This review contains spoilers.
5.10 Moments Of Vision
I hoped that this episode would largely redeem the first half of season five. It is, after all, what the entire thing has been building toward: the final fight between Ivar and Lagertha – let’s face it, that’s really the core of the conflict as Ivar and the episode make clear. It’s no accident that the first two flashbacks we see are focused on Lagertha and Ivar. They are the frame in which all the rest happens.
Unfortunately, if anything, this episode amplifies the problems of the half season it bookends.
First, there’s the structure and pacing.
This episode alternates between the frenzied chaos of the battlefield and slow flashbacks and fantasy sequences which might as well be shot through misty filters to emphasise how little they resemble any kind of reality. One of the biggest offensives to the realistic depiction that has, with very few exceptions, been Vikings’ bread-and-butter are also its most important moments: the deaths of important characters and the reaction of their loved ones to those deaths. It’s bad enough that we are expected to believe that Lagertha, Halfdan, and others are able to have little daydreams on such a killing field as the battle between the forces of Harald and Kattegat, but to also have to swallow that prime targets like Bjorn or Harald or Lagertha could take the time to kneel down and take long farewells of their dearly departed and no one takes advantage of their vulnerability to take a swing? Four and a half seasons of watching Vikings on the battlefield has taught us better than that.
The bigger question becomes “Why was it necessary or even preferable to structure the episode this way?” The simplest answer is that it takes very little content and makes it seem like a lot more. Normally, when a writer and director do this, it’s because the writer simply has written enough content for an episode or, worse yet, for the season. Finding an arthouse-film way (the flashbacks and fantasies) to serve as filler becomes a way to over come that problem. Unfortunately, that’s not the case here.
After all, the biggest problem with the previous episode, A Simple Story, was that it was too much content. Headed by the same director and based on the same writer’s work, it forced so much character development into so small a space that much of it came off as unbelievable and unnatural. We can see the effects of this in how our characters behaved in this week’s Moments of Vision: Lagertha seemingly as invested (maybe more) in her lover-of-an-hour Heahmund – an enemy – as she is in the long-time lover literally stolen her, Astrid. Likewise, Bjorn seems more heartbroken over the death of the woman he met at most weeks ago than in the that of the stepson he has raised.
In other words, there was no reason to add all the artsy filler to Moments Of Vision – there was, between the two episodes Daniel Grou directed, more than enough content to go around. Nor is there any reason for even such an important battle to take up an entire episode. After all, the final battle between Ragnar and Rollo for Paris – possibly the most important battle in the narrative prior to this one – took only half an episode. This was a conscious decision on the part of Hirst and Grou, and it goes against the grain of Vikings: a series which has always shown a world grounded in reality and in which the interior life of our characters has always been laid out in their interactions with others. The only other time it has dipped into this territory was when Ragnar was taking drugs – and at least that was character-driven.
Setting aside the form, there’s still much to be disappointed by, if only because it all leaves us with the feeling of having invested too much in all the wrong people.
Perhaps the one more artistically inspired decision that feels right is the singing that Harald’s forces and Halfdan do before the battle. The scene is a touching one as we realise that Halfdan would normally be there at his brother’s side singing this song (mostly likely to psych out the enemy). It’s a nice touch to remind us of what’s at stake: familial relationships versus personal loyalties (including a loyalty to oneself).
But once the singing subsides, we are thrown into the battle (along with the flashbacks, etc.) full force.
The immediate focus on Lagertha plays with the audience expectation that this will be Lagertha’s final battle (and it still may be, considering what we see at the end of Moments Of Vision). The long and heartfelt (and out of character) farewell that the shieldmaiden takes of Heahmund definitely feels like a goodbye to Midgard as well, not just from her perspective but ours as well. But this is Hirst playing with us. Instead it is not Lagertha’s body that is destroyed on the battlefield but possibly her mind. The death of Astrid at her hands must be difficult, although I wonder to what extent we are supposed to assume that Astrid’s child was Harald’s, as opposed to the product of her gang-rape at the hands of those who would take her message of warning to Kattegat’s queen. The fact that Lagertha refuses to kill Astrid until her lover charges her would normally, I think, give Lagertha – a pragmatic soul if there ever was one – an emotional out for her part in Astrid’s death. I am left wondering if it weren’t the impending destruction of Kattegat and her first husband’s legacy (because, let’s face it, Ivar is not emotionally constructed to rule so any tenure on the throne of Kattegat promises woe for Ragnar’s home) that causes her to breakdown – she’s lost, and left, those she loves more than it appears she ever did Astrid, so it’s hard to believe that this was her breaking point. Especially since she was so quick to shag Heahmund in Astrid’s absence.
