Trapped - "everybody in Iceland is earning a living off this film"

Spoiler alert - don't read if you want to watch Trapped but haven't caught up yet

We've not been watching Trapped - we're keeping our viewing time for Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, Gothan, Spin, and The Night Manager. But my mum is watching Trapped and for the past few weeks I've arrived to work on Monday morning to a rather amusing synopsis/review of the previous episode.

She's given me permission to put them on this blog. Apologies for the departure from academic subjects, but they are quite funny. 

Episode 1 - where my mum is the first person to point out everyone in Iceland is credited in Trapped

Dear Peter,

As you missed it, I thought I would summarise it for you, so that you can catch up quickly.

It’s cold and snowy in Iceland. Starts off 7 Years Ago and we see a young couple go into a disused building, have sex (even though it is always cold and snowing, clearly they are used to it) but he sets the building alight and she dies.  

Cut to present day.   Stolid local copper in the local small port, living with his mum & dad and two children – wife has left him. (Quiz question:  who was the last copper in a network series who didn’t have a broken marriage? Alistair knows the answer) Two fishermen on their boat. What have we here?  Dragging up a heavy load, clearly not a fish. A headless, armless, and legless corpse. Why didn’t they just throw it back in? Anyway, just as local copper is shown it, he sees a big ferry from Denmark come into the port. He goes on board and says to the captain “None of you can leave here until we have spoken to everyone on board.”  (How does an Icelandic copper speak to a Danish captain?  In English. That throws the English viewer, looking for the sub-titles, but they both speak in perfect English, better than me)

What do they do with the carcass while they wait for forensics from Reykjavik to arrive? Put it in the frozen food factory, despite the protests of the owner. (Note – do not buy any fish at Iceland)

The weather gets worse. The city coppers from Reykjavik say they are going to catch the next flight out, but of course all flights are grounded because of the blizzard. You can bet your bottom dollar (which is what the Icelandic bankers were doing in 2008) that they were well pleased that their hick cousins were continuing the investigation. Hick cousin manages to arrest the prime suspect (Lithuanian people trafficker who has a black African woman & her 13 year old sister in his camper van – they would have been easy to hide in Iceland) having followed him in the blizzard then run after him on his own when the camper van slid off the road. Takes Lithuanian back to the police station. Locks him up in a cell without a toilet in it. Leaves him overnight with a sole female copper to guard him. She manages to keep him in there, giving him a plastic bottle to pee in, whereas her male colleague, taking over from her, lets him out to go to the toilet and is over-powered by him. What a surprise. So main suspect escapes. We weren’t shown what his colleagues said to their male colleague when they realised what he had done. (“Oh it could have happened to any of us”  I think not)

Well, I won’t bore you with the plot details of the copper’s wife, who turns up with her lover, or the children. Suffice to say that the teachers in Iceland do not recognise bullying when it is going on in front of them (“Stop teasing him”) so the murders and inability of the police to solve them, let alone keep the main evidence (yes, the carcass is stolen from Iceland at the end of the second episode) are the main focus for yours truly. The children are also out in the blizzard by the end of Episode 2, though. You would think that when the weather started in like that you would just hunker down and stay indoors, wouldn’t you? Oh, and the young man who had had sex with the young girl and had burned down the building he is back…doesn’t look a well-balanced individual and the locals are all suspicious of him.  In fact his name is in the frame for stealing the carcass. Perhaps he is going to barbecue it, he’s good with fires. 

As the credits roll you realise that everybody in Iceland is earning a living off this film. I’ve never seen so many names with no function attached to them on credits in a lifetime of film viewing. Well, I guess they’ve got to earn an honest crust somehow, can’t go into banking (toxic) and the job at the food freezing warehouse is looking a bit risky. I can’t wait for the Reykjavik police crew to arrive. I wonder what they will say!