Streaming series review - Seconds: Season One

Seconds: Season One **1/2 (out of 5) This procedural series from Finnish TV offers something different from the usual police dramas. One night, a train crash and explosion kills over 60 people and injures many more, among passengers in the train and a group partying in the station’s lounge. Witness testimonies are scant and inconsistent over what happened. Our protagonists are the team of accident investigators from their equivalent of our National Transportation Safety Board.

For six hourlong episodes, the team headed by Marita (Leena Poysti) wades through the debris, witnesses, survivors and victims’ family members trying to figure out the cause in order to prevent such a disaster from happening again. Was it human error? A failure of the new AI control system that’s about to be adopted by all of Europe? Was there some act of vandalism that set the tragic events in motion?

The team is awash in possibilities – none of which seem plausible or consistent with aspects of the evidence. They’re not only separate from the police, whose job is to punish anyone who committed a causative crime regardless of the full array of contributing factors, but in some ways at odds with them. Conflicting interests exist as to control of the physical evidence and contact with witnesses.

We also are given a panoply of subplots and personal issues. The AI system creators might be covering up a known flaw to finalize the sale of their billion dollar product, rather than lose out to a few rival companies close behind in developing theirs. The dude driving the train may not be honest about what he observed. There’s a chicken-or-egg question about whether the train caused the explosion or whether the explosion caused it to crash? This occurred in the boonies, rather than in the middle of a city, further limiting the witness pool.

Of course, there’s plenty of media frenzy and outrage among the locals, seeking to punish whoever cost the lives and health of so many of their friends and family. Several seemingly likely culprits ebb and flow along the way. Marita’s process is influenced by recurring chats with her hallucinated sister, who died 36 years earlier. Another key player is schizophrenic. The woman who ran the station’s bar is a newcomer, and easy target for blame. One member of the team, Eero (Juho Milonoff), is an arrogant asshole who may be more obstructionist than helpful.

The cast is solid; the pace is slow; really slow. There’s less physical action than in crime dramas to keep the energy level up for sustained interest. Those who like puzzles will be most in synch with what they do and what they find in putting the whole thing together. The season ends with resolution of the case, setting the table for Season Two, which will set them on a new disaster to unravel.

(Seconds: Season One, mostly in Finnish with subtitles, streams on MHz Choice as of 9/22/26)