We want to be surprised when we watch shows. So when we can predict what’s going to happen in an episode, we don’t feel smug satisfaction, we feel annoyed. The first episode of a new Scandi noir series on Netflix was entirely predictable, which doesn’t give us a lot of hope that the rest of the limited series is going to suddenly be full of surprising twists.
Opening Shot: A girl walks home at night. She passes by a store and buys cigarettes for her mom and candy for herself.
The Gist: When young Lejla (Seraphine Krystek) gets back home, the door is open. Her mother isn’t around, but that’s not unusual. Suddenly, Lejla is grabbed. She wakes up in a glass box, mirrored on the inside, with no idea where she is or who took her.
Decades later, Lejla (Léonie Vincent) is a criminologist living in the US. We see her making a presentation on the mind of a child abductor, and the person who introduces her tells the audience that she has a unique perspective given that she’s an abduction victim herself.
After the lecture, she gets a phone call from her father, Valter (Johan Hedenberg) to tell her that his wife Ann-Marie died. Ann-Marie and Valter, the police commissioner in Lejla’s hometown of Granås, adopted Lejla after she was found alive, and while she considered Valter the father she never had, she and Ann-Marie didn’t get along as well.
Lejla flies back to Sweden to attend Ann-Marie’s funeral and see to Valter. He’s retired as police commissioner, replaced by his brother Tomas (Johan Rheborg). In the decades since Lejla’s abduction, Ann-Marie tried to find out who kidnapped her, but to no avail. Lejla has wanted to distance herself from the whole thing — one of the reasons why she moved overseas — but her time in that glass box still haunts her.
During the funeral, she reconnects with her childhood best friend Louise (Gina-Lee Fahlén Ronander) and her daughter Alicia (Minoo Andacheh); Louise recently moved back to town with her husband Said (Farzad Farzaneh). Said and Louise’s mother Kristina (Cecilia Nilsson) are leading a development project that will expand a local mine, with the townspeople giving them a lot of pushback. Louise hates that she’s getting cursed at by townspeople for what her husband and mother are doing.
The next day, right before Lejla leaves to go back to the US, she visits Louise. She not only finds Louise dead in her bathtub, blood everywhere; when Kristina shows up to the scene without Alicia, the realization sets in that Louise’s daughter has been abducted.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Glass Dome is similar to any number of Scandi noir series on Netflix, like Post Mortem: No One Dies In Skarnes.
Our Take: The Glass Dome has all the elements of Scandi noir that attracts people to the genre, from the main character coming back to their small home town after years away to the moody nighttime settings of most of the scenes. There’s the obligatory scene of Lejla driving into her hometown and another where she stops on a bridge as she starts having flashbacks to her nightmare abduction.
It’s all pretty standard stuff, and we know that Lejla and Valter are going to start investigating Alicia’s abduction on their own, much to the consternation of Valter’s brother Tomas. It’s also pretty obvious that the two abductions are connected; we don’t have to see the final scene to know that Alicia is going to wake up in a glass box, just like Lejla did two decades ago.
Because all of this was so predictable in the first episode, we wonder just how twisty the abduction mystery is going to be. The early indicators, of course, point to Alicia’s father Said, but that’s obviously not going to pan out. The expansion of the mine probably has something to do with this, but maybe not, given that whole “girl in a box” thing.
The most interesting part of this series is seeing how Lejla is able to handle revisiting that nightmarish era of her life, given that it already haunts her most of the time. We’ll get some more insight during flashbacks, we’d imagine, including what happened with her mother — we’re guessing she suffered the same fate Louise did. But the first episode isn’t giving us much confidence that this series is going to get better as it goes along.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: As we see Lejla flash back to her time in the kidnapper’s glass box, we see a flash of another girl in the box, screaming for help. Predictably, it’s Alicia.
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Johan Rheborg, who has the thankless task of playing Tomas, who is basically going to spend the series trying to keep his brother Valter and niece Lejla from interfering in his investigation into Louise’s murder and Alicia’s abduction.
Most Pilot-y Line: Valter tells Lejla that he’s been distracting himself since Ann-Marie’s death by listening to Joe Rogan. Oy.
Our Call: SKIP IT. The first episode of The Glass Dome was too predictable, giving us a bad feeling that the rest of the limited series will be, as well.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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