Ragnar Lothbrok’s legacy haunts a striking but empty Vikings right to the finish
TV Reviews Television seasons
“Is that the end?”
Vikings ends in far-off lands, with the sons of Ragnar Lothbrok meeting their fates in accordance—so they waveringly believe—with the will of their gods. As series finales go, “The Last Act” is an entertaining disappointment, studded with manipulative sentiment. And yet, the sentiment works well when it does, and Michael Hirst’s sprawling historical saga pays off its characters, if not its never-settled themes. That there are so few memorable characters left after all the attrition and bloodshed allows “The Last Act” time to linger affectingly over the deaths we expect, and the more surprising fates we don’t. In flashes thrilling, oversimplified, improbably moving, and both over-written and under-dramatized, it’s Vikings in melodramatic miniature.
Having spent all six seasons with the kin of Ragnar Lothbrok, there’s little more to be said about how Hirst’s worst storytelling instincts warred with his best. At first blessedly centered on the truly miraculous find that was Travis Fimmel’s Ragnar, the series was a sharp blow in the face of traditional TV semi-prestige drama. (Much of it created also by Hirst.) As the series’ conception of a man just enough ahead of his time to come to glorious grief, Ragnar Lothbrok was our striking blue eyes into a world that, at least initially, derived shocking energy and focus from its nigh-alien remoteness. Touched with just enough modern antihero inspiration to get himself in trouble, Ragnar’s boundless curiosity about a world he suspected was greater than his culture’s conception of it was, through Fimmel’s bottomlessly charismatic performance, heartbreakingly doomed. His fumbles as he strove to expand himself and his society were all the more tragic as he inevitably fell under the weight.
Now his legacy is pared down to two elements, and the two sons who came to embody them. “You look like him,” Floki the boatbuilder tells Ubbe at series’ end, the two lifelong friends sitting wrapped in the blankets of a new people in what Ubbe contends is the true new world of his father’s dreams. And he (Ubbe and Jordan Patrick Smith) does, a bit, especially after all this time. He’s sailed beyond where his father did, he’s made difficult decisions that, perhaps, his father would have stumbled at, and, even facing an uncertain and perilous future farther from home than any viking has yet been, his legacy as son of Ragnar is secure.
Ivar dies in battle, like his father, on English soil. And, like Ragnar, Ivar is defeated and in agony when he dies at the hands of an English king. (Ivar’s recent mishaps on his crutches culminate here in a series of truly gruesome-sounding bone-snaps.) Having spurned the tough-talking Alfred The Great’s offer of clemency if he and his Norse leave England, Ivar loses this one final gamble—that his wrath, cunning, and the ghost of his father will bring him another, seemingly impossible, victory. If Ubbe is Ragnar the explorer, Ivar The Boneless is Ragnar the conqueror, and the legend. “Your name is a byword for terror all over this world,” Alfred tells the delighted Ivar during their parley, and, having raised himself on his ruthlessness as much as his ingenious leg braces in his despotic career, Ivar The Boneless spurns any thought of changing his tactics now. Offering up the traditional hostages and promises in insincere good faith, Ivar sneers at the fed up Alfred’s order to either leave England for good, or die.
Ivar dies, stabbed repeatedly by a terrified young English soldier with a small dagger, after telling the boy, “Don’t be afraid.” Before that, and seeing his people’s imminent defeat, the already-injured Ivar staggers himself into the midst of the fray, finally mimicking the death-strokes of his warriors around him, another grandiose show of vainglorious awesomeness, as when he stood and dared an army of opposing archers to shoot him. There, he emerged unscratched, further convincing himself and most everyone else of his self-proclaimed divinity. Here, he dies in the bloodied Hvitserk’s arms, confessing to his little brother, “I’m afraid.”
Ivar’s never been as magnetic or complex a character as Vikings required from the one who essentially became series’ lead, but Alex Høgh and Marco Ilsø are given a long and epic moment, and they make it work. (Despite Hirst—writing the series’ swan song as he’s done most of Vikings throughout—stretching out their “I love you”s a few beats too long.) Hvitserk, ever the Fredo of the Lothbrok sons, is left alone in England, the uncertain guardian of his father’s dreams there. In the end, we see him converting to Christianity, with the forgiving Alfred giving him the new name of Athelstan. That although Ragnar’s history of game-playing with that gesture (and, as with Ivar’s death scene, some deeply clumsy and unnecessary flashbacks) suggests, along with Hvitserk’s unconvincing pious expression, that his conversion may well be his own method of carrying on in Ivar’s stead.
