Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Chosen’ On Netflix, A Danish Sci-Fi Drama About A Teen Who Digs For The Truth About A Meteor Strike

We’ve seen shows where teens who don’t feel like they belong in the town they live in find a like-minded group and then investigate a grand mystery in their small town. But have we seen that married to an alien invasion story? That’s the idea behind the new Danish series on Netflix.

CHOSEN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Shots of a nebula in space. A young woman’s voice says “Outer space. It’s all around us.”

The Gist: Emma (Malaika Mosendane) is a tour guide at a massive crater in the town of Middelbo. Seventeen years earlier, a meteor crashed in the sleepy shipping town, right in the middle of a supermarket owned by a man named Hussein (Shahbaz Sarwar). The resulting curiosity about the crater and the meteor has fueled tourism to the town and revived it — and has made Hussein insanely wealthy.

However, that surge is starting to wane, and the crowd that Emma is touring is just a school group. A particularly annoying kid wants to touch the meteor, and under threat, Emma relents. His light touch pushes it over and it breaks. Emma is fired, of course, but when she picked up a piece of the broken rock, she sees it’s made of glass. Meteors aren’t made of glass, are they?

In the meantime, scientists at a local satellite station are hearing an unusual signal coming from outer space. They find it even stranger when the signal and response are in the vicinity of Middelbo.

The glass shard bothers Emma, but she can’t get anyone to take her seriously, including her boyfriend Jonas (Magnus Juhl Andersen). She hates being in Middelbo and looks for more meds from her doctor, Susan (Magnus Juhl Andersen), to help her cope. She decides to call Hussein about what she found, and he invites her to his mansion for a talk. What he essentially says is that there was no meteor, at least not one that stayed intact upon impact, but he thought the town needed something tangible to look at. Suffice to say, the very moral Emma isn’t satisfied with that answer. He offers her drink tickets for the fair to buy her silence.

Her mother invokes something Emma wrote when she was 13 to persuade her to go to the annual meteor-themed fair with her on Emma’s 17th birthday. At the fair, Hussein introduces Thomas Damborg (Ken Vedsegaard), who intends on reviving the port that has been dormant for decades. During that intro, a drunk Emma screams that it’s all a lie.

She goes back to the museum, but falls asleep outside of it. A group of teens — Marie (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), Mads (Albert Rudbeck Lindhardt), Frederik (Andreas Dittmer) and Hussein’s son Elvis (Mohamed Djeziri) — bring her into the museum and let her know that they’re looking into the meteor crash, keeping an eye on anyone they knew was there. They think that what actually crashed was an alien ship, and something is communicating with it.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Chosen feels like Nancy Drew mixed with The X-Files. Seriously.

Our Take: Chosen, created by Christian Potalivo and Jannik Tai Mosholt (The Rain) has the good fortune of taking two seemingly different genres — the awkward-teen-investigating-a-mystery genre and the alien invasion drama — and melds them rather seamlessly. We don’t know everything that’s going on in Middelbo, but we know that enough strange things are going on that someone will come along and find out. We’re glad that it’s the set of characters at the center of this series.

We don’t know a ton about the boys in this group, except for the fact that they’re super-serious about this investigation. Emma seems to connect with Marie the strongest at the outset, as they bond while staking out Emma’s doctor, Susan. According to the boys, Marie is “90% vampire,” and she admits that she likes to watch people and see them reveal their secrets to reassure her that “everyone is as fucked up as me.” That seems to be Emma’s point of view, too, so her curiosity about the meteor plus her sense of belonging to this group will help keep her interested in this conspiracy.

The adult characters aren’t particularly well-defined at this point, but there’s supposed to be a bit of mystery surrounding who they are and what they know. It’s pretty obvious that a lot of people are keeping secrets, and what lengths they’ll go to to keep those secrets is what’s going to drive the teens’ investigation and the show’s story in general. It does help that the show displays a bit of a wry sense of humor when needed, so the entire exercise doesn’t just seem like yet another dirge-y piece of Scandi noir, just with aliens.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: As Emma and Marie see Susan sneaking out of her house to talk to Emma’s biology teacher, Hans (Henrik Prip), we see an odd-looking figure emerging from the wreckage of what originally looked like a plane crash.

Sleeper Star: Gadeberg is certainly creepy — in a fun way — as Marie. But it does look like she and Emma will become fast friends.

Most Pilot-y Line: Right after Jonas calls Emma a pain in the ass for contacting Hussein, he yells “I love you!” as she justifiably pedals away from him in anger. Kinda funny, but boy what a jerk he is.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Chosen has a number of places to go with its story. It can lean heavily on the alien invasion piece, or lean more towards the teen-finding-her-people piece. Either way, it looks to be a fun ride.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.