Jordan Ogihara December 30th, 2020 - 9:50 AM
The second half of the sixth season of the period drama Vikings has arrived on Amazon Prime Video in the U.S., according to TV Line. These ten episodes constitute the Emmy-winning historical action series’ final installments. Gustaf Skarsgård (Cursed), who plays the ship builder Floki in the show, announced on his Instagram that the program’s Scandinavian audience can access the final batch of episodes via HBO Nordic.
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Vikings creator Michael Hirst (Elizabeth, Camelot) has a script credit on 89 of the show’s 93 episodes, and from what he discussed with GameSpot, he is ending the story on his own terms: “I’d said as much as I had to say really about Vikings, you know? […] Often my days and nights for seven years were filled with Vikings. You know, I would write [until] 12 o’clock at night, I commuted to Ireland every week. It was time to conclude the story.”
Hirst told GameSpot that one of the biggest challenges that came with ending the series was grappling with the inevitably tragic fates of the characters he had created so many years ago. “It was, of course, deeply emotional because it meant killing off some of my favorite characters… These last ten episodes were deeply emotional for me and I lost a lot of sleep. But at the same time, there was an element of relief in getting to the end,” he admitted. One character death he labored over was that of the warrior king Bjorn Ironside, played by Alexander Ludwig (Lone Survivor), Entertainment Tonight reports. Ludwig recounted the details of a conversation he’d had with Hirst about Bjorn’s final moments: “He sat me down and we had a big talk about Bjorn’s demise, and he referenced [the 1961 film] El Cid… It’s obviously not the same, but it is definitely reminiscent of that event, and he wanted to do the character justice and I did too,” via Entertainment Tonight. El Cid is a medieval epic based on the life and times of the Castilian nobleman Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, whose dying wish was to return to the battlefront.
The ten episodes that comprise the second half of season six effectively end the main story of Vikings, but a sequel series is already in the works at Netflix. Filming for Vikings: Valhalla is allegedly underway in Ireland, as reported by Collider. The upcoming series is not a direct continuation of Hirst’s seven-year saga; it is actually set a full century after the events of Vikings. This means that although there are no plans to have characters from Vikings show up in Valhalla, Hirst says they will form the tapestry of the Netflix series’ in-universe history: “Ragnar Lothbrok, Lagertha, and Bjorn Ironside, and Ivar the Boneless… are now mythic characters even within the show… So everything connects in a useful, and interesting, and fascinating way,” via Collider.
You can now stream Vikings from beginning to end on Amazon Prime Video.