And that’s essentially everyone, excepting the stalwart Torvi, the rediscovered Floki, and Queen Ingrid, thankfully only briefly seen in Kattegat, receiving the news of Harald and Ivar’s death, and Hvitserk’s conversion. (She does appear to have taken her slave girl accessory to Erik’s murder as her royal companion, hinting that Kattegat will once more be ruled by two formidable female lovers. Lagertha and Astrid look down from Valhalla with knowing smiles.) Ubbe and Ivar. Explorer and conqueror. The living and the dead.
“The Last Act” tries to tie together each brother’s story into a statement about their disparate paths. And it can’t, really. Ivar both succeeded unthinkably beyond what his culture would have imagined for him, the crippled youngest son, rescued from traditional exposure to the elements only through a mother’s love. Taking his doomed father’s advice to be ruthless, Ivar became a monster, and then Vikings worked inefficiently to turn him into a sympathetic, complicated antihero. It never worked the way Hirst intended, Ivar’s outright villainy and unsubtle madness not so much softened by growth as overgrown into an increasingly shapeless figure whose inner turmoil and pretensions to godhood slotted him into the narrative wherever Hirst needed to move the plot forward with some entertaining badness.
Ubbe, now the leader of a tiny band of Norse settlers among the North American native people (identified in the captions here as the Mi’kmaq), faces down the one telegraphed crisis of his new life, as dum-dum viking Naad (Ian Lloyd Anderson) makes bloody good on his greedy-eyed gold fever last episode. Murdering the younger son of leader Pekitaulet while rifling through the leader’s house, Naad, captured easily by the pursuing and outraged Mi’kmaq, is turned over to Ubbe for punishment, and cements his place as the vikings’ premiere blockhead by sneering to Ubbe about the “savages,” and assuming the old Norse ways will keep him alive. Here’s where I offer up an only half-condescending “gods bless your heart” to Vikings, as the finale offers up a portrait of idealized and schematized cultural rapprochement. It’s a bloody rapprochement, of course, as the whimpering Naad is first sentenced by Ubbe to be “blood-eagled” (still a goofy sounding punishment when used as a verb), then mercifully throat-slit instead by Ubbe in front of the gathered Norse and Mi’kmaq. (“Valhalla’s not for you, my friend,” Ubbe says, not unkindly.)
Before then, Ubbe had been taking counsel from both Othere and Floki, with the Christian monk urging Ubbe to see this new land as an opportunity not to import the faults of their old world into this new and seemingly illimitable one, and Floki enigmatically suggesting that even he—the onetime guardian of the old gods and ways—has abandoned his pursuit of Norse purity. Gustaf Skarsgård is as great as ever, his all-too-brief return to Vikings providing the actor with ample opportunity to recall the series’ former (and not inconsiderable) glories. Telling Ubbe that the Mi’kmaq had discovered him nearly dead, “a gibbering fool,” the boatbuilder explains that, ultimately, the old gods he’d always believed in so unquestioningly finally dissipated under the evidence of their people’s greed, vindictiveness, and violence.
I felt deserted by the gods. I no longer heard their voices. The world made no sense. Everything that I once thought was real was beginning to melt and disfigure, to change its shape, and I was sick once more to my very soul.
“Being a viking as I still was, I was always able to find a boat,” Floki giggles wryly, and Ubbe notes the past tense. In the end, Ubbe, sitting with the onetime zealot Floki on the beach of a new world and watching the sun set, seems torn—but not too much. He tells Floki that he believes the old gods are here in this strange land, but Floki’s parable of himself as an ant on the forest floor, simply grateful for the shade of a leaf, is the series final word. At Naad’s execution, a Mi’kmaq woman tells Torvi, solemnly (and without subtitles, suggesting some seriously quick language study on both sides), “You understand that when we said you were welcome to this place, we did not mean you were welcome to possess it.” Now, Floki tells Ubbe, son of Ragnar, “You don’t need to know anything. It’s not important. Let the past go.”
As much more enjoyable as it is coming from Floki, the sentiment is a facile end to the human and cultural questions Vikings once raised. A dead-end happy ending outside of the sweep of all-too-predictable human predation, war, and awfulness—always spurred on by sincere or cynical belief. I was not immune to the last scene here, mainly for Floki’s old man’s resignation that, having thrashed, and flailed, and fought, and nearly died a dozen times over in pursuit of his narrow truth, he finally discovered that the world is simply too big, and too boundlessly rich, to be constrained by any set of rules or beliefs.
