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Vinland Saga Season 2
Episodes 1-3

by James Beckett,

How would you rate episode 1 of
Vinland Saga (TV 2) ?
Community score: 4.6

How would you rate episode 2 of
Vinland Saga (TV 2) ?
Community score: 4.4

How would you rate episode 3 of
Vinland Saga (TV 2) ?
Community score: 4.4

vinland-saga-s2-eps-1-3.png

When Einar first wakes up on the day that he loses everything, he has no idea what a “Thorfinn” is, and even if he has ever actually seen a map, he certainly couldn't use it to point out Iceland. It was easy to forget during Vinland Saga's excellent first season, but one traumatized Danish boy's quest to avenge his father's murder isn't actually that exceptional of a tale in the grand scheme of life in eleventh-century Europe. For many thousands of people such as Einar and his family, the specter of death and bloody warfare looms over everything, and you can hardly throw a stone without hitting someone who has lost a limb or a loved one to the cruel violence that is part and parcel of the cultures of the time. The thing that distinguishes men like Thorfinn from men like Einar is how they chose to respond to the worst things that ever happened to them: Thorfinn tossed away his future and his humanity in pursuit of a revenge that was ultimately stolen from him, while Einar, his mother, and his sister did everything they could to band together, love each other, and continue living.

All of that was just the prologue, though. The real tragedy of Einar and Thorfinn's stories lies in how, regardless of what paths these men took in the face of absolute ruin, they still ended up in the same exact place. That endless cycle of war brought the same old terror to Einar's doorstep, except this time it wore the face of the Danes instead of the English, and on top of being forced to watch the slaughter of his mother and sister, the poor man has to suffer the indignity of slavery. When he finally meets Thorfinn in the fields of their new master, Ketil, it's clear that the spark of hope that Einar is still so desperately clinging to has long since been smothered for our would-be Viking warrior. There is no life left in his eyes. He's given up.

Throughout these second and third episodes, Vinland Saga goes out of its way to demonstrate just how far Thorfinn has fallen from his former, fiery self. He takes the abuses and indignities thrust upon him by Ketil's workers without so much as a sideways glance, and he quite literally doesn't even flinch when he is getting maimed by the mercenary Fox in Episode 3. This is the man who once decried the very thought of becoming a slave as a fate reserved only for the weak and undeserving. Now, he freely admits that he has no desire whatsoever to preserve a life in which “nothing good has ever happened to him.” If he is told to work, he works. If he is told to die, he offers up his throat willingly.

If Thorfinn is a man that has become utterly unmoored from his life's purpose, Ketil's son Olmar is just the opposite. Moody, arrogant, and yet wracked with insecurity, Olmar is defined by his anxiety over finding a direction in life when his options seem so limited. He believes he is destined for so much more than life as a “mere” landowner and farmer. His problem, though, is the exact same one that Thorfinn encountered way back when: In this time, in this part of the world, one's “purpose” in life is inextricably linked to the violence they are capable of causing. You either live a life of peaceful pacifism by tilling the land or working as a servant/slave for some higher authority, or you take whatever you can carry by cutting it out of the hands of others. When Fox tells the boy that the only way to become a man is to kill another person, there isn't anyone around to object, since every one of the soldiers there was probably told the exact same thing. Olmar may be coming very from a very different place than Thorfinn, but he's heading down the same road of being caught up in the life of a killer, even if that isn't who he's really meant to be.

If the misery and the killing was all that this new status quo of Vinland Saga had to offer, then there probably wouldn't be much to get excited about. We've seen all of that before. Except we also have Einar, a deuteragonist who exemplifies everything that Thorfinn and Olmar are not: He rejects the valor and the allure of war, and he has a natural inclination towards believing in a world that upholds justice over the right of might. When Einar is told that he can “earn his freedom” with enough profitable work, he commits to his new profession wholeheartedly. When Ketil's haughty attendants abuse and humiliate the slaves, Einar's first instinct is to report them to their master, because surely such unfair treatment would be punished accordingly. Even though he still harbors some understandable fear and anger towards the Danes for, you know, slaughtering his family and ruining his life, he has the wherewithal to remark that “everyone's the same” when they're working together in the fields, English or Dane (the whole “slave/freeman” dichotomy notwithstanding). In other words, despite everything he's gone through in his life, Einar has been able to find a reason to keep on living, and he is holding steadfast in his belief that there has to be some path forward for him.

There might be some fans of the first season who balk at this new, relatively bloodless direction for Vinland Saga. What little bursts of violence we do get are petty, cruel affairs, and far from the pulse-pounding battles that took up so much of Season 1. As of yet, there is no clear throughline of vengeance or a king's rise to power to carry the momentum of the plot forward. Einar's simple desires to earn his independence and maybe even find love are solid, relatable points of entry, but the character that is supposed to be our main protagonist cannot even raise a hand in honest self-defense, much less fight for his dignity and freedom.

I'm perfectly fine with that, though. There have been thousands of stories about noble and ignoble men that find their glory on the battlefield, and there will be a thousand more to come. We have no shortage of entertainment that documents all of the ways that a warrior can kill, and be killed. Vinland Saga Season 2 seems determined to explore the ways that a warrior can live, in spite of blood that the world would have him shed. That is a much more fascinating story to tell, I think.

Rating:

Vinland Saga Season 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.


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