Beforeigners: HBO blends immigration and time travel in Nordic series' first trailer

Science fiction is always a ripe genre through which to explore weighty societal topics. Enter Beforeigners, a six-episode HBO miniseries about immigrants... from the past! The first winding trailer has arrived, and it lays out one humdinger of a sci-fi premise.

Set in the near future, the genre-bending Norwegian show begins when individuals from three distinct time periods — The Stone Age, The Viking era, and the late 1800s — begin to mysteriously show up and settle in modern day Oslo. These temporal refugees (who have no memory of how they traveled through time) are branded as "Beforeigners" and treated as second class citizens. 

Watch the trailer below:

Years after the unexplained appearance of the Beforeigners, Viking era time traveler Alfhildr Enginsdottir (Krista Kosonen) is paired up with jaded cop Lars Haaland (Nicolai Cleve Broch) to solve the murder of a woman from the Stone Age. Their labyrinthine investigation, as you probably already guessed, leads to some pretty unexpected discoveries. 

To put it another way, this is the kind of solid and allegorical set-up you'd expect to see in a novel that wins all the Hugo Awards. Created by Eilif Skodvin and Anne Bjørnstad (the minds behind Netflix's Lilyhammer), the miniseries was directed by Jens Lien (The Bothersome Man, Sons of Norway).

Credit: HBO

While it may not seem like HBO's style to pick up an international series like this, remember that it's basically the move Netflix pulled with Germany's Dark. Streaming services are now seeing the advantages and successes that come with releasing global content. Just because a show isn't in English, doesn't mean American audiences won't gravitate towards it.

All six episodes of Beforeigners are now available to watch on HBO's various streaming platforms: HBO Go and HBO Now.