Foreign Minister Birgitte Nyborg, 53, is plagued by hot flashes.
She shakes her shirt, bathes herself with a napkin, she gets volcanic eruptions from nowhere.
There is some kind of connection between her menopause debut and the adventure Borgen's fourth season entails for her.
Because the situation
heats up quickly.
A Canadian exploration company has discovered a huge oil field outside Greenland.
The Greenlandic politicians see a chance for independence from Denmark.
The Danish politicians at Christiansborg, on the other hand, have promised their voters to phase out fossil fuels and counter global warming.
But how do you explain to a poor and historically oppressed people that they are not allowed to exploit their own natural resources?
It does not get any easier when Russian interests start buying large shares in the exploration company.
Soon Birgitte Nyborg is in the eye of a geopolitical storm.
It has been a decade
since the last episode of Borgen but the important players are in place: the idealistic Birgitte Nyborg (Sidse Babett Knudsen) is Minister of Foreign Affairs, the shotgun reporter Katrine Fønsmark (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen) is back on TV1, now in the role of news director.
A welcome addition is Mikkel Boe Følsgaard (The Chestnut Man, The Rain), who takes a job as Nyborg's Arctic Ambassador.
Series creator Adam Price is a professional craftsman - appetizing cliffhangers (cliffs, as they are called in the industry) in every crime and in every end.
If you manage to keep up with the plot, the story is really exciting.
Sidse Babett Knudsen has grown into her role interpretation where Nyborg makes a much darker journey than before (think the Batman films where each iteration should be darker than its predecessor).
Nyborg loses its foothold.
She drinks too much, is disgusting towards her son, crawls on the floor and makes friends in the dirty outskirts of Copenhagen's political sphere.
When she starts dressing in black, the thoughts go to Queen Cersei in Game of Thrones.
But in heart and soul, Borgen is exactly what it has always been: a TV soap.
An elegant and well-made one, but a soap.
And as such quite unusual and welcome in today's streaming landscape where most are miniseries based on real events.
Despite an exciting season, two things turn out to be disappointing.
Despite the fact that half the story takes place in Greenland, the quite a few Greenlandic characters remain simple springboards for the development of Copenhagen politicians.
Such a fundamentally exciting society deserves better treatment instead of becoming one of the few threads that the story actually loses.
Then there is this with
Birgitte Nyborg's hot flashes.
The series portrays these not only as a metaphor for global warming, but also as a key to understanding her journey into the dark.
It's ugly and disloyal to the character.
Would menopause itself push a person across the border to the point where both family members and party comrades turn their backs on him?
I doubt.