Tears of blood were never a good sign.
Sloborn is a Danish-German live-action TV show from 2020. It was written and directed by Christian Alvart. A second season was published in 2022.
Sloborn is a quite normal German island in the North Sea. Close to Denmark, loved by tourists for the countryside, and inhabited by bored teenagers and adults trying their best. Evelin Kern, 15, finds out about her pregnancy. The father is a teacher she has a secret relationship with, and her parents Helena and Richard are divorcing due to their too-different career plans. Her classmate Hermann “Herm” Schwarting is bullied by his classmates and tries to grow a spine. The bookshop owner Merit Ponz invites her favorite author Nikolai Wagner to hold a public reading of his new book in her shop, but Nikolai has a problem – the new novel doesn’t exist yet. The Dane Magnus Fisker also comes back to Sloborn, leading a group of juvenile convicts in a project to renovate a farm.And who also comes, is the pigeon flu. First, it is just news reports about a new disease spreading in Asia and Latin America. Then, a sailing boat bumps into the coast of Sloborn. On board – only two corpses, and both were sick with pigeon flu…
Contains examples of the following tropes:
- Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder: Mrs Kern has sex with Nikolai Wagner while her husband is away for work.
- Abusive Parents:
- Herm’s father, the village policeman of Sloborn, hits his son.
- Evelin’s parents are neglectful towards their duties as parents and often leave their younger sons with their oldest daughter to pursue their respective careers.
- Accidental Child-Killer Backstory: The backstory of one of the juvenile delinquents. The boy threw rocks on a highway for some action and caused a car crash in which a mother and two little children were killed.
- Addled Addict: Nikolai Wagner, an author spending some time on Sloborn for a public reading he didn’t yet write the book for, is addicted to cocaine and suffers from withdrawal.
- A Degree in Useless: Evelin’s father Richard Kern is a virologist but has to work as a vet on Sloborn to be able to do anything for a living. His arc is mainly about him trying to get a job in basic research on pigeon flu.
- After the End: Becomes this in the later seasons.
- The Apocalypse Brings Out the Best in People: Inverted. It doesn't need long until Sloborn devolves into anarchy, even with the military around and martial law declared. People refuse to wear masks out of sheer spite, loot the local supermarket and even shoot around aimlessly. The only good it does is helping some people to become more courageous.
- Appeal to Worse Problems: When Magnus Fisker tries to share his awe at the sunset and the beauty of nature with two of his delinquents, one of them snaps at him why a sunset should make him happy while there is so much suffering like climate change, biodiversity loss, parental abuse or the dove bug in the world.
- As the Good Book Says...: Arno Ponz reads Psalm 91 to his congregation.
- Author Appeal: Author Christian Alvart was raised in a strictly Christian household and includes this experience with the family of Evelin's friend and classmate Emma, whose family holds daily family prayer services and is implied to be Seventh Day Adventist. On the evacuation bus, they are seen praying the Lord's Prayer together.
- Blood from Every Orifice: A symptom of a later stage of pigeon flu.
- Canine Companion: Knuspa, the dog of the Kern family.
- Coincidental Broadcast: Broadcasts about the pigeon flu in foreign countries are used for Foreshadowing in the early episodes.
- Cozy Catastrophe: Becomes one for Nikolai Wagner, since he is brought to an empty and luxurious hotel where is safe from infection and can finally write his new book in peace.
- Crisis Point Hospital: The hospital in Kiel Evelin is brought to is in chaos, infected people have to be placed in the corridors and a good part of the medical personnel is infected themselves.
- Daddy's Girl: Evelin is much closer to her father than to her mother, accompanying him on his job and trusting him much more. Subverted from the moment when she finds out about the Dark Secret of his workplace.
- Dead Guy Junior: In season 2, Evelin names her newborn daughter Mila after her deceased father Milan.
- Due to the Dead: John Wilkinson held a lonely vigil for his wife Rachel, who died of pigeon flu before him.
- Driven to Suicide:
- John Wilkinson shot himself to avert the late stages of the dove bug.
- An elderly couple from Sloborn, both sick, is seen jumping from a cliff together.
- Herm’s father shoots himself with his service weapon.
- Herm drinks the water he used to infect his father deliberately.
- Everybody's Dead, Dave: Double subverted. A mailman finds a house full of dead people. He tries to save the Not Quite Dead little daughter, but she also dies.
- Ghost Ship: How pigeon flu arrives on Sloborn. A sailing boat is washed unto the shore, on board only two corpses. Both were sick with The Plague when they died…
- Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Double Subverted. When Evelin gets that she is pregnant, she decides not to keep the baby, but after Milan dies, she decides to have it anyway. Justified by Someone to Remember Him By.
- Good Shepherd: Pastor Arno Ponz is a good priest who tries his best to help his congregation cope with the pandemic reaching their island and killing people.
