In the latter half of the Book of Genesis, the patriarch Jacob’s sons gang up on Jacob’s favorite son, Joseph, and sell him into slavery. After the terrible deed is done, they come back to their father bearing Joseph’s coat of many colors, which they have torn and smeared with sheep’s blood to make it look as if Joseph had been killed by a wild animal. Jacob is inconsolable and sinks into a state of deep mourning for 22 years until his eventual dramatic reunion with Joseph in Egypt. Why, though, ask the rabbinic sages, did Jacob continue to mourn for Joseph after the first year? Is there not a tradition that says that the spirit of the departed begins to leave the memory of the mourner after the first year? This tradition, answer the sages, only applies when the departed person is dead. Jacob continued to mourn for Joseph not because he believed that his son had died but because he never gave up hope that he was still alive.

A similar spirit animates the soul of Astrid Agerskov, the protagonist of the new Danish mystery series Equinox, now streaming on Netflix. Based on a Danish podcast, the series centers on the aforementioned Astrid, a journalist who hosts a call-in radio show called The Voice of the Night, in which she discusses superstitions, apparitions, and other occult phenomena, appropriate work for someone troubled by disturbing specters of her own. When she was a young girl, her older sister Ida went off in a party truck with 23 other students. The truck never returned. What exactly happened to it is shrouded in mystery, but whatever it was, it led to the disappearance of nearly everyone in the truck, including Ida. The cryptic events of that day continue to haunt Astrid into her adulthood, afflicting her with nightmares and waking visions of horror but also, strangely, nourishing her with an undying sense of hope.