The Kingdom (TV Miniseries) - Plot

Plot

Each episode of Riget and Riget II begins with the same prologue, detailing how the hospital, Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, was built on the site of the "bleaching ponds", which recur in the name of the street of the hospital's official address, Blegdamsvej, although the exact significance of the reference is never explicitly discussed in the series.

The show begins with the admission of a spiritualist patient, Sigrid Drusse, who hears the sound of a girl crying in the elevator shaft. Upon investigation, Drusse discovers that the girl had died decades earlier, having been killed by her father to hide her illegitimacy. In order to put the spirit to rest, Drusse searches for the girl's body, ultimately finding it preserved in a specimen jar in the office of the hospital's professor of pathology, professor Bondo (Baard Owe).

Meanwhile, neurosurgeon Stig Helmer, a recent appointee from Sweden to the neurosurgery department, tries to cover up his responsibility for a botched operation which left a young girl in a persistent vegetative state.

Pathologist Dr. Bondo attempts to convince the family of a man dying from liver cancer to donate his liver to the hospital for his research. (In fact, he wants it as a trophy, it being the second largest hepatosarcoma ever recorded.) When his request is denied, Bondo has the cancerous liver transplanted into his own body (the patient having signed an organ donor form), so that the cancer will become his personal property and can be kept within the hospital.

Amongst other plotlines, a young medical student becomes attracted to the nurse in charge of the sleep research laboratory, a ghostly ambulance appears and disappears every night, a junior doctor runs a black market in medical supplies, and a neurosurgeon discovers that she was impregnated by a ghost and that her baby is developing abnormally rapidly. In every episode, two dishwashers (each with Down syndrome) in the cellar discuss the strange happenings at Riget and Stig Helmer stands on the roof and screams his famous catchphrase: Danskjävlar (Danish scum has been a common translation, but Danish bastards or even Danish fuckers would be closer to the context to what he means).