The confrontation (and I don’t think we can fairly use a better word for it) between Hvitserk and Ivar may be long overdue, but it makes little sense from the point of view of a strategist like Ivar. Why on earth would he go to such lengths to alienate his brother (who is, in fact, as good a fighter as any other son of Ragnar) on the eve of the most important battle of his life? Is it an intentional effort to make Hvitserk as obviously suicidal as he seems on the battlefield? Ivar cannot bring himself to kill the brother who sided with him but whom he does not trust, so he uses his wiles to convince Hvitserk that he would be far better off in Valhalla than as a living son of Ragnar? Regardless of his intent, this certainly seems to be the effect, as it’s clear that Hvitserk appears to be attempting a version of death-by-cop in laying himself open not once but twice to Ubbe’s blade. The fact that his older brother fails to kill him – while telling us everything we already hoped about Ubbe – then leads to the senseless death of Guthrum, a character who could have blossomed in a way that Hvitserk has completely failed to do.
What made Guthrum so ripe for development was the way in which his own experience—the son of a man blood-eagled by Ragnar but raised by Ragnar’s first born – mirrored that of both Ivar and Halfdan in a way: men caught between two sets of loyalties. There was a lot that could have been teased out there and simply wasn’t. Ivar isn’t a good candidate for playing with the idea of conflict between loyalties because he’s only ever about himself, but it might have been nice to see Guthrum and Halfdan struggle with the same problem in different ways. Unfortunately, the death of Halfdan at his brother’s unflinching hands (which shows us a side of Harald we probably did not suspect of a man who has otherwise been so soft-hearted) brought not only that possibility but so many others to an end, and honestly felt like an unworthy end to a character who was just becoming interesting.
On the other hand, we saw several characters spared who we, as the audience, certainly weren’t done with: surprisingly, Torvi lives, as do her children, although at this point there’s little doubt that the latter is just blind luck, as Margrethe is so clearly mad that all of Kattegat is watching her when she again tells the children that everyone the love is about to die. That Ubbe walks away unscathed – and without his brother’s blood on his hands – bodes well for both characters, as individuals and a possible couple in the second half of the season. Harald will still be around and now he has as much reason (possibly more) to hate Lagertha as Ivar does, since his wife and his (supposed) child died at her hand. This means he’s much more likely to let Ivar live out any horrific fantasy he has built up about killing his father’s first wife.
As we go into the second half of the season, scheduled to air later this year sometime, there is both good and bad suggested on the horizon. This season’s poor pacing and lack of its former concentration of good character development does not bode well. Narratively, however, there’s much to look forward to. The battle lines – and their attendant loyalties – between Ivar and (at this point) Bjorn’s sides could not be clearer, with the possible exception of Hvitserk who it is becoming harder and harder to care about at all. Rollo’s impending arrival should only make things more interesting as we discover whether he actually sides with Ivar and Hvitserk (a bit hard to believe) or has merely given them enough troops to decimate Kattegat’s defenders and thus leave his brother’s kingdom open to a quick conquest from the man who envied everything Ragnar ever had. Our concern over the question of whether Lagertha can recover from the latest of emotional blows she has suffered is more a matter of our long investment in her than in anything this season has shown us, and our desire to see whether Bjorn can lead off the battlefield (in his mother’s ‘absence’) as well as he does on it is certainly intriguing. And then there’s Floki’s fate to consider.
Like Lagertha, Hirst’s writing has done little this season to make us all that interested in the always-side story that has been Floki’s journey in these last ten episodes. And yet, we care because he’s Floki. He has been with us from the beginning and Gustaf Skarsgård has taken an intensely odd man and made him into something far more than the words on the page. That’s hard to do with a character who is intentionally created to be so far outside the experience of the audience. And yet, we love him – cult leader that he now is – and would be sad to see him go. There’s not much reason to believe that he will actually sacrifice himself as offered, but we can at least look forward to the twist that will make it unnecessary and the continued insanity of our favourite boatwright.
Unfortunately, in the end, it’s more this sort of nostalgia that will ensure the return of long-term fans for the second half of the season than anything we saw in it. And it is hard to believe that there was enough of the good in these first ten episodes to lure in new viewers. So we, like Floki, are left wondering if we have been abandoned by the makers that we have generally appreciated for their past blessings. I am as loathe as he is to give up. But another half-season like this, and I’m not sure I can keep the faith.
Read Laura’s review of the previous episode, A Simple Story, here.