Stop Nyqvist

Helsinki is swarming with spies. The CIA and the FSB are quietly wrestling over Finland's future, while the country's own ministries, staffed by officials of spectacular incompetence, are doing an equally effective job of pushing the world toward catastrophe.

Into this chaos steps Aleksis Nyqvist, a junior intern at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. When Finland's newly established secret service needs a figurehead, a pliable nobody to occupy the top position, Nyqvist is the obvious choice. The problem is that he takes the job seriously. Too seriously. His over-identification with his new role sets off a security crisis that spirals far beyond anyone's control, drawing in a NATO submarine now sitting on the seabed, thirty dead Danish sailors, Russian forces in eastern Finland, a serial killer operative, and the long-unsolved mystery of who shot Olof Palme.

Pysäyttäkää Nyqvist is a sharp satirical comedy from Finland's Yle, written by Teemu Kaskinen and Heikki Heiskanen and directed by Juha Lankinen. Its absurdist premise lands somewhere between bureaucratic farce and genuine geopolitical dread, and its timing proved uncomfortably prescient. The series was produced in 2022, before the world it imagined began to feel a great deal less fictional.