I’m not really a person to write television reviews, but I do feel compelled for this one, as it is perhaps the first ‘mainstream’ tv show I’ve seen that is specifically and fascinatingly cli-fi. In case you’re wondering, cli-fi is a relatively new sub-genre of science fiction that takes on climate change as a topic for dystopian futures. Imagining a post-climate disaster world has been the subject of several movies thus far (The Age of Stupid and The Day after Tomorrow are two that immediately spring to mind) but not as many television shows have taken up the genre.

Enter Fortitude.

If you haven’t heard of it, Fortitude is a genre-bending television show with a stellar cast, set in the fictional Norse Arctic town Fortitude. Part Twin Peaks, part Fargo, part The Terror, it’s all good. A great interview with the show’s creator can be found here, I don’t need to go into the specifics of the plot of the show as it’s been done elsewhere.

The first season’s cli-fi angle is very self-evident, in that there is a melting glacier, a mammoth corpse, and prehistoric parasitic wasp that’s never encountered humans before taking up residence in the town (with various gruesome results). That’s the obvious cli-fi angle.

The metaphors run deep in this show, however, and they become better as the show goes on. The first person to be affected by the virus is a child of colour, Liam Sutter. Liam is the son of the only black adult on the show in season 1, Frank Sutter, the local search and rescue pilot. Frank is a veteran of Afghanistan, and has more than a few anger issues that become evident throughout the season, he also feels deeply complicit in his child’s illness because of his own selfish actions, thus individualizing the blame and horror of what is a structural (climate) problem. This mirrors the ways in which climate harms will be unevenly distributed in the developed (mostly white) and developing (mostly of colour) worlds, and the ways in which blame for the problems are largely individualized so as to prevent ourselves from looking at structural issues. It also mirrors the ways in which the choices we make today (extraction, profit – the mammoth is brought down from the glacier by two recently out of work miners who want to sell it at a profit) will harm the people who are children today – because the harms done to the earth today are going to be our children’s problems to deal with. This is despite one of the miners doing it for his daughter – the short-sighted gain for his own child outweighing the enormous harms that are to come.

The second victim, Shirley, is another metaphor in that she is the quintessential young consumer, made concrete by the feeding behaviours of her partner, Markus. She is reluctant in some ways, gently resistant to his forcing food down her throat, but does it still, because she is so in need of the love and approval that she never got from her mother (intergenerational trauma). The idea of consuming as the solution to our problems creates this person who, despite her being the type of person who no one would think of as evil, becomes a monster. The fact that Frank Sutter attacks Markus could perhaps be a metaphor for the way in which climate activists attack McDonald’s store fronts as metonymy for corporatism as a whole – satisfying, but largely misguided and ineffectual.

Now, for the hubris of the scientists (Vincent and Natalie) at the Arctic Research Centre. They intentionally cause harm (give a lumbar puncture) to Liam, because they are so sure that there is a certain explanation to the illness – specifically, the accumulation of a persistent organic pollutant they find common to Shirley and the polar bear’s brain – they talk specifically about confirmation bias. This could be in reference to the “Climategate” papers that were made so famous in the lead up to the big climate conference in Copenhagen, where scientists were accused of massaging the data to show a certain outcome. The fact that Vincent and Natalie were wrong that time (about the persistent organic pollutants) however, doesn’t mean that something still isn’t going on!

Finally, the ability of fire to destroy what ice couldn’t – we’ve learned over millennia to live in all the climates that our goldilocks planet have produced, including the far north. What we cannot live through is the kind of warming that is projected to happen in the next few hundred years.

Ok. That’s season one. Season two gets even more interesting,