'Vikings' recap: 'All His Angels' 

Travis Fimmel, Katheryn Winnick, Clive Standen

Little Ivar and Little Alfred play chess. They don’t speak each other’s language, but they speak the universal language: Call it gameplay or call it war. Someday history will know these two boys as men — one Boneless, one Great — but for now, they sit in the shadows and wait patiently for old men to finish playing their own games.

One game moves toward an inevitable conclusion. Ragnar asks Ecbert if he can speak to his son. He knows this will be their final moment together. He tells his son Ivar, “It is you who I believe is the most important to the future of our people.” He tells him anger is a gift and he is unpredictable. “Use your anger intelligently,” says Ragnar. “And I promise you, my son, one day the whole world will know and fear Ivar the Boneless.”

“I wish I wasn’t so angry all the time,” says Ivar.

Final wisdom and a final message. Ragnar whispers in his son’s ear, revealing a final twist in his strategem. It is Aelle who will kill Ragnar, but that is not the subject of Ragnar’s final vengeance. “You must seek revenge,” he tells his son. “But not on Aelle. On Ecbert.”

And so, Ivar the Boneless leaves Wessex with a final gift from Alfred. The heir gives Ivar a chess piece: A memory of happy times, or perhaps an artifact from their first battle.

Soon enough, Ecbert has also sent Ragnar away. Ragnar gives Alfred his own personal totem: The crucifix worn by Athelstan, Alfred’s true father and Ragnar’s beloved friend. “I will never forget you,” says young Alfred.

Nor will Alfred’s grandfather. Struggling with guilt, Ecbert confides in Judith. “Am I to wash my hands of him?” asks Ecbert. “Like Pontius Pilate?” Ecbert sets off on walkabout, dressing as a monk or a beggar, following Ragnar to his final destiny. In the sagas, the great god Odin would often set off wandering, his head cloaked, his affect that of a humble everyman. (Surely, Ecbert’s long beard would practically rival any gods’.)

It makes sense Ecbert would assume the affects of both Pontius Pilate and of Odin, of a low figure in Christendom and a great figure of the pagan religion. Ecbert, like Ragnar, has always been curious about other cultures. Their lives have reflected the clash of nations; perhaps, as old men, their own lives are becoming decoupled from nationhood. Or perhaps it makes sense Ragnar, who thought he saw Odin on battlefields in his youth, would now see Odin one final time: Personified in the man who was his close friend and his final nemesis.

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