Alerted to the name and setting of HBO Max’s new Antarctic series, The Head, the discerning viewer is likely to have some questions. Has the streaming service purchased, in its desperation for fresh content, a program about cold-weather latrines, perhaps intending to explore their effect on the exposed human posterior? Might the title refer instead to a polar promontory, an expedition leader, or the foam on an adventurer’s celebratory beer? As it turns out, The Head’s creators have in mind something altogether more obvious. Near the end of the first episode, their eponymous object falls from a body and rolls across the ice.
The identity of the responsible decapitator is the enigma that drives HBO Max’s six-part thriller, a show so indebted to Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None that one half-expects the queen of mystery to rise from the grave and attack it with an ice pick. Like the bestselling novel, HBO Max’s series features an isolated location and a cast of suspicious persons. As in Dame Agatha’s plot, The Head’s characters die one by one at the hands of a killer who is concealed among them. A creature of its time, The Head trades And Then There Were None’s interest in criminal psychology for inconsequential feints in the direction of climate change and the #MeToo movement. Nevertheless, in both its pacing and trajectory, the series is pure Christie. It may be cold, but it’s very much a “cozy.”
The Head opens on a rollicking celebration held by the staff of Polaris VI, an Antarctic research station tasked with studying a carbon dioxide-eating bacterium. Sitting on the ice alongside the barbecue grills and foldout tables is the transport plane that will take the summer staff back to civilization. For the rest of the crew, a motley band of misfits and eager beavers, a long, dark winter awaits. If the homicidal maniac in their number doesn’t get them, count on the soul-destroying boredom to finish the job.
Told primarily in retrospect, The Head spends only a scene or two with the winterers before leaping ahead to the return of their departed colleagues. Led by Johan Berg (Alexandre Willaume), the summer staff reenter the station to find a disaster zone of bloody handprints, bullet-pocked walls, and broken bodies. Of the winter crew’s 10 members, only two remain unaccounted for amid the carnage: Johan’s wife, Annika (Laura Bach), and a rival biologist, Arthur Wilde (John Lynch). Having found a third, team doctor Maggie Mitchell (Katharine O’Donnelly), in hiding, Johan begins to elicit the story that will allow him to uncover Annika’s whereabouts.
Though the flashbacks constructed from Maggie’s memories eventually reveal the guilty party, their initial job is to introduce audiences to the victims-slash-suspects. Erik Osterland (Richard Sammel) is the ineffectual winter chief and the sometime lover of Ebba Ullman (Sandra Andreis), a steely nurse with a husband and children back home. Nils Hedlund (Chris Reilly), a hard-drinking technician, frequently feuds with Miles Porter (Tom Lawrence), a communication officer who monitors his coworkers’ hot-water usage with a stopwatch. Like the computer specialist Heather Blake (Amelia Hoy), research assistant Aki Kobayashi (Tomohisa Yamashita) is new to the Antarctic and unaccustomed to the protracted polar night. Far more comfortable is chef Ramon Lazaro (Alvaro Morte), who served, along with several other members of the winter crew, at Polaris VI’s ill-fated precursor station, Polaris V.
What happened during that previous mission plays a significant role in The Head’s solution, as does a late-episode trek to Polaris V’s abandoned site. The show’s strongest moments, however, occur earlier in its run, when the confused and traumatized members of the winter crew confront one another over the identity of the murderer. These scenes, buoyed by Alain Bainee’s impressively claustrophobic set design, break no new ground and will be familiar to viewers who understand the conventions of parlor mysteries. Nevertheless, they are engagingly filmed and appropriately tense. For a while, it really does seem as if anyone could be the killer.
That this delicious unpredictability mostly dissipates by the series’s midpoint is due to the show’s lamentable failure to disguise its deceptions properly. Like more than one Christie novel, The Head makes use of a false solution before revealing what actually happened. Unlike Christie’s best books, the series drops so many conspicuous hints that few observers will be fooled by the former or astonished by the latter. Given the program’s other flaws, among them a tendency toward ponderous dialogue in the “blood is the best camouflage” vein, The Head’s central conundrum simply has to satisfy if the show is to succeed. With nothing especially true or profound to say about the human experience, The Head has little to fall back on once audiences guess its ending.
Indeed, the most interesting thing about the series may be the circumstances of its development and distribution, which together reveal much about the evolving television landscape. A production of Spanish and Japanese media companies, The Head is an English-language thriller starring Danish and Irish actors and streaming on an American subscription service. Whatever its downsides may have been, globalism won.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
