Valkyrien: The Underground review: Physician's tunnel vision
CHANNEL 4 Vilma, Dr Ravn and Leif in Valkyrien
The same power is entrusted to Dr Ravn (Sven Nordin) in Norwegian thriller VALKYRIEN: THE UNDERGROUND (Sunday C4) a disgraced physician who can save lives, provided the right equipment is available. Not coincidentally, Valkyrien also happens to be the name of the disused Oslo underground station where the doctor has his lab and consulting rooms, and his patients are the sorts of subterranean type who, for one reason or another, can't go near an official hospital.
As with all the best (and worst) thrillers, it's all about the back story. Barely a year back, Ravn and his wife were top medics doing brave research at the far fringes of cutting-edge quackery. The research (in ways wisely not described too much) made Mrs Ravn ill but instead of permitting Ravn to try out an untested research cure, their colleagues closed ranks and left her to die.
CHANNEL 4 The Norwegian thriller is all about the back story
Mrs Ravn then took her sailing boat out to sea in a storm and disappeared, a sort of fitting Viking warrior suicide, or it would have been if it hadn't been staged by Ravn as a cover. Now sequestered deep underground and devoted to finding a cure for his wife's illness, Ravn depends on the continuing favours of city engineer Leif (Pål Sverre Hagen), who has the keys to all the secret tunnels and bomb shelters. It's claustrophobic and the very opposite of the big skiesempty wilderness stuff we've come to expect of Scandi-import shows. In that sense, it's a nice change.
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The first episode also hinted at the future potential of the unique double act that is the two leads. If Ravn is some way down the obsessive crackpot scale, he's nothing compared to Leif, a moody "doomsday prepper" with some very dodgy friends. (How Leif manages to have friends is another mystery entirely.) Last night saw Dr Ravn treating one of these friends, a severely wounded but cash-rich bank robber, in between pinching a mass spectrometer machine from a local hospital. Say what you like but we never got that on Wallander.
BBC Tech writer Jamie Bartlett in BBC2's Secrets of Silicon Valley
It clogs up my phone with pictures of my "friends" enjoying their first, frosted beers of the weekend, their first swims of the holiday, their children receiving their swimming badges. It reminds me, regularly, that four years ago, I was thinner with more hair and doing slightly better things with my free time. In lots of ways, I already didn't like Facebook. Now, thanks to SECRETS OF SILICON VALLEY (Sunday, BBC2), there's another reason. In last night's concluding episode tech writer Jamie Bartlett charted how its spookily clever datagathering tricks helped put Donald Trump in power.