The trip to Germany was the crack of cracks. Phillip is tremendously unhappy, but he's found an outlet in EST. All she has is her tattered ideology.

We'll see. Sounds like they just finished filming Season 4 this past week. The show must be a lot of work.

I'm unreasonably bothered by Floki showing Ivar an Anglo-Saxon rune (Os), rather than its Norse equivalent. Yeah, I should get out more.

It's basically all prequel to upcoming seasons, which will be heavily involved in England.

No, but Hirst could depart from the sagas and have Rangar leave the series by taking her home to China. He's a curious fellow. I know that's an unlikely outcome, but it's possible.

"Of course, it's early days." — Lagertha's weasel words to Kalf

Saying "She's a Viking," is like saying "She's a pirate." There were no Vikings. There were the various Norse peoples, and they sometimes went raiding ("viking") or invading their neighbors. Lagertha is supposed to be a raider, so we can call her a Viking in the popular sense. And the Vikings sucked. They killed and…

I liked The Last Kingdom, but would feel infinitely better about the series if the main character would stop wearing his longsword on his back, ninja-style. It's silly.

She's a Viking. They're not nice. If I can fault the show on anything, they're *too* nice.

Couldn't agree more about the Bastard Executioner. And most of the violence seemed to be directed against women.

Me, too. :-)

I wonder if perhaps he left it with Lagertha.

I think he'll end up in a snake pit, though I agree with you that all the snakes on the promos are allusions to enemies. I'm not sure Ragnar of the sagas even existed, so I'm more interested in a good story than historicity. My immediate question is timing — will Ragnar survive to the second half of the 20-episode…

No, I wasn't buying it, either. Rollo is too fluent and *nobody* would have taught a slave, even if there were someone at hand who knew her Chinese dialect.

I actually expected Siggy or Aslaug to become the next seer. Both have exercised sight through the series. Norse volvas were exclusively women, and men toying with divination would have been viewed with great suspicion. The Seer is Hirst's invention, as are the weird clergy types we saw at Uppsala in Season 2.

No, the sagas shouldn't be taken literally. I like how this series uses history and legend as a loose framework, putting storytelling first. That's a very authentic way to adapt the sagas.

I'm warming up to Bjorn, though Travis Fimmel is just a ton of fun in his role. The really interesting one, in terms of history, will be Ivar. Not much character development there just yet. ;-)

I certainly wouldn't take the various death narratives of Ragna for history. If I remember, the primary attestation for his death in the snake pit was the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (and also an Icelandic saga I cannot recall). There's another cycle which claims he dies of dysentery shortly after the siege of Paris. Hirst…

It's the turning of winter and the beginning of the return of the sun (that's why the bonfires). Yule is also the time of year that the veil between this life and the next is thinnest, which is perhaps why we saw Athelstan last episode.

Great. Now I'll know where to go when I'm in the market for a pager.