The Last Kingdom - new season out today

[Maithanet]

My wife and I just finished watching all 5 seasons of this for the first time.  The overall quality of the show is better than I expected.  Making a compelling action-packed historical drama is really hard.  Budget constraints, time gaps and huge cast of characters always makes for difficult storytelling.  The show wasn't perfect, but it was IMO a resounding success.  Season 4 was the weakest.  Season 5 was a bit better, with some really terrible moments, particularly:

- Brida's fundamentalist cult in the first few episodes was just a terrible plotline

 - The entire Aelfwynn abduction plotline.  How did they find her?  One guy goes looking for her in all of England with no clues and finds her in like a day?  Then when they try and escape, a man picked up Aelfwynn from a moving horse as she was running away.  Everyone knows this is physically impossible, right?  Like, it is extremely hard to do this if both people are working together and have practiced it many times.    

 - Everyone always listening and bending to the will of Lord Badadvice.  So irritating.  The King of Scotland was a good character/actor, but Aethelhelm was offering him nothing but empty promises, and he should have NEVER gone along with that.  "If you fight and win a war for me, I'll give you some portion of the spoils" is not a good deal, particularly when the alternative is to hand over Aethelhelm and getting a reward from Edward without having to do anything.  

 

But I don't want to just dwell on the negatives.  The final conclusion hit the right notes, and the climax at Bebbanberg mostly worked.  Uhtred finally telling Edward to get wrecked was very satisfying.  Sytrygga was a great character, if underutilized. 

[Iskaral Pust]

@Maithanet I haven’t read all of this book series but your complaints are exactly why I took a long pause from Cornwell: he creates such contrived obstacles for his protagonist —especially by scheming, underhanded and improbably successful nemeses — to give him a huge emo personal stake in the story as it moves toward the next major historical event.  We’re meant to always feel aggrieved on behalf of the protagonist so we don’t get tired of him triumphing at the end of each book.  It’s pretty lazy plot construction and character arc tbh, although pretty commonplace in long series of historical fiction (even Patrick O’Brian falls slightly into this trap as Jack’s naval successes must be offset by political and bureaucratic persecution).  I enjoyed Cornwell’s approach with his Sharpe series because Hakeswill was entertaining in his role of impossibly persistent nemesis but I gradually got tired of it in his other series. 

[Maithanet]

21 minutes ago, Iskaral Pust said:

@Maithanet I haven’t read all of this book series but your complaints are exactly why I took a long pause from Cornwell: he creates such contrived obstacles for his protagonist —especially by scheming, underhanded and improbably successful nemeses — to give him a huge emo personal stake in the story as it moves toward the next major historical event.  We’re meant to always feel aggrieved on behalf of the protagonist so we don’t get tired of him triumphing at the end of each book.  It’s pretty lazy plot construction and character arc tbh, although pretty commonplace in long series of historical fiction (even Patrick O’Brian falls slightly into this trap as Jack’s naval successes must be offset by political and bureaucratic persecution).  I enjoyed Cornwell’s approach with his Sharpe series because Hakeswill was entertaining in his role of impossibly persistent nemesis but I gradually got tired of it in his other series. 

Yes, I didn't feel like this was a problem in the Last Kingdom books I've read thus far (I'm through book 7) although I could see it potentially becoming a problem.  But there was some really sloppy writing in the show, where it seemed like (in particular in seasons 4 and 5) the villains would oscillate between lucky and incompetent.