nah, Floki is meant to be Loki's avatar in the series, he's probably some kind of medicine man with a few actual supernatural powers.

I'm sure it's one of those "I was manipulating him but FALLING IN LOVE was never part of the plan" type of things.

Since the Seer is too ugly for the show now and he actually has supernatural powers, the new guy is probably meant to replace him and steer the show towards a bit more magical stuff

babies under 4 months old still have reflexes that make them cry immediately if they feel like they're about to fall down (historically, from a tree). So they can be made to cry on demand.

how does a baby autosuggest? they barely have self awareness

they did, the whole misdirection bit about him swearing fealty to Horik was based on religious zealotry

it's par for the course, Mary Stuart took 2 blows to the neck and 1 ax strike to be beheaded and even then, it was considered to be a less arduous death than hanging. The guillotine was invented as a symbol of the French Revolution to democratize a humane death sentence and kill every condemned in a single strike,…

my take is that he considered the vikings as a novelty, like a shiny new toy. Ecbert seems pretty interested in pagan culture due to his fascination with the Romans, he outright compared the Roman pantheon to the Viking one. So he just expected their religions to be equally lofty, mild mannered and tame just more…

to be fair, this is something the series did much better in season 1 and took for granted people would understand 2 seasons later.

that plowing speech was way too lewd. If I didn't know Ecbert's gonna have to die I'd think he was trying to get Lagertha pregnant

but that would have been patronizing and whatnot…

she got seduced over a plow, how is that under her terms? to be sure, a plow is at the time the equivalent of a combine harvester

I just think he was horrified at the overhead, one swing decapitation of a calf

this reads like Perkins saw an episode from a different series.

I meant OSS as the predecessor of the CIA which wouldn't have been around at the time. But it's one of those things that comes with a lower budget I guess.

that's what complicated the way Peggy saved Jarvis during his interrogation. For one thing, she really did expose herself to be seen as incompetent (they don't know why she did it, so they were justified in chewing her ass afterwards) and second it really does taint her record with the intelligence service.

"The fact that they are actually for the most part relatively likeable"
but they have been pretty unlikeable so far. The only reason why you're supposed to empathize with the one who got killed this episode is because he got killed