Review: ‘Beforeigners’ mashes up the buddy cop genre and sci-fi time travel in this Norwegian drama

One night in the Norwegian city of Oslo, strange flashes of light illuminate the bay from below. And then suddenly, living, breathing, freaked-out humans pop up out of the water, gasping for air, and completely unaware of how they got there or why.

Flash-forward a few years, and these watery arrivals have become a nightly occurrence, delivering people from three distinct historical periods into the present. These one-way time travelers — Stone Age primitives, Vikings from the Middle Ages and Victorians from the late 1800s — have been mysteriously (and unwillingly) blasted into the 21st century in the Norwegian series “Beforeigners,” a production of HBO Europe that was added to the HBO Max streaming