I know right. How come you never see positive portrayals of glip glops on television?

Was Lincler voiced by Maurice LaMarche? It sounded like a blend of his Orson Welles with his Morbo/Lrrr growl but I wasn't certain (he definitely did at least one other voice in the episode though, so I can't tell from just the credits)

Yeah, and to some degree he definitely is — as far as I know, the debate/open question is whether he was a real guy who did some stuff and then had a bunch of other stories pinned on him, or if he's a total fictional amalgam.

As I said an hour ago:

Because the show's going for a realistic but still heavily mythologized account… But, look, I'm not saying you're *wrong* for disliking where they land on it — ultimately it's just a matter of taste.

So far they just haven't really had a chance to go head to head with them, except in initial encounters where they underestimate them. Aelle would have met them with a much bigger army, but then Ragnar didn't return to Northumbria. Ecbert would have eventually marched a huge army to their camp, but instead Ragnar took…

To me, the reason for all that stuff is because that's exactly how such things get warped through history. In fact it's even how they get warped today, in an afternoon: a roadside psychic tells someone "I see a man with a stick" and by the time they get to dinner that night they are telling their family "he knew my…

the idea of torture being an intimate act is an old one — but this is definitely one of the best portrayals of that ever accomplished. Interesting to note that Ragnar describes the final appearance of the victim as a "magnificent Eagle" (or something like that) — not a demeaning pose.

I think Athelwulf is aware of, and disapproves of, his father's curiosity about (and seeming admiration of) pagans. Even though Ecbert is secretive about it, it stands to reason that his own son might pick up on it. Possibly even part of the reason Ecbert is taking such a shine to Athelstan is that his own son was so…

He was at Ragnar's hall by invitation to rejoin the alliance, not his own.

While neither is conclusively “magic” at his point, soon Vikings is going to have to take a stand on the issue—having it both ways is dramatically lazy and genuinely annoying.

(And yeah — the fact that the SHIELD brass is *still* resistant to the idea of psychic powers is just getting silly. Sometimes television in general is just so irritating: in shows where the supernatural doesn't exist, every character is a gullible idiot who can be tricked into believing it does; in shows where the…

The funny thing is, it had nothing to do with "magnetic fields". I've noticed that as a pattern in this show actually: something happens that seems to be based on a fairly well-established sci-fi trope, and sometimes it's a bit groany because that trope doesn't make a lot of sense… and then, the show actually throws…

what part of this was a good story?

You're disgusted?

Pretty sure Oliver does indeed understand the meaning of good storytelling — and it was the near-total lack of it in the series so far that made everything feel so pointless, as if the show was waiting to actually begin this week.

OK, so we're at the clairvoyant-is-a-SHIELD-agent point now, but let's step back before that for a moment:

I was wondering about that — if Wessex currently spans all the way to the east coast, what's the 4th Kingdom Athelstan mentioned? Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex and… ?

Y'know, my initial reaction was "that's too far" but I hadn't even really thought about it in detail until just now and… damn that's silly. So one storm carried them south down the entire eastern coast of England, west through the strait of Dover (without noticing land on either side), then swung them back north past…

Yeah, randomly landing at Wessex did seem a bit farfetched — but I suppose the show just wanted to cut out too much geography. It would have made more sense, though, if they'd come out of the storm near the mouth of the Thames and sailed up the river to Wessex — at least then it would be believable that simply…