Teresa Reviews Blackout (2021) from “Hjerson”

Teresa reviews Blackout (2021), a two-part episode from “Hjerson” and is looking forward to seeing more, warily.

(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel

Agatha adjacent? 2 garottes

A closed circle of people who can’t leave the cruise ship. And Sven Hjerson, Ariadne Oliver’s creation.

Quality of movie: 3 ½ garottes

Plot holes galore, too much information in not enough time, and weird dubbing, but what style!

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.

Agatha never wrote any Sven Hjerson stories. That was the job of her author avatar, Ariadne Oliver. Ariadne gave Agatha a way to comment on writing, detectives, and fans, without revealing what she, personally, thought. Is Ariadne a stand-in for Agatha? You could take it that way. Agatha probably enjoyed people thinking Ariadne was her, the author, inserted into a story because it provided another layer of privacy between her and the public. So don’t assume that what Ariadne says or does in the stories is what Agatha said or did. That’s why it’s called fiction.

Like Agatha, Ariadne is known to complain about her manic, vegetable-eating Finnish detective and wish she’d never invented that idiot from a country she knew nothing about. But it seemed a good idea at the time. She had no idea what the future would bring, including having virtually every novel and many of her short stories being transmogrified into celluloid.

And so here we are, faced with the fact there’s very little left of Agatha’s oeuvre that’s new and exciting and never before seen by the public.

Except for Ariadne’s detective, Sven Hjerson. We know Ariadne wrote numerous novels about Sven; eleven are named in the canon. The titles are almost parodies of detective novels. Goldfish figure in three of them. We know that Ariadne didn’t regard them highly. We know she discouraged fans from reading too much into them or modeling their lives on Sven’s.

But there he is, waiting for some sharp producer to turn into TV gold. Even better, since Agatha didn’t write Sven stories, scripts can be what the producers need them to be. They aren’t constrained by having to remain faithful to the text. As long as they remain internally consistent, entertaining, and reasonably plausible as mysteries go, they succeed.

Sven Hjerson has been waiting for this chance since he was first mentioned in Cards on the Table (1936).

The series consists of eight 45-minute episodes. Two episodes make a complete mystery. The eight episodes look to have an overall story arc, too. What did happen to Klara when she was a child and was found next to two dead bodies? Why did Sven leave the police force? Why did he abandon Finland for Sweden and refuse to return home for 30 years? Will Klara reconcile with her husband?

We’ll find out!

The opening setup is clever. We meet Klara, a producer of a sleazy but successful reality TV show called MILF Hotel. She’s getting tired of the sleaze and would like to do something with more taste and less crass sensationalism. Her boss feels differently, as do the other showrunners. She suggests getting Sven Hjerson, once famous as Sweden’s answer to Sherlock Holmes (not the shared initials) but now a recluse because of an evidence scandal, to star in a reality TV series about solving murders.

Peder, her boss, agrees but only if Klara can prove Sven’s onboard with the idea. She has one week.

Somehow (one of the many plot mysteries left unexplained), Klara finds a woman who used to work with Sven. Zana reveals that he gets his hair cut every day. Somehow, Klara finds the barber. They don’t let her in to harass their client, but the taxi driver waiting for Sven is more forthcoming. He’s on his way to a cruise ship to Mariehamm on the Finnish island of Åland.

Success! Klara, demonstrating why she’s a successful producer of TV reality sleaze, abandons Niklas, her … husband? It wasn’t clear, except he’s unhappy about being a househusband while Klara gets to have exciting adventures in the real world. He’s stuck with the mundane realities of housekeeping and tending to their daughter. Olivia’s Klara’s daughter. I don’t know if she’s Niklas’ daughter but it didn’t seem that way.

