The Last Kingdom season 5: All episodes reviewed and explained

Episode 5

Plans go awry and tensions ratchet up in the fifth episode of The Last Kingdom season 5.

Let’s start by pouring one out for Aelflaed, who joins a group of pilgrims on their way to a holy site when they are waylaid by brigands sent by her own father. Of course, Aelflaed doesn’t know they’re sent by her dad and Aethelhelm didn’t know his daughter was traveling with this lot. His intention was to kill a bunch of holy folk and frame the Danes for it. That part works, more or less, but he ends up accidentally killing his own daughter in the process.

We wait the entire episode for Aethelhelm to discover what he’s done, and it’s worth it. As loathsome a man as he is, I almost felt something for him as he stumbled through camp overcome by the Shakespearian weight of what he’d done. Actor Adrian Schiller does some terrific work as Aethelhelm comes to the edge of suicide but brings himself back from the brink, full of cold fury. He’s more dangerous than ever now. Chills.

It’s a good ending to a good episode, although my head couldn’t help but spin a bit at how fast things progressed. Maybe I’m just trained to think of deaths as a big deal, so Aelflaed’s happening in the blink of an eye felt odd to me. Poor girl; even the producers give her no respect.

Edward also feels guilty about treating Aelflaed like trash and takes his anger out on Eadgifu, who bears it with compassion, dignity and Lady MacBeth-like advice. “Be a good king, not a good man.” She’s kind of emerged fully formed as a perfect partner; it’s hard to sympathize with.

But Edward will have bigger problems soon. Aethelhelm’s scheming worked; Edward thinks that Danes sent by Sigtryggr killed his wife, so he is obliged to respond with steel. And Sigtryggr, still stinging from Brida’s attack, has decided to embrace his Dane-hood and become more hostile to Christians, so a fight with Edward suits him just fine.

The only one who knows what really happened is Uhtred; thanks to Haesten (Jeppe Beck Laursen), of all people, he’s able to interview a witness to Aelflaed’s murder and has pieced together that Aethelhelm is behind everything. Averting war may mean him reaching Edward and Sigtryggr in time and telling them the truth. (Side note: it’s great to have Haesten and his smug one-liners back.)

And Uhtred will soon have even more reason to be wroth with Aethelhelm, since in another scheme Aethelhelm convinces a bunch of Christians to attack Uhtred’s home in a brutal battle scene. Really, this is as disturbing a scene as anything the show has given to us. There’s a particularly awful moment where we fixate on the face of Oswalt, sweet Oswalt — who’s still recovering from being castrated by Brida, I might add — as he watches atrocities be committed offscreen; I wager it’s far more effective than if we’d seen the atrocities ourselves.

But of course, the real heartbreaker comes when Osferth dies on the field of battle. Y’know, Osferth never had that big a presence on the show, but actor Ewan Mitchell is so affecting during his death scene (“Don’t let me die, Finan.”) that it moved me anyway. And I appreciated that the show gave this sequence room to breathe, as they didn’t do with Aelflaed.

It just got real. More real than usual, even.

The Last Bullet Points

• Aldhelm (James Northcote), gets a nice moment at the top of the episode where he turns in his resignation to Edward like a boss; obviously Aldhelm, ever loyal to Aethelflaed, isn’t going to work for the man who murdered his sister’s noblemen to put himself on the throne. But he’s later convinced to stay on in the job. Ah well, you got to be a badass for a second there, Aldhelm. Honestly, I think that would have been good way for his character to exit the story.
• Before the attack, Uhtred and Oswalt have a conversation where Oswalt, even as he recovers from castration, tries to comfort his father about Aethelflaed’s death. Uhtred doesn’t value this kid nearly enough.
• There’s a subplot where Aelswith conspires to marry off Aelfwynn to some dude she was flirting with in Rumcofa, the logic being that if she’s married to a nobody no one will see her as a threat to the Mercian throne and try to have her killed…and then there’s a bit where Aelswith and Aelfwynn are in bed and Aelswith is telling her how much fun it was to have sex with her grandpa. Kay.
• Aethelstan providing some snappy counsel: “Be wiser.”
• Brida is having Pyrlig take her to Uhtred. That should go fine.

The Last Kingdom Episode Grade: B+

– Dan