Vikings: Valhalla Offers an Entertaining Escape from Winter Blues | TV/Streaming

“Vikings” was a massive hit for the History Channel, a cable network not exactly known for big ratings. The series premiere in 2013 drew six million viewers, which is crazy numbers then and now. People like historical action, and we have long been fascinated with the era of the Vikings, even if some of the facts and depictions in “Vikings” angered the experts. After five and a half seasons on History, the second half of the final season landed at the end of 2020 on Amazon Prime Video. Now, a little over a year later, the venture sails to Netflix for “Vikings: Valhalla,” jumping forward 100 years but maintaining a similar aesthetic of warring tribes and fighting families (with a little less mysticism).

Created and written by Jeb Stuart (an ‘80s/’90s powerhouse with credits like “Die Hard” and “The Fugitive”), “Vikings: Valhalla” picks up a century after the original series, charting the arc of some of the most famous names in Norse history, including Leif Erikson, Olaf Haraldsson, and Freydís Eiríksdóttir. I can’t speak to the historical veracity of “Valhalla” (although I’m sure others will), but the show feels like it’s playing with true figures more than trying to teach viewers about their real lives, existing somewhere between reality and Viking fan-fic. It smartly doesn’t take itself too seriously, forging characters instead of worrying about sticking to the text.

“Vikings: Valhalla” opens with the arrivals of Erikson (the charismatic Sam Corlett) and his sister Freydis (the excellent Frida Gustavsson) in Norway, sailing through impossibly choppy waters to arrive there from Greenland. This casts them as outsiders to outsiders, allies of the Vikings with whom they will fight but also from a different land. They come from a people that aligns itself more with the Gods of old than the Christians of Scandinavia, including Harald Hardrada (the future star Leo Suter), who plans to avenge his father’s death against the British. The King ordered the murder of the Vikings, and much of the first season is about vengeance, both on a grand and personal scale.