This Finnish crime series has two big draws: an eerily prescient focus in 2018 on an emerging global pandemic, and a truly picturesque setting in Finland’s remote Lapland region. Unfortunately, it’s hampered by a bland leading character and actress, a rotating supporting cast, and a meandering, overlong first season.
Buy Arctic Circle: Seasons 1-3 DVDIina Kuustonen stars as an average beat cop named Nina Kautsalo, tasked with patrolling the sleepy, reindeer-infested Lapland territory on snowmobile. When she discovers a dying Russian sex worker in a cabin, a woman later determined to be carrying an extinction-level-event virus, she triggers an international race to find the killer and a cure.
It’s telling when the most interesting thing about Nina is her special-needs daughter. Nina is persistent, but doesn’t possess any unique talents or quirky tics that make her stand out. Saddled with Kuustonen’s flat, affectless delivery, Nina merely serves the plot without ever really driving it. After starting strong, that plot spins its wheels through vast swathes of the season, with the writers seemingly struggling to fill the 10-episode runtime.
Season two and three wisely shrink to six episodes each, making for much more satisfying focus and consistency. Since the pandemic plot is fully resolved in season one, the biohazard symbol on the DVD cover feels like a bit of a cheat and not indicative of the later seasons. Even the snow is a bit misleading, since Lapland is abandoned for temperate Russia and Helsinki in season two.
Season two focuses on a secret society of wealthy hunters who meet in the Russian hinterlands for one week a year to dole out vigilante justice to murderers who have escaped the reach of the law. Nina gets involved when the sole-surviving sex worker from season one is murdered by an associate of the secret society, leading her to team up with a young Russian cop to locate the group and put a stop to their actions. She’s also dealing with family issues including the impending death of her mother, meeting her father for the first time, and discovering that her ex-husband and half-sister are becoming a couple. The season starts a bit slow, but picks up steam and never lets off through thrilling twists and turns.
Season three finds Nina back in the Arctic Circle, somehow landing on her feet as chief of police after being fired in the previous season. This season focuses on crimes in the international car business in her area, including the hijacking of a top-secret test-car prototype. The auto-industry murders lack the punch of season two’s all-too-plausible secret society of killers, but it’s fun to see Nina back in her original element with familiar faces.
The new DVD box set includes all 22 episodes spread across 6 discs and housed in a standard DVD case. Audio is Finnish with English subtitles, but the characters frequently switch to English anyway as they converse across nationalities, so the native soundtrack is definitely preferable. Optional English audio tracks are also provided, but the dub is considerably more flat and distracting than the original audio, so proceed at your own risk if you simply must have dubbed audio. No bonus features are included.
