'The Fortress' Is Entertaining Enough to Get Away With Being Too Soon
Are we far enough away from the pandemic outbreak that countries can start making their own television dramas about nationwide responses to novel diseases? That’s what happens in The Fortress, a Norwegian thriller that’s somewhere between disease thriller and conspiracy drama, imagining a completely walled-off Norway in 2037, having gone through total border lockdown after a prior pandemic – only for the arrival of a British refugee (Russell Tovey) to coincide with a new, dangerous outbreak.
It can be dangerous to make a series directly responding to our era’s most recent crises and anxieties; however, global responses to COVID-19 became era-defining super-events so quickly that The Fortress is mostly forgiven for how abruptly and dramatically it exploits paranoia about bureaucracy and contagion. After all, every country made costly mistakes – intentionally or not – during the initial years of the pandemic. The most severe ones amounted to corruption, labor abuses, and sometimes deadly medical negligence. Imagining a more TV audience-friendly version of pandemic abuses when the more mundane but stomach-turning reality remains unchallenged could be tasteless to international viewers.
But The Fortress mainly gets a pass for its too-eagerly timely premise by being very entertaining. It cuts between people on every level of Norway’s powder keg of self-sufficiency but primarily circles around three perspectives – Esther Winter (Selome Emnetu), who leads the strategic planning for the Norwegian Food Safety Authority; Charlie Oldman (Tovey, who’s already been central to a futurist dystopian drama, Years and Years), a Brit refugee separated from his wife and child as he passes Norway’s borders into their dubious work program, and Ariel Mowinkel (Eili Harboe), an ambitious speechwriter who takes an opportunity to work for Norway’s Prime Minister (Tobias Santelmann).
