Agreed. I lived in France for five years, so I did get quite a bit of what she said. It was just the usual thing you might say in a verbal dispute with a family member who drives you crazy because you love them to bits: talk of bastards, prostitutes, and the organs of farm animals. She might have hit him pretty…

The parallel development in this episode of foster-father and foster-son bonds is quite interesting, with Floki taking Ivar under his wing and King Ecbert mentoring Alfred. There is a tradition in dramatic literature of the failure of pseudoparents to save young people from tragedy: Think of the role of the priest…

On the question of Helga, there is the issue of Floki refusing to allow them to have another child. Has he rejected Helga physically? Is she incapable? I do not recall if those details have been established.

Viking conversion therapy for lesbians: swive your wife's henpecked son. Who knew?

What I am talking about is what Hirst ACTUALLY gave us for motivation for Lagertha in the script, and that is jealousy, period. I am discussing his writing and its laziness and his failure to understand women properly (the ridiculous effort to make Lagertha both jealous of Aslaug and involved with Astrid at the same…

This character arc would make sense if it weren't for the lines Lagertha says about how much she loves-misses-wants Ragnar for herself—especially the lines she says when she is alone, as in this last episode. Then there is what she says to Ragnar (a really good line): "No regrets. And every regret." If she had…

Thanks for pointing this out. I've actually contradicted myself in my own post, as I argue that Lagertha might have gone with Bjorn to the Mediterranean as a shield-maiden, as she did before. I thought of this pretty soon after I wrote it, but I let the observation stand just to stir things up, to see if anyone…

Thanks for the heads-up.

You know, I could also see JRM as the older Ivar, in terms of casting. Playing Ivar gives him more scope than the role of King Alfred. Think of what a great job Cumberbatch did with Richard III in the recent tetralogy (we just saw the series on PBS over the last four weeks).

Let's consider another option for Lagertha: She joins Bjorn on the trip to the Mediterranean. I can even tolerate Astrid accompanying Lagertha as long as the storyline sustains whatever their bond is (however anachronistic). By having Lagertha accompany Bjorn, as she has before in the series, Hirst avoids the…

The gravitas of Ragnar's death would have had more time to sink in and make sense if Hirst had put last week's episode at the end of a season. It's like fine music, constructing a story: the silences are as important as the notes.

We're good.

Research into background on historical fiction is a lot faster and easier now than it used to be (think hauling dusty tomes off library shelves)—but just as much fun. Even more fun is the social aspect of conversing via a comment thread, which is much faster than intellectual discourse used to be, when dueling…

Maybe snakes native to Britain that looked like they came from other continents were in costume. It is historical fiction, after all.

You know, on another comment thread, AV Club removed my posts, too. I've always been viewed by the men who run things (and the women who cling to them) as a disagreeable troublemaker, like Anne of Green Gables or Jo in "Little Women." So I'm used to it. I was born this way. I'll look forward to reading your…

I learned a lot about Viking practices in warfare from "The Last Kingdom" because the plot involves a captivity narrative: Uhtred is captured by the Danes and raised as one of them before being returned to his countrymen. I believe he is Ubba's foster brother. So Uhtred takes on the role of training the British…

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Hirst is among those show-runners who have taken to explaining their product instead of enriching its content so that it does not need explication. This sort of commentary by Hirst, it seems to me, is an attempt to burnish soft-minded creative choices with the brush of academia. And Hirst should know better. Who am…

I don't doubt for a minute that you genuinely found this tiresome and with perfect justification. My mantra in these situations cuts bloodthirsty show-runners some slack: "Just make-believe for telling a story," I say over and over.

I always look forward to reading your comments.