The end of an era.
Warning: Full spoilers for the episode below.
Vikings closed out Season 4 with a huge victory for Ragnar's sons and a bit of a curtain drop for the series in general. Oh, the show's not ending. Season 5's already been booked for 20 episodes (presumedly split in half like Season 4 was) so the saga's not shutting down any time soon. But an entire multi-year arc featuring Ragnar and Ecbert faded gracefully into the event horizon after Aethelwulf fled (as the new king) and Ecbert was allowed to nobly take his own life in the royal bath.
It's hard not to get emotional about this huge part of the show coming to a close. Even if you had mixed feelings about Ragnar and Ecbert, their friendship and unique bond was really engaging and now it's all been supplanted by a web of bickering, feuding, and murder among brothers thanks to Ivar's miserable disposition and the monumental chip on his shoulder.
It's almost a relief that Bjorn has a different mother than the rest of them so he can just excuse himself from the chaos and go off on his own adventure. Others, like poor Sigurd, weren't so lucky as the comedown from battle proved to be more than the strained siblings could bear. After a war of words, Ivar launched an axe into his brother's chest, killing him. And instead of the act causing remorse or regret, it only seemed to add to Ivar's madness. Now Ivar's ready to just raid and pillage all across England instead of settling down and farming the land like Ragnar wanted.
Ecbert wasn't the only major character who fell in "The Reckoning." Helga, as determined as she was to create a new family with the young Muslim girl she sort of "took in" after her people killed the girl's parents, couldn't quite convince the girl that her new life was going to be one of love and harmony. Maybe taking her on a giant bloody conquest across England wasn't the best idea overall, in hindsight, since it spelled certain death for Helga. Yeah, Vikings don't make a great first impression. Or second or third.
Anyhow, it was sad to see Helga go, especially given all she and Floki have been through, and how her death worked to finally hollow out Floki as an individual ("What I am now is nothing"), but there was also a sort of poetic "reap the whirlwind" element at work here. The Vikings culture thrives on murder and mayhem and, basically, destroying families. Helga couldn't understand why she was unable to simply will this girl into accepting her as a mother given all that happened to the girl's village.
I'm not sure how well the actual ending of the episode worked here, with the sort of jarring and vague introduction of Bishop Heahmund, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers. It seemed like his introduction might have worked better as an opening to Season 5 since we got so little here. More than anything, him appearing right at the end turned an exclamation point into a question mark, sadly supplanting the dramatic stamp created by the murder of Sigurd.
The Verdict
Vikings rounded out its fourth season with a somber, death-filled chapter that marked the end of a multi-year story involving some of the show's most important characters. One death was shocking, another fitting, and one we even saw coming miles out, but they all worked to set the stage for the stories to come. A fitting finale.
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