, horribly wounded feet. She did this repeatedly. At a time when roads were just rough terrain. Finally, she threatened to throw herself into the Falls. She won. Gullfoss became a national park in 1979.

That road is paved, quite beautiful and easy to travel. We have driven it many times. And we always stare out thinking of Sigridur, her legend.

Supremely unique.
Watching Trapped left a longing for finding ourselves through travel, sharing the experience of how we like it: light on plans, heavy on discovering what lay ahead. A longing for what we had, as an American, just a few years ago. Our freedom to go(!) and reputation as Americans taken for granted. All that gone now.

Just as the world closes in on the characters in Trapped, so we too feel and relate. Like an avalanche, without metaphor.

There are the usual story beats in Trapped, impending doom and escalation of thrill, that comes with a crime procedural. But instead of dark alleys, necessarily, it is the landscape that presents itself. A much larger sense of stakes at hand. An overall slowed-down pace also pushes tension and, honestly, the relatability of this pandemic-moment we are living in. Longer, slower shots, more thoughtful time with (fewer) characters, more truth delivered through actors’ emotions. There is far less explosive reaction. Instead, surprising moments of empathy. It was these subtleties that played with us – like being quietly stalked by the unknown.

Here is the description and talent reference.  Thank you Wikipedia.

Trapped (Icelandic: Ófærð) is an Icelandic television mystery drama series, created by Baltasar Kormákur and produced by RVK Studios. Broadcast in Iceland on RÚV started on 27 December 2015.[1] Co-written by Sigurjón Kjartansson and Clive Bradley, the first series of ten episodes follows Andri Olafsson (Ólafur Darri Ólafsson), the chief of police in a remote town in Iceland, solving the murder of a former townsman whose mutilated corpse is recovered by fishermen. The series was directed by Kormákur, Baldvin Z, Óskar Thor Axelsson and Börkur Sigthorsson.