“In any case, I’ll be dead soon,” Floki the boatbuilder says, untroubled, staring out over the sea. In their matching moments of desperation on the battlefield in Wessex, both Alfred and Ivar call out to their gods—Jesus Christ and the Allfather, respectively—Hirst giving them each a fruitless and unanswered (even by visions) plea for help and guidance. Nobody answers. Vikings wouldn’t be Vikings if, at the moment of Ivar’s death, Floki didn’t look up in seeming, mystical acknowledgement, but, in its sweet but superficial ending, Vikings leaves us with Floki’s words of resignation and rejection of all faiths other than [fill in the humanist platitude]. It’s unearned but lovely, which means it’s empty, ultimately. For a series that once seemed, like its first and greatest protagonist, to be aiming higher, it’s ruefully fitting that Vikings would settle in the end.
Stray observations
- Man, it’s lovely to see Gustaf Skarsgård don Floki’s beard and head-tattoos once more time. The long, searching moment where Floki either can’t or chooses not to recall the grimy end of his Iceland dream is a stunner of wordless acting.
- Floki does remember Ragnar, of course, telling the amused Ubbe that Ragnar won’t leave him alone. “He keeps asking me to build him a new boat. And I say, ‘What the hell do you need a new boat for, Ragnar? You’re dead.’”
- Ferdia Walsh-Peelo’s Alfred, exposition machine right to the end: “It’s been a long time. Our fathers died, we both became kings, but we are still fighting.”
- Upon Ivar’s death, Alfred starts waving his hands like a referee calling an injury time out, and both sides in the still pitched and bloody battle just—stop?
- Ivar’s eyes flash CGI bluer right before his death, with Vikings flashing back to just last episode, when Hvitserk portentously told of how that meant Ivar was going to hurt himself. Flashbacks in a show that’s being routinely binge-watched are an outdated device, and a debilitatingly silly one in a series finale.
- Ivar, snatching a bit of his father’s insouciant timing, waits for Alfred to finish his long-winded rebuttal to Ivar’s transparent offer of detente, deadpans, “So that’s a no?”
- Ivar’s troops had time to whip up some flaming catapults for the final battle, which is fun.
- Look, I’m all for Ubbe and Pekitaulet’s bands finding unlikely common ground, but some of the speechifying throughout “The Last Act” is howlingly unsubtle. Floki: “The world is more important than we are. We should take care of it, thats all.” Othere: “If murder can be overlooked, there will never be justice or peace in this new world.”
- Saying much more with fewer words, Hvitserk—who’d long proclaimed his disbelief in his brother’s godhood—responds to the dying Ivar’s repeated, “I’m afraid,” with a tearful, “I won’t tell anyone.”
- The storytelling is less than clear, but it looks like the widow of the murdered warrior is entombed, after being cocooned in honey-soaked wrappings. Apart from the narrative blurriness, I have no idea what Hirst is drawing from here (a vigorous, furrow-browed Googling didn’t help), but the way the rite is dropped in like exotic, unexplained background underscores my suspicions that Michael Hirst and Vikings are not the right storytellers for the story going forward.
- Floki, scoffing at Ubbe’s plea for insight on the gods, responds with the sound counsel, “Advice? Always take stones out of your shoe.”
- For all my critical gripes, I’ve been covering Vikings for the A.V. Club since the beginning. It was my first regular series gig, and I am forever grateful for the opportunity to review this simultaneously fascinating and frustrating show for the past seven years, to my editors Emily VanDerWerff and Erik Adams for entrusting the new kid with this scruffy first foray into fictional TV from History, and to all of you who remain reading after all this time. Sitting on a beach and watching the sun set on a series that’s meant a great deal to me, personally and professionally, seems more appropriate to the mood, but, for old times’ sake—SHIELD WALL!
38 Comments
There are barely a handful of comments on this entire season of reviews. Av club gives piles of press to saved by the bell reboot, Letterkenny, a dozen other shows —— doesn’t review them or give any criticism beyond, though many of these news pieces appear heavily trafficked. Vikings and other shows that apparently nobody cares about, though. Eeeesh.
“Tell me about it” – Expanse fans
I’ve heard nothing but good things.
