SERIES REVIEW – Vikings: Valhalla was one of the most surprising Netflix series of last year, exploding out of the blocks with its gritty and rich retelling of the Vikings’ dying. The second season aims to maintain that momentum, but as the world expands away from the shores of Scandinavia, this “excursion” to other landscapes also means the historical series loses some of the fevered intensity that made it such an initial success.

After Olaf’s victory in Kattegat, our heroes Leif, Harald and Freydis find themselves – once again – on very different paths. The second season is set in four major locations, and it is Leif and Harald who benefit most from the more exploratory tone of Vikings Valhalla. A budding bromance, bubbling with tension after Harald begins adventuring with his love, Leif’s sister Freydis, heads first to icy Novgorod and then on a dangerous and bloody adventure down the Dnieper River as Harald tries to gather an army to become King of Norway.

Harald is won over by the Pechenegs, Leif by a new love

Their journey, fraught with peril and overshadowed by a barbaric new group, the Pechenegs (a nomadic Turkic-speaking horse people who later merged into the Hungarians), is the undoubted highlight of the season. As the pair’s seafaring group grows larger and larger, consisting of a mixed crew of slave-traders, merchants, warriors and captives, it only serves to highlight the emotional core that was sorely missing from the first season’s wild surge of wars and invasions.

This comes to the fore at the beginning of the series, as Leif, still grieving the loss of Liv, finds a new emotional connection and then love in the scientist Mariam. Their budding relationship is an effective and orderly way to delve deeper into the season’s overarching theme of broadening our horizons.

This is not to say that Valhalla is without its moments of blood and action. Despite having fewer big set pieces than expected, the emphasis is on more intimate character work, culminating in a standout standalone episode. The criss-crossing dynamics of the ship’s crew boil to the boil, paying off with a number of emotional beats against a backdrop of heart-pounding action and relentless violence that marks itself out as the best hour of the series to date.

Freydis has become too clichéd, and Emma is constantly fretting over an assassination

Vikings: another new setting for Valhalla, Jomsborg is less triumphant. Dubbed the ‘new Uppsala’, Freydis finds himself in the friendly arms of the pirate rulers in a feeble and overlong arc. Not only does the journey of the Keeper of the Faith drag on to an unsatisfying conclusion thanks to a one-dimensional villain who feels (and looks) like a Jamie Lannister knock-off, but it also magnifies the way Vikings: Valhalla continually abuses one of its strongest characters. After two seasons, Freydis, despite the best efforts of actor Frida Gustavsson, seems even more of a walking, clichéd archetype than a living, breathing character.

In London, Emma’s position as ruler is secure, but the court around her has changed. Whereas Valhalla’s early time across the English Channel in England felt like a relentless package of Game of Thrones greatest hits, season two almost completely loses the momentum and political intrigue for an assassination plot that spills over into the new season and strangles the life out of one of the best characters.

Godwin, one of the most conspiratorial and incendiary forces of the first season, has lost his edge. The deer-eyed and seemingly love-struck former London Machiavellian puppeteer has become a notch duller this season – even if there is more to his courtship of Emma’s daughter than meets the eye.

Nonetheless, Godwin’s manipulations and his inner struggle with his new love reach emotional heights that the series has so far failed to capture, while a final, brilliant twist returns the series to a suitably complex and exciting direction.

Kattegat is back

The fourth location – the well-known settlement of Kattegat – is where Vikings: Valhalla Season 2 feels like it could explode during its eight episodes.

Things get off to a promising start when Olaf, humiliated by the arrival of “Forkbeard” Svend I, is given the impossible task of protecting Olaf’s grandson, Svein. This partnership soon turns into a clashing sideshow, with a much more interesting relationship between Olaf and the Queen.

Vikings: Valhalla is a very good second season, but not as good as the previous one. While one of the great positives of the series is that it introduces interesting new cultures and peoples, the second season strays too far from the historical line and becomes more fantasy-driven. At times the plot is really very high quality, but at other times there is too much idle pacing or clichés, too many white or black characters, of whom there are too many anyway. There is a noticeable downturn from the first season, but it is still a pleasant, entertaining, exciting, more fantasy-like historical series.

-BadSector-