A challenging crime series well worth watching for its characters, plot, and setting: Trapped Season 2

Continuing from Season 1 with many of the same characters - notably the top police officer Andri and the local police chief Hnrika - but w/ a completely new plot line, Season 2 of the Icelandic saga Trapped is a series that will hold your interest and attention through all 10 episodes. Once again the plot focuses on a series of unexplained, grisly deaths in a small Icelandic town that is undergoing a huge economic upheaval, as a foreign conglomerate is building a vast power plant and mining operation - supported by local (and national) politicians but bitterly opposed by some of the local farmers. There are many strands to the story line, and some of these strands are red herrings; at times it's difficult to follow all the leads, especially for viewers, like most of us, unfamiliar w/ Icelandic nomenclature. But close attention will be rewarded, as the complex plot unfolds and the various layers - possible pollution from the power plant, possible bribery of public officials, inter-familiar warfare, tension between foreign workers (from Africa) and others, a homosexual relationship that endangers both men, bizarre behavior by Andri's daughter that makes her a target, kidnap of the Mayor by right-wing activists, a brother's botched attempt to murder his sister who is also the Minister of Industries and responsible for the power plant, plus others. Whew! The tension is always high and the characters are always credible, and even though a few of the plot elements don't quite make sense of close examination that series creator, Baltasar Kormakur, does a good job keeping us in suspense and guessing right up to the very tense dramatic conclusion: a somewhat challenging but always intriguing crime drama that's worth watching. Plus, there's probably no country in the world as photogenic as Iceland - worth watching for that alone!

One of the best police-procedrual series, with credible characters and a plot that makes sense

The Icelandic 10-part series on  Prime, Baltasar Kormakur's Trapped (2015), works really well start to finish on many levels. First of all, it's a murder mystery w/ many twists and tendrils - a fishing trawler pulls up a dismembered body in an Iceland harbor just as a huge Danish passenger ferry pulls into port, and the local police force - consisting of a chief and 2 officers - begins an investigation that leads them down many paths: what's the tie-in, if any, to a suspicious fire that sent a young man to jail for arson - and the man has just returned to town; what's the connection w/ a guy aboard the ferry who was transporting two captive Nigerian women to work as sex slaves; what's up with the plan for the government of China to build a massive port facility in this isolated harbor; and so on. Add to that strong character development, particularly of the ursine, beleaguered police chief, Andri, carrying the burden of a broken marriage and a failure in his previous post with any police agency, and in particular the stark, harsh beauty of the Iceland setting and this turns out to be a fine series start to finish, with the plot much more elegantly built and completed than in almost any other police-procedural drama (Sure, there could be a sequel, but the end doesn't leave you hanging on for more, either.) and awith ll of the characters coming across as lifelike, flawed, and credible - for the most part (excepting the one or two "heavies") they're "round" characters who seem to have a life beyond or outside of this narrative.   I have to say that the plot can be hard to follow for American viewers because every character has a name that's unusual or unfamiliar to us - I'd advise paying close attention to the names in early going, as that will make it easier as you go alone when the characters refer to one another by name. We had to laugh at times at the lack of "continuity" - sometimes the village was supposed to be caught in a paralyzing blizzard and in the next sequence the roads are clear - but, hey, it must be just about impossible to film a series in Iceland and literally impossible to do so in winter, with about 10 minutes of daylight. Great series to watch, though, even for the setting alone.