I’m talking about how much press the show gets here. There used to be episode reviews but not the past few seasons. No place to discuss the new ones. Expanse is probably the best science fiction show ever made and these days all we hear about it is what an asshole Cas Anvar is. It deserves better.
I feel like I should start watching it!
Oh yeah you should. It starts off slow like a gumshoe in space show but give it a few episodes.
Well, Legend of the Galactic Heroes is still better as far as space operas go. But…damnit, it deserves reviews!
I enjoyed the ending. I’m a history buff, and, I’m very forgiving of the liberties taken here all series, because it’s fun. They needed a cohesive story and a narrative. But one of the things you’ll notice in history debates is when did the age of the Viking truly end. It’s a debate. And it ended with a fizzle, or a thud, not with a giant Bang and in glorious final combat like, oh, say the fall of Constantinople and the Byzantine empire which we have a date for. We KNOW how all this ends before it starts. We knew how Ragnar dies, we knew of the Great Heathen Army, we know Bjorn doesn’t conquer all of Norway. Ivar doesn’t conquer England (though they did take a chunk). Alfred the Great doesn’t lose the war. We know how the Rus arc goes. Vikings don’t colonize the new world. Almost every historic character on that show, we know what happened to them. Sure they changed some things but, they didn’t lose the spirit. Having it end with an introspective moment on the beach may be the most Viking thing ever. They didn’t disappear, they changed. Rollo’s French Vikings conquer England 200-250 years later, but, they weren’t called vikings, they were the Normans (frenchified Norsemen/north men). But the age ended. Hirst knows this, he looks at it from the English POV as his career has shown. And England endured and adapted to proto viking conquest by the Angles (Aenglish), Saxons and Jutes, then the actual vikings, then the norman vikings. It’s 700 years of waves of conquest and migration, with very blurry lines. I enjoyed the last half season. Seeing Ivar bond with a ‘fellow cripple’ and find some humanity but not becoming someone he wasn’t was a very nice touch. They gave Bjorn his epic last stand, even Harold got his peace if not redemption. Grunnhilde’s choice… wow. That scene with Ubbe/Torvi’s daughter seeing Jörmungandr right before it took her was heartbreaking, but man… it worked. And Floki, glorious Floki… Ending the show on that beach with the silence, I’m ok with it. What was left, a recap/epilogue about the future? Well, since they plan on continuing the show in some form, 100 years after the sons of Ragnar, and may re-use some via flashback… that’s also respect to not clip their wings. Considering how thoroughly unlikeable most of these people were, even fictionally, they had a lot of heavy lifting to do. They kinda wasted Ray Stevenson, but other than that, I don’t know how anyone expected the show about a doomed people to end in anything other than doom (which simply means fate, but given how fate worked out for them took on the meaning we use). I also enjoy the contrast with the Last Kingdom looking at the same period from the other side’s eyes. And also, I know it’s hard to remember the pre-covid times but this show was designed to air weekly and they cut a deal to binge it on Amazon Prime before they air it like that, so, not sure your point about the flaws that only show up while binging really holds up. Maybe going forward all shows will have to walk the line as they may end up more watched in binging, but, it was a little late in their game to start compromising because of it.
The irony of: “. Flashbacks in a show that’s being routinely binge-watched are an outdated device,” coming in a review published weeks after everybody binged the show should be lost on no-one.
In England at least it’s taught in school that the Viking age truly ended at Stamford Bridge in 1066, just before Hastings. That’s when the last truly Viking warlord Harald Hardrada and his Jomsvikings were defeated, and I’m not aware that there were any large scale invasion attempts after that.I think the big story Alfred goes through is learning to be king of England, not just king of Wessex, and the ways he needs to adapt his thinking and planning in order to do that. It’s the death of the Heptarchy and the birth of England, even though that wouldn’t truly happen until his grandson’s time.
Yes, but that discounts the Normands who weren’t fully french. Who went on to hold onto southern Italy and other things in the years after. I mean, they’re the descendants of Rollo’s group that was given the land to guard from other Vikings. From the English standpoint it did end at Stamford Bridge or Hastings, for sure.
I guess then you’re into the discussion about whether the Normans were actual Vikings who went a-Viking or an early modern Christian state like any other in Europe. I think that’s why 1066 is picked, because Harald was a Viking in the quintessential rape and pillage mould.
