“This is the beginning of something new for all of us.”
“What Happens In The Cave” opens in a cave, naturally. Floki strikes sparks, lights a guttering torch, and descends into what he, in his single-minded resolve after the self-destruction of his dream of a pure Norse colony, is convinced is the actual, physical portal to the realm of the gods. Clambering resolutely through tumbles of slaty stone, waxy formations of volcanic rock, and the increasing rumble and spray of the unstable mountain, he leaves no trail, no markers to lead him out again should his single torch die. This is a one way trip, and, for the most faithful and fanatical of the Vikings, its end will literally explode the earth.
Faith is front-and-center throughout, as characters torn between two worlds for different reasons reach out in moments of crisis and claim their gods. Magnus, clinging in sodden panic to Bjorn’s ship as Harald’s fleet founders in a terrible storm, cries out for Jesus. Hvitserk, confronted with a huffing and seemingly indecisive King Olaf, strokes his statuette of the Buddha and talks of fate. Ubbe, locked in a vicious one-on-one fight to the death against the brutish King Frodo (Gavan Ó Connor Duffy) for his father’s legacy (and his own life), prays in the last extremity to Odin. Lagertha, still and pale as a ghost, visits the chapel where Heahmund lies entombed, washes her face at the altar, and then asks her victorious son Ubbe if she can join him and Torvi in the now Viking territory of East Anglia. And, as for Floki, his own desperate, lurching quest for the pure and ultimate truth of his faith in the gods delivers him into the presence, finally, of what looks to the most steadfast Norseman of all, like the ultimate cosmic sick joke.
This season of Vikings has been perhaps necessarily scattered and chaotic. That doesn’t excuse so much as inform the difficulties creator Michael Hirst has had in maintaining narrative thrust, consistent characterization, or our interest (see: Wessex). If faith is a lodestar for these characters, then the legacy of Ragnar Lothbrok is another. Here, Ubbe finally (but for the inevitable sweep of what we know history to be) has secured, once and for all, his father’s dream, and proven himself the heir to his father’s truest self. He must almost die to do it, as befits any son of Ragnar, his battle with the one Danish king unwilling to settle peacefully in England an impressively grueling extended brawl, complete with leg-stabbing, head-butting, slashing, and enough hammer-blows to the head to send most men into the beyond. Jordan Patrick Smith has come into his own of late as Ubbe, here exhibiting flashes of his father’s cunning and wit (his smiling head fake during the fight is pure Ragnar), and, finally, lounging in bed with wife Torvi, basking in the success of the longshot gambit he’s just pulled off. Having Torvi bring him the cross he’s worn since his conversion, Ubbe, his one working eye clear and blue, tells her, “This cross means nothing to me.”
For Ubbe, the cross has become a thing, “a brooch,” as his near-death clarity about what he believes in his heart leaves him as relaxed and confident in himself as a man with multiple, life-threatening injuries can be. Georgia Hirst’s Torvi matches him with an echo of Lagertha, too, curtly dismissing the praying nuns from her husband’s sick room and curling up contentedly with him in bed. For Ubbe, his choice is a culmination of a victorious journey to further—and surpass—his illustrious father’s legacy. (The Danish troops—after Torvi quickly dispatches one of their number seeking to kill the clearly-winning Ubbe—once more chant Ubbe’s name.) He’s not bitter as he tells Torvi about his renunciation of the Christian god, saying plainly, “I wanted what being a Christian could do for me and my people.” A bargain. What he feels now is, to him, simple truth. “How could I fight for a Christ god, some stranger,” he muses, explaining that, when all was on the line, “In my heart, I called for them and they answered me.”
For Lagertha, religious faith has never been the driving force in her life as much as Ragnar Lothbrok. It’s a murky character element that Hirst has never quite clarified, how much the independent, fearsome, ambitious, and courageous Lagertha defines herself in opposition to, or in proximity to, the men in her heart. Here, she once more must bid goodbye to the warlike but stolidly conflicted Heahmund, and we see, in flashback, how instrumental Heahmund’s bloody battlefield death was in her lonesome wilderness breakdown. But then she spots the vision leading her to Ragnar that we saw last week, where the sight of her first—and, c’mon, truest—love completes her journey into temporary madness. Found by the old crone (Sandra Voe) we saw caring for Judith, Lagertha wakes only to see the old woman slicing off her long, white braid, telling Lagertha as she burns it in the fire, “Now you are reborn.” And, indeed, the Lagertha we see in “What Happens In The Cave” floats through the contentious doings around her—poor Judith’s silent death, reunion with Torvi, the decision to leave Wessex—like a figure untethered to the world, her short white hair under her cloak spectral and regal simultaneously. She fingers the scars on her face, ruminates, and chooses. Scooping up a handful of the East Anglian soil, she holds it to her face and breathes it in, thinking of Ragnar Lothbrok. “Ragnar, do you see this?,” Lagertha smiles into her fistful of earth, “Are you watching this? This is our dream.”