Klara stalks Sven, finally forcing him to share the only table left in the cruise ship restaurant. A word about the cruise ship. It’s gorgeous; ultra-fancy with a huge bar, casino, a ballroom for conventions, a happening disco with a very happening sound system, and its posh restaurant serves lobster. It also — I think but it might have been bad dubbing plus my lack of understanding of the Scandinavian ship industry — seems to serve as a ferry boat between ports in the fjords and the islands. The Cape May-Lewis ferry is nothing like this!

To Sven’s horror and disgust, Klara chows down on lobsters. She disembowels them, sucking the meat from claws, legs, and other body parts. He’s desperate to flee. Proving this cruise ship isn’t a regular ferry, the waiter is unable to provide a take-out box for leftovers.

Meanwhile, Katarina Askov, a genius CEO leading a remarkable new company that will transform green energy into the miracle its boosters claim it will be, is making her pitch to investors and reporters in the ballroom. Her company is transforming battery technology into one that’s clean, with double the power, twice the life, and half the cost. It’s a miracle! If anyone ever comes up with battery technology like this, they could buy the state of Pennsylvania with their riches after they return from Sweden with their collection of Nobel prizes.

At the bar, Sven and Klara observe reporter Aida Fabris being harassed by a drunk jerk (Hugo), her ex-husband (Magnus), another wanna-be star reporter who’s obviously much lower on the food chain (Alexandra), and her former friend and colleague who’s upset that Aida ruthlessly uses others to climb the ladder of success (Pernilla). Meanwhile, as we know from the opening scenes, Aida is up to something, meeting a mysterious man on deck to learn his secrets.

Then the power goes out throughout the entire cruise ship, something that should never happen. Although you don’t see it, the captain on the bridge is fighting madly to learn what happened, how to fix it asap, did the power outage affect the engine room, and who the hell let anyone near the electrical room which is strictly off-limits to everyone but selected crewmembers.

This is an important point. If you know anything about ships, you’ll quickly work out who must have been involved because the passengers wouldn’t have been able to get into the locked room.

Anyway, it’s not a surprise when Aida turns up strangled in her stateroom, her murder taking place during the blackout. Her laptop’s gone too. Klara’s involved because she helps find Aida’s body. She ropes in Sven and then they discover Magnus, impaled on a pike holding up a canopy.

If you wonder why Magnus is referred to as “foppa slippers”, it’s an only in Sweden joke about hockey player Peter Forsberg, who got rich investing in Crocs for Swedes.

But back to the ship. During the investigation, they run afoul of Viktoria, head of cruise ship security. She’s a trusting woman, trusting her own instincts and her cruise ship’s personnel office, instead of these two nosy strangers. She doesn’t know much about ships because she’s stymied by how the power outage happened too. At no point do you see her on the bridge, explaining to the captain why her bad security allowed someone to access the electrical room.

Klara and Sven snoop about but sadly, you don’t get an explanation for who arranged for Magnus to be onboard or why Pernilla was so angry with Aida. Nor do you get an explanation for Hugo’s behavior or why his posse lies for him. Eventually, Sven works out the logical person to break into the electrical room and spells it out to Viktoria.

Sven, by the way, doesn’t run about.

He leaves the footwork to underlings like Klara and Viktoria. They, chasing the logical suspect, end up coshed.

The ferry docks at Mariehamm. It’s a dismal, cold, snow-covered island. The hotel staff at Sven’s dead mother’s hotel is minimal and unwelcoming. Perhaps later in the series we’ll learn why. Eventually, Klara and Sven work out a vital clue and the villains are captured at gunpoint.

Their capture leads back, naturally, to Katarina Askov, genius CEO. She should make you think of Elizabeth Holmes (1984 – ), founder of Theranos. She’s currently a guest of the Federal Government for multiple counts of fraud.

Remember, if a fabulous new scientific method sounds like a miracle, it’s probably something much more mundane, like fraud.

The series, however, isn’t fraud. The mystery is underwritten and far too many people were introduced in far too little time, but it was still fun to watch. And as Sven and Klara’s story unfolds over the next six episodes, we should get answers to their mysteries.