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A heated debate lately went viral across online platforms, after someone asked the question for females: which would you prefer find yourself stranded in a forest alongside a male or a bear? Like all the best thought experiments, it revealed vastly opposing perspectives and life encounters, highlighted chasms among genders, and could easily to induce an existential crisis if you thought on it for too long. Additionally, there came the almost inevitable follow-up where men of a certain stripe took to the internet to inform females how foolish they were to select the animal and went on to describe the punishments they merited for that choice. This at minimum enabled those females who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.

Portraying the Scenario

To Cook a Bear effectively dramatises this clever small premise. This six-episode drama is adapted on Swedish author Mikael Niemi’s 2018 book of the same name (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It traces the tribulations of a pastor (Gustaf Skarsgård) and his household as they come to begin a new ministry in Kengis, an isolated village in Sweden’s north, during the mid-19th century. Within a community with few pleasures, not one of the inhabitants especially warm to his strict approach to drinking and revelry, but it is his defense of impoverished people – especially the native Sami population, from among whom hails the pastor’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his belief in social justice and equal rights that sets him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.

The Antagonists

Soon in cahoots against him include the lawman Brahe (the performer), the fearsome mill owner the matron Sjödahl (Pernilla August), observed initially dismissing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains gibbering upon seeing of his pulped hand, and anyone else who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of liquor sold by the creepy shopkeeper the merchant Lindmark (Jonas Karlsson). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s creepiness pales once travelling artist the artist Beronius appears on the scene (Simon J Berger, delivering an acting turn of rare unsettling intensity). If they are – like the pastor himself – only a little more being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.

Narrative Development

With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The servant employed by the doctor, the character Hilda (the actress), accordingly vanishes from the woods. Indications of her escape and bear markings upon a trunk are found yet she remains completely absent. Gossip and anxieties of a man/maid-eating bear roaming the woodland spread, yet the clergyman holds a different view that he and Jussi embark to verify.

An Odd Beast

To Cook a Bear is a somewhat odd beast. It conjures a strong impression of the desolation that allows distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that animals might be dominated or inhabited by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the hardscrabble life experienced by the villagers, where brutality, whether that of the wild or mankind, lurks constantly on the edges, poised to explode. But the characters seldom evolve more than ciphers – or maybe, as the struggles amid fairness and vengeance, rationality and religion, good and wickedness escalate, emblematic figures within a moral tale – which stops the whole thing truly coming to life.

Stylistic Shifts

Additionally, there are the many tonally jarring moments where the pastor’s ability in finding evidence and determine the maid’s destiny turns nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds like a combined the Belgian detective the English sleuth – with Jussi a rather hapless assistant figure (neither of whom had to lick a mixture of blood spatter and the boss’s spit to agree that indeed, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), before announcing his newest conclusion and pulling a corpse from a bog.

Opposing Goals

The local leaders are determined proving that Hilda was killed by an animal, perhaps to protect the peace, or possibly to shield a fellow elite. The clergyman is intent on proving otherwise, and the proof so rapidly accumulates in his favour that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance are tested. At its best, the series evokes memories of the TV version a few years ago of the author’s the serpent tale, through its portrayal of the opposing attractions and fears offered by science and belief. In its low points, it resembles Law & Order: Special Ursine Unit. Still, it appears to offer the response to the earlier query: “Females, choose the animal.”

• The series streams on Disney+ now.