Katla season 1, episode 4 recap – “This Is Not Him”

This recap of Katla season 1, episode 4, “This Is Not Him”, contains spoilers.

Thanks to Mikael’s snitching in the previous episode, his mother Rakel is on her way to Vik, which is sure to upset Darri, who is thus far doing a terrible job of keeping the young boy hidden.

Then again everyone seems to be doing a terrible job of virtually everything in Katla episode 4. Grima is having dreams about Asa’s disappearance and is trying to get to the bottom of them, risking another mental breakdown in the process, which isn’t helped by Kjartan’s complete lack of support. (He does justify his attitude somewhat to Asa, blaming her misbehavior before she disappeared as the root of his marital problems.) Rakel can’t get up to the glacier, so Darri takes Mikael down to Vik, which doesn’t go unremarked upon.

Everyone seems to be converging on the hotel. That’s where Rakel, Darri, and Mikael are staying, and it’s where the younger Gunhild is heading after being discharged from the clinic, though she deviates to spend some time with Thor, while the older version frets to learn he has children she didn’t know about.

More problems begin to emerge in Katla season 1, episode 4. We learn more about Mikael, for instance, including that he burned down his school and lied about it, and that Rakel covered for him; Darri thinks this new version lacks even the glimmer of conscience that the original child had exhibited after clipping his bird’s wings. If he’s worse now than he was when he was an animal-torturing arsonist, then that probably doesn’t bode well.

Grima and Asa, meanwhile, return to the site of the latter’s disappearance, a cabin on the glacier, and find a crawl space underneath it that leads to a corpse. It’s hard to tell, but Grima seems to exclaim “Asa” upon this discovery — is she shouting to Asa, who is nearby, or is this the dead body of her real sister? If the latter is the case, then who is inhabiting her sister’s body now?