WiC Watches: Vikings Season 5, Part 2
Episode 516: “The Buddha”
Ubbe gets his land, Alfred gets sick, Bjorn gets a girlfriend and Floki’s story is still going absolutely nowhere. Seriously, can we just kill Floki and usher his island of idiots off the show? This is getting ridiculous, and it’s a waste of Gustaf Skarsgård’s talents.
And while we’re talking about wasted talent, Lagertha’s (Katheryn Winnick) only appears in this episode to watch Heahmund die and then wander off the battlefield. Where did she go? Only the gods know, but Bjorn has decided to look for her. Helping him in this endeavor is his new girlfriend, the recently widowed Gunnhild, who likes to play rough.
Bjorn and Gunnhild accompany Ubbe and Torvi, along with King Alfred and his Saxon guards, to the promised land holdings, but decide the Christian life isn’t for them. They head to York where Bjorn makes a deal with King Harald to take back Kattegat from Ivar.
Speaking of Kattegat, Hvitserk finds an Asian man selling little Buddha statues and buys one. Then he learns some sayings. That’s it. Literally, the only reason to call this episode “The Buddha” was because of that one scene.
Finally, back at Wessex, Queen Judith tells Prince Aethelred that she knows he was part of the failed assassination plot, but he convinces her he called it off. Alfred is in his sick bed, so Aethelred has to govern the realm in his place, and seems to get a little bit too big for his pantaloons. So, doing what any good mother would do, Queen Judith poisons her son Aethelred so her other son Alfred can have his throne when he gets better.
This was not a good episode of Vikings. Floki’s story is dead. So is Lagertha’s. Who knows what the hell Ivar is even doing. Vikings is spending way too much time on side stories and not enough on the main characters. Season 5 is suffering for it.