WiC Watches: Vikings Season 5, Part 2

Image: Vikings/History
Image: Vikings/History /
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Episode 518: “Baldur”

Things get heated in Kattegat, Ivar’s son finally arrives, Bjorn gets married, and Ubbe meets the Danes. And while all this happens, Lagertha reemerges. “Baldur” was a return to what made Vikings so entertaining in the first place: intense and well-filmed scenes with great acting.

First off, Ivar is a lying dickbag, and even though he promised not to harm Hvitserk’s woman while he’s off making an alliance, when his godlike statue is found split down the middle and defaced with a pig’s head, he blames Thora and burns her family alive before her very eyes, then has her burned alive as well.

Meanwhile, Hvitserk heads off to meet with the allied king to help Ivar’s forces invade Wessex. He decides to turn on his brother and convince the king to join him in overthrowing Ivar. After a bit of torture, the king agrees to help Hvitserk. Damn, but the Vikings are some double-crossing bastards…and I love it.

In Wessex, Judith goes to a witch woman to see about getting an herbal remedy for the lump she recently found in her breast. She knows she has cancer and will die, so she’s willing to try anything at this point. While at the witch’s hut, she finds Lagertha huddled in the corner muttering about Ragnar.

This is where the episode gets weird but cool. Lagertha sees how Ragnar was killed, but sees herself in the roles of the people who put him to death. Judith brings her back to Wessex’s castle and tries to heal her, but she’s pretty f*cked up and I don’t think she’ll ever be the same.

Speaking of Wessex, Ubbe and Torvi lead King Alfred’s army to meet the three kings of the great army of the Danes. There is a parlay. They convince two kings to make peace and farm Alfred’s land, but a third refuses. Ubbe challenges him to a one-on-one duel to the death. Next episode should be fun.

While that’s going on, Bjorn marries Gunnhild. During the celebration, King Harald gets super creepy but decides to play it safe and watch Bjorn’s new bride from afar, dreaming of the day he can finally climb out of the friendzone and get a woman who actually likes him. Poor Harald.

Back at Kattegat, Ivar’s crazy wife goes into labor and delivers a deformed child. And just like Ragnar did with him when he was a baby, Ivar takes little baby Baldur out into the snow-covered forest and leaves him to die. Again, Ivar is such a dickbag.

And now we come to my favorite part: Flokiville, where everyone is happily butchering everyone else, and Floki can’t seem to do a goddam thing about it. Floki buries his final supporter — the one girl who threw herself from the waterfall in last week’s episode — and when her father comes to taunt him, Floki goes full-on old school Floki. He tells the father that if he was the old Floki, he would bury the shovel he just used to dig a grave for the man’s daughter just far enough into his skull so he’d be awake enough to see Floki rape and burn his wife alive, force the man’s son to cut off his balls and feed them to him, then force the father to watch Floki rape and murder the son, all while he slowly bled out.

Yeah, that’s the Floki I’ve been waiting to see…well, not the rapey stuff, but you get it. Anyway, Floki tells the man he’s done with the settlement and that he’s going to see the gods. The show ends with him going into a cave.

This was a very good episode of Vikings and I can’t wait to see what happens in the final two hours of the season.

Grade: A