- Government Conspiracy: The government is telling the populace wrong numbers of infections, seemingly tries to kill off all of Sloborn by quarantining infected and healthy people together and apparently has some shady secrets which aren’t elaborated any further.
- Her Heart Will Go On: Evelin sees her teacher and boyfriend die from a dove bug infection she gave him.
- History Repeats Itself: The backstory of the Kern family tells us that Helena was once the oldest and only sister of several younger brothers who were frequently left in her care by her parents, who were always at work. Helena and her husband Richard treat their daughter Evelin in a similar way now.
- Honor Before Reason: Fiete and Herm don’t inform the authorities when discovering that one of them shows symptoms of dove bug, since they ran away to have some fun together and don’t want to get into trouble for that.
- How We Got Here: The very first scene is Evelin with a blood-stained face wearing a mask and running away from a military helicopter together with her brothers. The next scene blends back to "8 days before".
- The Immune: Evelin is discovered to be this. There are more out there.
- Incest Subtext: Between Helena Kern and her younger brother, Sloborn's mayor Rolf Ostergaard. They are seen cuddling an awful lot for adult siblings, and even greet each other with a kiss once.
- Incurable Cough of Death: Bloody coughing fits are one of the symptoms of pigeon flu.
- Infection Scene: Evelin’s first infection with dove bug happens through a shared water bottle. It is filmed in close-up.
- Information Wants to Be Free: Evelin and Herm spread a video about the circumstances the public media doesn't talk about, especially how dire they really are: much higher infection than reported by official media, apparent spread from Germany to Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden in a timeframe of less than a week, Crisis Point Hospitals, inhumane quarantine conditions and immune people being experimented on.
- Just Before the End: The setting in the first season.
- Mad Artist: Nikolai Wagner is a cocaine-addicted, mentally unstable author.
- Meaningful Funeral: The funerals of Ole and Merit Ponz. Subverted in the latter’s case, since the mourners are forced to break up.
- Missing Mom:
- Herm’s mother suffered Death by Childbirth when he was born.
- Also becomes a thing for Louis Ponz after his mother Merit dies of pigeon flu.
- Mistaken For Dead: Herm believes Louis to be dead while he is just asleep. Justified, since Louis has the very deadly pigeon flu.
- Morning Sickness: Experiencing this when coming back from a field trip gives Evelin the clue that she should test herself for pregnancy.
- Ominous Pipe Organ: In S1 E2, the pipe organ of the Sloborn church is played Louis Ponz's face features bloody tears, the first symptom of pigeon flu.
- One-Word Title: Sloborn, like the main setting. Doubles as a Pun-Based Title, since it sounds similar to the English phrase "slow burn".
- The Patient Has Left the Building: After seeing dead immune people and the chaos at the hospital in Kiel, Evelin flees from there after shooting a video.
- Patricide: Herm tries to invoke this by infecting his father with pigeon flu deliberately. It backfires when he shoots himself when he gets that he is sick now, driving guilt-ridden Herm to infect himself too.
- The Plague: Pigeon flu, also known as dove bug. First you bleed from the eyes, then bloody coughing fits and fever follow, the blood then comes from every orifice, and 90 % of the patients are dead after several days.
- Pun-Based Title: Sloborn invokes the pronunciation of the English phrase "slow burn". Author Christian Alvart intended to tell the story of a cataclysm in slow motion.
- Quarantine with Extreme Prejudice: All of Sloborn shall be brought into quarantine camps by the end. Men, women and children all together, all the same whether infected or not. It is enforced by the military.
- Run for the Border: Magnus Fisker, a Danish citizen, tries to evacuate his group of juvenile delinquents to Denmark by boat. The emphasis is on trying.
- Someone to Remember Him By: Evelin’s child becomes this after Milan Gruber dies of pigeon flu.
- Teacher/Student Romance: Between Evelin Kern and her teacher and school counselor Milan Gruber.
- Teen Pregnancy: Evelin got pregnant from her secret lover, who is her teacher.
- Tears of Blood: One of the first symptoms of pigeon flu is bleeding from the eyes.
- There Is Another: Evelin proves to be not alone with her status as The Immune. She finds out when brought to a Special Isolation Ward in a hospital in Kiel, where she meets another immune girl her age who tells her that she arrived with a whole group of people like her.
- Took a Level in Badass: Herm becomes more and more courageous during the course of the show.
- Tourism-Derailing Event: Tourism is the biggest trade on Sloborn, most people on Sloborn make their living from tourism, and the tourists are the first to be evacuated as soon as it is proven that pigeon flu really reached the island. Like expected, many Slobornians are enraged.
- Traumatic Haircut: Evelin is nearly subjected to one on the Special Isolation Ward in Kiel: for reasons of hygiene, her hair has to be shaved off. The girl she meets there is already shaved. She defies this trope by escaping.
- You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Merit tries to tell this to Nikolai. He starts believing it slowly.
