I am! So good! Travis Fimmel is so compelling to watch!

And Lagertha. She's amazing! I want to be a Shield Maiden when I grow up!

I am intrigued by it, but I would have to backtrack. Is it good?

I am intrigued by it, but I would have to backtrack. Is it good?

It's not brilliant, but if you like moderate levels of gritty (not as gruesome as Walking Dead or Game of Thrones), some well-drawn characters, and history mined for the most dramatic moments (irrespective of chronological believability), it's pretty fun. I started listening to a podcast by a medieval historian, and from what he says, the show is not nearly as ahistoric as, say, Reign.

It's based mostly on legend, since there's no contemporaneous documentation of the Viking lifestyle from the Viking perspective, and little enough from the English side of things.

Basically, it has two spectacularly charismatic leads, and a host of interesting characters, and some great small battles, and it's just kind of fun. It also overlaps nicely with Hild, which I just finished; looks like it's set about 50 years later than the book.

I tried to get into it, but found the show literally hard to watch - everything is done up in this muted dark brown/blue/gray palate and I found that I was spending more time trying to pick the characters out of the background than following the actual plot.

Yeah, the palette is pretty sepia-toned.

I found the easiest way to distinguish the characters was by hairstyle. Anyone with generic shoulder-length hair & heavy beard is unimportant, except for the guy played by Clive Standen, who is bigger than nearly everyone else. All the other interesting characters have clearly-distinguishable hairstyles.

Woah, Vikings got real.

I was totally ready for Lagertha to knife wassname, so that wasn't a surprise, but I didn't expect the earl's own men to turn on him. That was a well-earned death.

Ragnar was absolutely going to get his revenge on Jarl Borg. But I was pretty unhappy about the horrifying death of all of those Kattegat servants trapped in the burning barn with Borg's men.

So did Bjorn sleep with the servant girl whose life he saved and who will now suffer from horrifying survivor's guilt?

Speaking of which, there definitely seemed to be a theme of women and non-consensual relationships this week. Both Siggy and Lagertha were trapped into ugly situations by choices they'd made in the past, and which seemed sensible at the time. Now, not so much. I would be cooler about this if the gender differential wasn't going only one way.

So do Ragnar and Horik head back to England with their reduced forces, or what? And what will happen with Athelstan, anyway? I was pleased to see that someone at least remembers the Romans, although Ecgbert should certainly know that Charlemagne was the Holy Roman Emperor: the existence of the Romans is hardly a secret, even 300+ years after the fall of Rome.

Justified, you guys! That was the season finale, right? I am excited for full-on Raylan and Boyd Show next year.

With additional Mary Steenburgen! (And yes, that was the season finale.)

Yessssssss.