Meanwhile, Bjorn’s plan for a surprise attack on Kattegat incurs the furious Harald’s wrath as the remnants of his army washes ashore somewhere Bjorn is almost certain is close to home. Coming to blows in a battle for macho supremacy (complete with tough guys exchanges like: “If you make a deal with Iavr, you will have to kill me.” “I know.”), they’re shoved apart by Gunnhild who, basically, orders them to put their dicks away, at least until their mutual objective is reached. (Both Gunnhild’s dismissive, “Then fight about Kattegat, or whatever you want to fight about,” and the ensuing abashed Bash Brothers forearm bash of truce the two men exchange are genuinely hilarious.)
Finding that their bedraggled forces have landed near where Hvitserk and Olaf’s camp is set up, Bjorn comes to his little brother’s tent with a glower—and then embraces Hvitserk upon hearing of their shared plan to defeat Ivar. Here again, Vikings delivers some much-needed warmth to the incessantly dour season, with Bjorn’s fakeout smile erupting unbidden as he roars, “This is one of the happiest days of my life.” Hvitserk, his newfound (half-understood) faith lending him an air of gravitas he’s never had before, tells big brother Bjorn that he finally knows his purpose. Fate led him through his disloyalty to Ubbe and the humiliations of being slighted by Ivar, only because it’s his fate to kill his tyrannical youngest brother. There’s a smug surety to this Hvitserk, his lifelong muddleheaded also-ran status coalescing around that mysterious little figurine in his pocket. What happens to Hvitserk’s resolve once he learns about Thora’s horrific death at Ivar’s orders remains to be seen in next week’s season finale.
Ivar himself, of course, has faith only in himself, but even that is showing cracks. Confronted by Freydis about their missing newborn, Baldur, Freydis is nearly choked to death as the impotent Ivar seemingly abandons all pretense of believing his wife’s tales of miraculous, godly conception. Appearing before his assembled people in the great hall alongside the silent Freydis, Ivar rants under those suspiciously Nazi-esque banners about how the death of his boy (whose deformity he transforms into perfection) must be accepted as the will of the gods. Spinning the narrative now into a tale of the gods’ will and his own divinity, he whips his people into a slow-burning frenzy with rhetoric about having to shore up Kattegat’s defenses against all the invaders and outsiders coming to destroy their way of life. (He doesn’t start a “Build the wall!” chant, but the wild-eyed zealotry of his subjects “Odin! Ivar!” chant gets Hirst’s message about megalomaniac racist nationalism with sledgehammer clarity.) With Hvitserk, Olaf, Bjorn, and Harald as adversaries, all converging on Kattegat, Ivar’s fate hangs, seemingly, on his ability to maintain others’ faith in his own infallibility. (His very public near-fall as he effortfully walks into the hall on his braces and crutches hints at how that wind is blowing.)
Then there’s Floki. The most zealous, the most purely hostile to outside influences, the aging boatbuilder/madman/prophet yet has pursued his own occasionally bloody course not for power, but for the glory of what he knows in his soul the gods have in store for him. So when, the volcanic mountain quaking around him in deepening booms and cascades of choking dust, he reaches an impossible ray of sunlight through a crack in the cave wall, he spies the end of his quest, it destroys him. An ancient, long-abandoned Christian cross stands, scarred and implacable, in the streaming sunlight. A dented chalice is on the ground at his feet. Floki gasps, then laughs a mad giggle, then weeps, then roars in a towering outrage so mighty that the concurrent eruption of the rumbling volcano above him earns its metaphorical majesty as the manifestation of Floki’s ruptured soul. Whatever happens next will happen with the staunchest defender of the gods shattered and buried under a broken mountain.