I’m not sold, tbh, but it’s a discussion. You can argue Vikings didn’t settle, but, in Ireland, Scotland, France, Rus, Iceland, Greenland and england, and more they did. It’s just a fuzzy line. We all agree it started at Lindisfarne, we disagree where it ends.
I get they had to tell their story, but it still baffles me some of the choices they made when it came to telling it. SO much spinning in circles, not enough of the feeling of time passing and culture changing as in the early seasons. These sons of Ragnar put down roots, and established kingdoms, and while it all ended in tragedy for most of them, they were legendary enough to be remembered (if poorly) to today. So much of this show feels like it cuts short of doing the things that establish them in legend (while also inserting characters into areas occupied by other historical characters, like where the hell is Guthrum? He’s one of the only guys from the Heathen army to make it out of this) and kind of miss the point of the actual journey of the Vikings as a people. I mean to hell with Ubbe’s group in North America, we know that doesn’t go anywhere, Ragnar’s real legacy is the Danelaw, a new land for his people. Because of his journey west, the British Isles would forever be home to Danes (at least according to the telling in this show). It seems like a more cohesive story to tell if you show the rise and fall of the sons of Ragnar, and the Kingdoms and legacies they founded, and then show how by the end these sons of Ragnar changed England forever. Like who would remember this show’s Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye? But half the warlords of the Danes are said to be descended from this guy, and Half-dan (Hvitserk) was supposed to have his own kingdom he dies defending in Ireland. I feel like with these kinds of stories the details in the middle are fine to fiddle with, but the beginnings and the endings should fit the legend. There were some great moments, and many strange turns, but I’ve spent much of the last few season throwing my hands in the air in confusion, instead of excitement as I did in the early seasons. I dunno, I know it’s historical fiction, but somewhere along the way it’s like Hirst just kept fiddling with things because he was worried about 1200 year old spoilers. This ending does not disabuse me of that feeling.
Yeah, if you know the history you can fill in the blanks and draw parallels (Hvitserk is basically Guthrum in this I guess, for some reason) but if you came into this show with a blank slate you could be forgiven for wondering what the hell happened for six seasons. Too much time spent on meandering interpersonal drama and not enough epic sweep of history.For a start, what was Alfred doing for two seasons? All that nation building was all really important stuff which would come to define what we think of as a modern state, but doesn’t even get a mention in the show, where it appears he’s being sitting on his thumbs for a decade.
Watch The Last Kingdom for that.
Don’t worry, I have. It’s the better show in many ways even though it didn’t get as much press.
Well you have to start with the point that they took ALL the Ragnars and made a choice they were the same person. We are not sure the same one who hit Paris was the one who also hit England, for example. Rollo wasn’t born for what, 100-150 years after that? They weren’t brothers in any version (I also thought he was coming back for the last season, I must have missed it). It was there from day 1 that Hirst was going to alter things for the story he wanted to tell which was the over arching plot, not a historical reading. As for Guthram, wasn’t he also supposed to be Hvitserk? Or at least in one version? And yes I get that he killed people off too soon, too late or in the wrong place, but it’s still a show with a budget and casts cost more money. There was a lot of streamlining. We know they hit Greenland and Vinland WAY too soon and we know how that ends… It gets very ahistorical by the end, but… did he really stray from showing them as they were, as Vikings, customs, traditions, beliefs and the struggles (with settling, with the invasion of Christians)… He’d rather have redeemed Ivar than let him get older and let him die that way because it was a better story. Pretty sure Finehair lived another 20 years, but, he got an ending. I’m ok when they do service to the characters and actors. Sometimes the true history makes for a shitty story. You’re not wrong but they are walking the line between two worlds. History and entertainment. I just accept things will tilt because without people watching, there’s no show. We were ok for it during the Ragnar years, I can’t get nitpicky now. The show simply promised us Vikings and I never felt that they didn’t show us who they were, good and bad, fairly, the whole time.
