Feeling the long, heavy drag of these barren winter months? Wouldn't it be nice to get away from it all to someplace colder? Handy enough with a rifle and not easily put off by deranged polar bears intent on ripping out your viscera? Then come to Fortitude (Sky Atlantic, Thursday, 9pm).
A mining town in the northernmost settlement in the world, Fortitude is blessed with spectacular Arctic views of the aurora borealis, a thriving death metal scene and the most ill-advised tourism campaign since invitations went out for the unsinkable Titanic.
Kick-starting the construction of a glacier hotel two years ago, Gov Hildur Odegard (The Killing's Sofie Gråbøl) called Fortitude "the safest place on earth". There were many reasons for the cataclysmic events that followed in creator Simon Donald's slyly contagious series – a collision between science, commerce and disgruntled, vengeful nature. But this was something more ancient and horrifying; a town brought down by dramatic irony.
"The glacier moves! You can't build a hotel on it!" bawled one character, quite sensibly, in last season's finale. If that hadn't occurred to you over 12 episodes, it was because Fortitude had given your own sanity frostbite. You were not alone. Because it turned out – and here be spoilers! – that prehistoric parasitic wasps, thawed after several millennia from the carcasses of woolly mammoths, had been turning people into deranged killers.
That will only sound preposterous to the uninitiated, because, much like malevolent prehistoric insect larvae, Fortitude knows how to get under your skin.
What first seemed like the apotheosis of British television’s fascination with Scandi crime drama, recruiting a hive of international stars to a world of snow and tasteful furnishings, actually became a more effective emulation of Scandi horror.
Frosty music
And so it remains. The pale haze of sunlight on ice makes daytime seem no less threatening than the night. The music, by the evocatively named Ben Frost, shivers with strings and unsettling creaks. And Richard Dormer, as Sheriff Dan Andersen, makes even the good guys seem animalistic and sinister, all grizzle, growl and flashing teeth.
Some time has passed since most of the threat was incinerated in season one. Hildur has grown out her hair and lost her job (Oslo wrests control in the shape of Ken Stott). Andersen, grieving and drinking, has gone missing, presumed dead. (“You don’t disappear in the Arctic and show up later with stubble and a story,” reasons Hildur, with as sure a grasp of the plot as she had for the rudiments of architecture.)
Elsewhere, Parminder Nagra's newly arrived secretive scientist is conducting experiments on comatose survivor Elena (Verónica Echegui). Grizzly, grinning Dennis Quaid is also on hand as a fisherman and old flame of Hildur's whose wife (Game of Throne's Michelle Fairlay) is wrestling stoically with a terminal illness. That cast list radiates with the pedigree of nuanced human drama in much the same way Gov Hildur promised safety.
Happily, a ghoulish opening sequence of demonic possession and cannibalism, a decapitated body and a few monstrous jump moments assure us the exact opposite: this is a zombie thriller on ice. It all happens now under the dancing lights of a deep red sky – “the bloody aurora”, Hildur marvels, still no better at branding, but much closer to the truth.
