Season 16: Episode 8

Episode 8: Heritage

January 2022. Penelope and Xara are back in Shetland for a short winter vacation, enjoying the hospitality of their friends at Ravenscroft – just in time for the Up Helly Aa fire festival! But the celebration of the past sometimes uncovers questions which can only be answered by time travellers. Or can they?  A tale of identity and uncertainty… with Vikings and Picts!

 

This was a nice episode – the perfect “back to Earth” story before our mid-season break. It started with a somewhat cosy, familiar atmosphere, re-using the main NPCs and locations introduced in our first Shetland story (season 15, episode 11) – folk music, local color, majestic landscapes and all that… and led quite logically (and, I must say, quite beautifully) to a short temporal expedition to 850 AD, just to witness HOW the first Viking settlers interacted with the local natives – which is actually a hotly debated topic among historians and archaeologists, with two main opposite hypotheses (the “peace school” and the “war school”). The result was a very tense, psychology-oriented episode of the “pure historical” variety (no monsters, aliens or weird occurrences aside from the time travellers' own interventions), leading to a nicely open-ended conclusion… Next stop: Avalon! 

See you in November (or so) for the second half of our sixteenth season!