Each episode of all three series opens 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 (
Kirsten Rolffes), 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 and ultimately finds it preserved in a specimen jar in the office of the hospital's professor of pathology, Professor Bondo (
Baard Owe). Meanwhile,
neurosurgeon Stig Helmer (
Ernst-Hugo Järegård), 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. Palle Bondo (
Baard Owe) attempts to convince the family of a man dying from
liver cancer to donate his liver to the hospital for Bondo's research. (In fact, Bondo wants it as a trophy, as it is the second largest hepatosarcoma ever recorded.) When denied, Bondo has the cancerous liver
transplanted into his own body (as the patient 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 the baby in her
womb is developing abnormally rapidly. In every episode, two dishwashers (each with
Down syndrome) in the cellar discuss the strange happenings at Riget, and Helmer screams his famous catchphrase:
"Danskjävlar!" (subtitled as "Danish scum", but literally "Danish devils"). In the third series,
Exodus, sleepwalker Karen Svensson finds herself at Rigshospitalet, investigating the fallout of the fatal power outage at the end of the second series.
Exodus also introduces Dr. Helmer, Jr. (
Mikael Persbrandt), the neurotic son of the late Stig Helmer, and a new addition to the staff of Riget. Helmer Jr. is threatened with a lawsuit after making sexual advances to a female colleague in the hospital, has to consult a Swedish lawyer (
Alexander Skarsgard), son of the lawyer from season 2. == Cast ==