I take your points, but the flexibility they showed in the early seasons, both in character growth, and the passage of time were lost in the later seasons.(Some of those early time skips were excellent at pushing us into new spaces, and respecting the passage of time, and the arc of a character’s growth.) The sweep of change would have felt more powerful if the feeling of time, and the establishment of characters as taking up space in the world, meant something, rather than the many actions they took propelling them into more plots because they have to be doing something. And if the story hadn’t meandered so much, and left us with such pale shades and second runners as our leads, I would be fine with the broad deviations. We accepted it with Ragnar and Rollo, because they were good characters (though the Rollo betrayal cycle was tiresome, him killing all his men when he hooked up with the Franks made me face palm. They’re called the Normans, not the Norman. You gotta have more than one guys. It also would have been more powerful if his choice meant that we saw not just him change, but others of his people assimilate, and got some insights into how that worked out in comparison to his brother’s people.) and because the journeys they were on were transformative for them and their culture. We watched them go from farmers and raiders to kings. Other than Bjorn, we didn’t see these other Ragnarsons make that journey, and the differences between them and how they handled that destiny, how those journeys inspired legends were what I was hoping for once those characters became the focus. As it is, we got many diminishing returns, and confused character meandering.I don’t agree that Ivar dying as he does is a better story, I think there’s room to flex in the historical space, and yet still have the character walk in their historical counterparts footsteps. In this version of the tale, Ivar would be front and center in our history books, (and he’d have died at like 20-something?). The problem I find, is the show wanted it all. It wanted the central conflict of the characters to be the same one that history and popular consciousness is focused on. This I think was a mistake, we don’t have to focus all our attention on Alfred’s war, or rise, he’s the villain/hero of other character’s stories, the point of following these characters is to have them find their own, and to play in the gaps in history and make them your own. Muddling up and mashing the parts we do know about together just makes a strange mess and causes a host of problems as you try to tick off boxes and make concessions to include everything you want to (not to mention the least interesting aspect of the whole series has always been when we spend time in other people’s courts, and it always defaults to cloak and dagger drama, that’s been done to death. Culture clash and the birth of whole new cultures as worlds collide and new kingdoms form? Not so much). I think if the history makes for a poor story, it’s on the writer. Of course you’re going to follow the narrative arc of the character to a degree, but Harold getting to live long enough to watch his own sons tear apart his kingdom, and get a great deal of glory as the first king to unite Norway, while being a runty murderous bastard and treading on the corpses of the characters we know to be better men, there’s many ways you can spin that as a poignant and potent ending. Likewise the many fates of the sons of Ragnar. (I do recognize that there’s a lot of pushback on Harald even existing at all, but like with the many Ragnar’s and Rollo, once you’ve made the concession follow it through.)One of the things I liked about The Last Kingdom after watching Vikings, is it felt like the next era, like the stage had been set by this incredible invasion and these legendary figures, and now the Danes were there, and the people had to figure out what happens next. The Ubba of that story, while still likely ahistorical, struck me as a remnant of a prior age, one trying to claim glory and do what had been done before, and ultimately failing. I feel that stage, where the sons of Ragnar are all but gone, and Alfred is just coming into his own, but perhaps not yet king, is how this run of Vikings should have ended, with the sons of Ragnar old and established and fading into legend as their father did. (Hell with them connecting Ecbert and Ragnar so much, you could easily have it so that the reason they don’t get as involved is after killing Aelle they can’t betray their father’s regard for Ecbert’s sons, and so while this thing they started is propelled towards Wessex, they themselves flow in other directions, and to different destinies.)Ultimately, if you enjoyed it I can’t fault you. Nor would I say it’s unworthy of appreciation, or a terrible, or even bad show. Hell I’ll probably watch the whole thing again at some point, bitching half the time. But for me it was clear after a while that the direction the narrative was taking was at odds with what drew me to the show, and it’s ending did not fail to disappoint me, even as I found aspects of it very enjoyable (mostly I just like that I finally got to see Floki again, the mad old bastard).
And seeing nowhere else to put this, I’ll put it here. Seems it ended just in time for Uhtred of Bebbenburg to meet up with Alfred and take the story of Englaland forward. 🙂
Wyrd bið ful aræd
you can really stop watching this series after Lagertha dies
I’d say Floki
well, Floki made it to the last episode lol. I knew he was going to come back at some point.
To be honest, I thought Ragnar lost his charisma a fair bit before the end (after Paris is when the magic wore off), but I enjoyed reading the reviews to keep up with the story, thanks!Also, I deeply enjoy their methods for aging people up on this show. Grey hair/giant beards for all!
Vikings ends as it always was, too many expositions and confusing character choices, but with a richness of setting and those few moments they let things kinda be organic. Thanks Dennis for all the reviews!
I think what I take away most from this show is learning that in the time of Vikings, the sun apparently sets in the east. Who knew?