Stray observations
- For the second episode in a row nearing season’s end, Vikings appears to relearn that less is more, when it comes to speeches. Ubbe’s decision to leave his adopted faith and king is handled merely with Ubbe’s line to Alfred, “You have proven yourself to be a good and wise king” as he leaves for East Anglia.
- Judith’s death, too, isn’t lingered over. Her breast cancer having attacked her with deadly speed, the sallow Judith expires with just a single, long exhale as Alfred weeps and closes her eyes.
- Lagertha bids her goodbye succinctly, too, telling the son of a queen, “She succeeded in her life’s mission,” and telling Alfred, “You have a duty now to repay her love by becoming a great king.” Lagertha’s thoughts of her own sons and their struggles to live up to her hopes exist only in Katheryn Winnick’s eyes.
- Poor Baldur, it seems, was eaten by foxes.
- Ivar’s despotic reign calls to mind plenty of comparisons, fictional (MacBeth), fictional/actual (Richard III) and actual (you know), so next week’s season finale has its templates for his fate all laid out for him. (Or, in the real-world example, rapidly encroaching fates.)
32 Comments
Jeez, lady! The pudding get out of hand again?
Aw cmon, all that sexual tension last week for nothing?Floki’s discovery was one of the greatest hilariously twisted ironies I’ve ever seen on TV.
His giggle really sells it.
Really more ironic than….
Ubbe is not Lagertha’s son. She killed Ubbe’s mom. Lagertha does not have multiple sons. Bjorn is her only son. A bewildering error to make.In regards to Ivar’s speech being an allusion to Trump: it makes zero sense how Ivar’s behavior could be construed as racist or nationalistic, unless you have your own personal definitions of those words. “Wild-eyed zealotry” is not even a mannerism of Trump, especially not in the way Ivar’s actor portrays it. Projecting your political ideology onto a show about 9th-century Vikings is childish.
I think they’re alluding to a kind of despotic leadership that transcends Trump. It’s not so much what he is now, but what history’s tell us he could turn into, as it happened before many times.
I know they’ve been running Ivar as a Trump analogue but that final speech really went all in. I am greatly amused that Floki may have found, and buried, the Holy Grail. With Judith dead and only the king remaining as a major court character one can hope that will finally take a backseat until the ‘sudden but inevitable’ betrayal.
I had that same thought. This show loves religious iconography so much, I’d be shocked if it wasn’t actually the grail. It’s funny, Floki would be even more furious if he knew.
I think from a historical context its a couple of hundred years too early. Ivar’s time was early 9th century and the Crusades didn’t start until 12th century
Fair enough. Most of my context comes from Indiana Jones, so I bow to literally anyone else on the subject.
I’m not saying that wouldn’t be cooler and since it’s pretty much accepted as fact that Floki was the first Viking to go to Iceland It’s hugely unlikely that any Christians would have gone there before him so why not roll with it.
I totally expected Ivar to proclaim, “BUILD THE WALL AND THEY WILL FALL!” Or a banner with the slogan since, you know, no Twitter.
“I know they’ve been running Ivar as a Trump analogue…”Ah, Americans. Ever believing the world revolves around them. Such insularism – and racism – spells such spectacular irony.
I’m glad they were able to bring Ubbe down this path, because I was seriously wondering whither the Ubbe of history and The Last Kingdom had gone. Now we just need Guthrum, and Alfredbowl is go.
Sadly they don’t seem to be any closer to (spoiler alert?) Ivar’s conquests in Ireland, both mentioned in TLK (briefly) and historically accurate.
I find spoiler alerts on documented history annoying, but it does make people mad if you don’t, so….
*Spoilers*
My theory is that Guthrum will show up in S6 and convince Ubbe that he needs to invade Wessex to be a proper Viking and honour his father’s legacy, then when they get defeated at Arx Cynuit and Edington, Ubbe will choose to die like a Viking while sneaky-ass Guthrum will convert and take Ubbe’s kingdom.
I suspect Ivar’s Irish story isn’t going to make it into the show unfortunately, which is dumb, because Ireland is such an important part of the whole Viking world. Plus, it’s filmed there anyway, so…
Bjorn is Lagertha’s only son. The other boys are Aslaug’s.
If it wasn’t before, Floki’s goose is well and truly cooked now.
Hirst seems to have just said “fuck all” with any subtlety. That’s not necessarily a show killer but it does change the feel of the show and demonstrates the real power Fimmel’s performance lent to the series.
