Netflix’s Norwegian fantasy drama Ragnarok sets Norse gods loose in a small town choking on its own industry, and it works far better than that premise should.
The series premiered on January 31, 2020, created by Adam Price and Emilie Lebech Kaae. It runs three seasons and 18 episodes, ending on August 24, 2023. Set in the fictional Norwegian town of Edda in Hordaland, it follows a teenager who discovers he is the reincarnation of Thor and turns him against the family that owns the local factories.
Trailer, via Netflix.
Edda, Hordaland, and the Jutul Family
The town of Edda has a problem. Its winters are warm, its downpours are violent, and its pollution traces back to factories owned by the Jutul family. That is the show’s starting point: a community being poisoned by the people who employ it.
The Jutuls are not what they appear. They are four jötnar — supernatural beings the English dub and closed captions render, inexactly, as “giants.” They pose as a family. Synnøve Macody Lund plays Ran Jutul, Herman Tømmeraas plays Fjor, Theresa Frostad Eggesbø plays Saxa, and the household runs on the quiet authority of people who have outlasted everyone around them.
This is the smartest thing Ragnarok does. It does not stage a battle between gods and monsters. It stages a fight between a boy and a company town, and lets the supernatural layer sit on top of an ordinary grievance.
Magne Seier Picks Up the Hammer
David Alexander Sjøholt plays Magne Seier, the teenage boy at the center. He is surprised to learn he is the reincarnation of Thor, the Norse god of thunder. His friend dies under mysterious circumstances, and that death pushes him to fight the forces destroying Edda.
Sjøholt plays Magne as a kid who is not thrilled about any of this. The power arrives without instruction. There is no training montage, no mentor handing over a rulebook. He gets strong, he gets angry, and he has to figure out what to do with both.
Jonas Strand Gravli plays Laurits Seier, Magne’s brother. Henriette Steenstrup plays their mother, Turid Seier. The family scenes are where the show keeps its footing when the mythology threatens to take over.
The Second Season Brings More Gods
Season one is Magne against the Jutuls, more or less alone. In the second season, he is joined by more people who embody other Norse gods. That shift changes the show’s shape — from one boy’s secret to a small pantheon learning to operate together.
Danu Sunth plays Iman Reza, one of the new arrivals in that expansion. Bjørn Sundquist plays Wotan Wagner, a name that tells you exactly what the show is doing with him. The series does not hide its hand. It wants you to recognize the gods before the characters do.
The second season released in May 2021. It is a broader, busier run than the first, and it trades some of the original’s tight focus for a bigger cast and a bigger fight.
Ragnarok is a Norwegian fantasy drama television series reimagining of Norse mythology from Netflix.
Netflix’s Third Norwegian-Language Series
Ragnarok is Netflix’s third Norwegian-language TV series, following Home for Christmas and Lilyhammer. It is produced by the Danish production company SAM Productions.
That production history matters to how the show looks. It is not a glossy American fantasy with Norwegian scenery pasted in. The town feels lived-in, the factories feel municipal, and the apocalypse arrives through weather reports rather than fire from the sky.
The show ran for three seasons. In November 2021, Tømmeraas confirmed the series was returning for a third and final season. That final season was released on August 24, 2023, closing the story at 18 episodes across three runs.
What Ragnarok Gets Right
The best episodes treat climate change as a local fact rather than a slogan. Edda’s warm winters and violent downpours are not background. They are the crime. The Jutuls profit from the damage, and the town depends on them anyway, which is a more honest bind than most genre shows bother to construct.
The cast carries it. Macody Lund gives Ran a stillness that reads as age rather than menace, which is harder. Tømmeraas and Frostad Eggesbø play the Jutul children as people who have never once been told no. Sundquist’s Wotan Wagner arrives with the weight of a man who has seen this all before.
The show also knows when to be small. Magne’s powers do not solve his family’s problems. Laurits gets his own arc, and Gravli plays it with a restlessness that keeps the brotherhood from becoming a simple alliance.
Where the Series Stumbles
Three seasons is a long time to sustain a reveal, and Ragnarok spends a lot of its middle stretch stalling. The second season adds gods faster than it adds reasons to care about them. Iman Reza and the others expand the board without always deepening it.
The mythology can also get in the way of the story. Once the show starts naming its gods outright, some of the mystery drains out. The first season worked because Magne did not know what he was. Later seasons know too much, and the audience knows it too.
The final season has to close a story that kept widening. It lands the ending, but it lands it by narrowing fast, and some of the characters who mattered most in the early episodes get less room than they earned.
Here is the ranking of what the show does best, in order:
- The Jutul family as a portrait of inherited power
- Magne’s unwilling, unglamorous version of Thor
- Edda itself as a town being slowly poisoned
- The second-season expansion into a broader pantheon
- The final season’s rush to close every thread
That order is also the show’s problem. Its strongest asset is its villain family, and its weakest is the machinery it builds around them.
The Verdict on Ragnarok
Ragnarok is a good show that could have been a great one, and the gap between those two things is mostly discipline. The premise is strong, the setting is specific, and the central idea — that the apocalypse is already happening in a small town and nobody wants to say so — is the reason to watch.
What holds it back is scale. Netflix gave it three seasons and 18 episodes, and the show used that room to add rather than to deepen. More gods, more allies, more mythology. The first season’s power came from a boy, a dead friend, and a family that owned everything. That is enough for a series. It did not need a pantheon.
The published critical score sits at 7.0 out of 10, with a 70% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. That is about right. Ragnarok is worth the time, especially the first season, and it never quite becomes the show its best ideas promised.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.