I just want to know why they are watching the sunset. Or rather, where they are watching the sunset. Didn’t they land on the east coast of North America? Pretty sure the sun rose in the east and set in the west back then too.
L’Anse aux Meadows faces west across Epaves Bay and the Strait of Belle Isle.https://www.pc.gc.ca/en/lhn-nhs/nl/meadows/visit/~/media/56428E245B614B2A851DD3549ADD9212.ashx?w=760&h=440&as=1
They’re either in Newfoundland or Nova Scotia for that particular tribe of natives to be. However, Floki nor Ubbe discovered it, Leif Erriccson did!
And Erik the Red is down as the discoverer of Greenland. Which implies that Ubbe’s entire expedition dies without a trace before anyone can write a saga about them.
We all know this show has lots of faults, and they got worse as it went along. Why we spent anytime in Kattegat after the sons left is beyond me. I know they condensed like 200 years of Norse history into two generations, combined characters etc, – but that’s for narrative purposes. Making it boring I can’t forgive, and deciding that Ivar had to be the defacto lead, when it was clear that Andersen couldn’t hack it was another mistake. I do wonder if they kept Lagertha around so long because of that fact. The thing that bothered me the most about the last string of episodes, was the Kattegat storyline for two reasons. The first as I mentioned, was that we shouldn’t have spent anytime with any characters that weren’t Rangarsons. Second, was the blinding. Was this the first time in the show we saw actual magic work? I think it was. I know there’s lots of mystical stuff that’s gone on in this show, but all the results of those rituals at least had the suspension of disbelief attached. The Seer spoke in riddles, the visions of the dead or messages from the dead could be in other people’s minds. The Wanderer, who they hinted at being Odin, may have just been a wanderer. The answered prayers or rituals to the gods, well sometimes things work out, sometimes you see your dead brother in a delusion before you die, if you believe something fervently you’re going to see what you want to see etc. The use of psychedelic mushrooms also helps – we were seeing things from the characters perspectives and if they believed they were un-killable or whatever, then they were. Bjorn wasn’t actually dead when he made his last ride to face the Rus, but under the Viking belief system they could say he was dead and rode out there as an animated corpse – but it was possible. The ritual to produce blindness, actually working, was a bridge too far. If she had done a ritual asking that he be harmed, or even asking that he be blinded and then he got drunk and fell into the fire, or had some other accident – then that suspension of disbelief remains. Him just waking up blind – a last stupid plot decision from Hirst.
Somehow this show felt like it had a lot more than 7 seasons. Ragnar died in S4 but the show somehow made it through S7. Incredible!
There were 96 episodes over six seasons, the last two were 20 each. Most cable dramas nowadays are 10-13 eps. So it was really more like 9 seasons of content compared to other shows.
that explains why it felt longer than 7 seasons!
Fuck this show is so good. Couldn’t give a fuck less about trash like GoT ending… but this I would have enjoyed a few more seasons of.
Just wanted to say thank you. I’ve developed a little nightly pagan ritual over the years (which might have involved certain herbs) of reading your reviews after each episode airing, and they’ve always been an illuminating and insightful companion pieces. You really helped flesh out the themes and inner purpose of the show, and it was a fun ride enjoying the highs and lows alongside you when the show nailed it or fumbled forward. By relentlessly comparing the post-Ragnar era to previous seasons not only you’ve made the almost unbearable last 2 seasons so much more bearable, but you managed to put a finger on everything that’s gone missing from the show (A whole lot, besides Fimmel), and even though it’s been a slog, it helped me better understand why I loved this show so much in the first place, and what made those early seasons so compelling.
I don’t mean to be too teary-eyed, but I’ll miss it. You did a great job, it’s been a Valhella of a journey, and I just wanted you to know you didn’t put your words out to the vacuum of the internets. Godspeed and thanks
Just watched the finale (it didn’t air in Canada until last night) and it was just as bad as the rest of this season (or half season, however it officially breaks down). What a garbage end to a once really interesting show.I personally enjoyed (sarcasm) how they just totally ignored the whole “Floki finds a cross then gets trapped in a cave” cliff hanger they set up. Like, they ever addressed it or explained it at all. Floki just magically shows up in Canada and his answer to what happened is literally “I don’t remember”. Hahaha. Although they don’t really address or explain alot of things in the final 10 episodes. They spend most of the time jumping from one meaningless story to another. (Rus, Greenland, Erik/Whats-her-name) and introducing new characters that don’t matter at all. What a mess.