This is a mediocre episode of a normally great TV series.
I'll get into it in a bit, but there are some misguided reviewers who gave this episode a bad review because they have mistakenly pirated a version of this episode for the visually impaired. The whole episode has a narrator who describes everything you see on the screen ("Ragnar moves forward, he pours himself an ale," etc.) and the narrator only stops during dialogues. This is NOT the real episode. This is just one version for people with a disability. I saw the regular episode and it had the regular audio track. Giving this episode a bad review because of your own incompetence is silly.
The problem with this show is that it sometimes lacks personality. It tries to copy whatever is popular. If sex gets Game of Thrones success, then they will add a long sex scene. If lesbianism gets viewers, they'll add that too. The problem is not that there's sex or lesbianism or whatever, it's that it adds nothing to the story. You could have a 30 second sex scene that would have the same message as a 4 minute one. Here, sex comes at the expense of the story, eating away minutes that could be used to tell you something.
The lesbian Lagertha came out of nowhere. There was not one hint of it before and now suddenly she has to be a lesbian because "all strong women are lesbians." I don't mind Lagertha being a lesbian, but they should've thought of it before, adding hints and clues. Sudden personality changes makes it look like the writers have no plan, they just come up with ideas just like that.
The episode tried to do a lot of things and failed, in my opinion. It wanted to brief us on everyone, where they are now, but it does a weak job at that, because they already did that in the previous episode before the break. It also doesn't show us everyone, just a few characters, so you're left wondering what happened to the rest. It spends too much time on Ragnar brooding and suicide-thinking when we already know nothing would happen to him.
The way they should've done it is have a defeated Ragnar brooding as the last episode before the break. Spend a whole episode on him, how this great man has been beaten. Then we would wonder if he really is going to kill himself. Let him visit Floki in secret, say goodbye to him, visit Lagertha in secret, say goodbye to her, watch his kids sleeping from afar, then attempt to hang himself. Instead, we get a messy script. He comes back declaring "I am king" and challenging people to fight him. He's back. Then he makes plans for England. He goes to visit everyone. Then for no reason he switches back to depressed, suicide mode. Then he attempts suicide, fails, and he's back to "Let's go to England." That makes no sense.
They had him switch from suicidal emo to arrogant king multiple times. He goes to Floki for ships to England with great ambition, then switches to "I'm not going to Valhalla. I'm going to kill myself probably #imsoalone." No, I'm serious. He tells Floki "come with me to England" and then he tells him that he's going to die, but not in battle or from disease.
The show clearly wanted to do a depressed Ragnar episode, but it was ruined by "I am the king" thing from the previous one, as well as using the episode as a catch-up session. All these compromises and inconsistencies messed up a potentially great episode of a great TV show.
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