Great review as always – until you made a thinly veiled and, frankly, pathetic dig at Trump. Shame on you.
You realize these bloggers only get paid if they make a Trump dig in every article, right?
Gots to keep pandering, bro.
That discovery Floki made has been building since he murdered Athelstan. I only wish he’d heard Athelstan laughing joining his own when he saw it. Combine that with Ubbe’s reversal on his conversion, I guess Christianity got a draw in this episode.
Savage fight there between Ubbe and Danish King Frodo. That’s some great fight choreography and brutal stuff. It was painful to watch. Whew.
Lagertha remains a mystery to me. What will she become? What will happen to her?
The reunion between Bjorn and Hvitserk was their best scene together. Lets see if all those egos (Harald, Bjorn, Olaf, Hvitserk and even Gunnhild) can take down raving lunatic/fanatic and biggest ego of them all Ivar. It’ll be interesting to see.
I’m guessing Ivar will come out on top and Gunnhild will decide she prefers fat guys and goes back with Olaf for some sauna time.
Ubbe isn’t Lagertha’s son.
Lagertha bids her goodbye … and telling Alfred, “You have a
duty now to repay her love by becoming a great king.”
Why maybe he could become…. Alfred the Great? Nah!
What happened to Bjorn and Torvi’s kids? Are they with her in England? Are they back in Kattegat (that seems unwise)?
The weird thing about Judith’s death is that it seemed to happen in a manner of minutes between Ubbe’s decision to engage in single combat with Frodo and the actual fight.
I was expecting Ivar to proclaim “BUILD A WALL AND THEY WILL FALL!”
One of the baffling things for me, as I look at the larger picture, is how Ivar became the antithesis of Ragnar. Ivar was the one who accompanied Ragnar on his last trip to England, so narratively, it would have made more sense for him to adopt Ragnar’s subtlety in leading others. Instead, Hirst is (as you point out) cribbing from Richard III here. Bjorn, Ubbe, and even Hvitserk (who, apparently is Rollo to Ubbe’s Ragnar) seem to have gotten that less is generally more. Hvitserk might even be closest to Ragnar in terms of religious views. But Ivar, with his paleo-fascism, is more anachronistic than anything else in this series. Let’s hope we don’t get a bunch of new characters intoduced next week that will drag down the last season (looking at you, Magnus, and whomever your babysitter/inevitable squeeze is).
Nazi-esque? Curious about that comment in that people don’t seemed versed enough in history to know Nazi symbols and icons came from much older, benign, historic symbology separate from the malevolence of the Nazi legacy. So as the period of the show pre-dates WWII, the symbology used relates to the it’s initial heritage and form, not it’s later more wicked incarnations as appropriations. And yeah, i enjoyed the well written review until the unexpected, blatant, untoward right-turn into the xenophobic dig on Americans with the “build the wall” face-punch. How does a delightful period show about ancient Norseman get connected to generalized hate against people who support American austerity?
I’m late on the draw here, as I’ve just been catching up now that *Vikings* is on Prime. I agree with most of your assessment of the ups and downs of this season. It’s a C+ at best, even if the highs were very high!One thing that I’ve been wracking my brain over this whole season is why Lagertha has become so irritating! She used to be a badass warrior princess and this season she turned into a grandma who likes the sound of her own voice too much. Or is it Hirst enjoying the sound of his own writing? I’ve thought from season 1 that he would be better served with a writer’s room, rather than flying solo.Anyways, she seems to have turned some kind of corner with this episode but I’m still skeptical.Now on to the finale!Couple other stray observations of my own:
-It’s almost like Torvi has taken the reigns as the Strong Female Lead, something I totally did not expect as I felt for her in past seasons what I felt about Margerethe in this season
-Speaking of which, character age on this show means absolutely nothing. Wouldn’t Torvi be significantly older than Ubbe or something? Guess it doesn’t matter since they totally work as a couple.
-I would watch a “You Gods” sitcom starring Floki. What is that crazy Freya up to this week?!
-The battles on this show can be boring, as there are just too many, but the fight between Ubbe and #NotMyFrodo was really very good. It reminded me of the sheer brutality that was the fight between Dan and the Captain on Deadwood
-As someone who watched WWE back in the day, I enjoyed your Edge-Watch and was totally disappointed when Flatnose turned heel, even if the untempered violence of it was scary-exhilerating