The Last Kingdom, on Netflix

Or: Mud, Blood, Sax’n Violence

“I need to kill someone! And I choose him!”

Thus seethes Uhtred Ragnarson (Alexander Draymon). He’s watched his second home go up in flames, his second father murdered (to have one father butchered may be regarded as misfortune, Mr. Ragnarsrson, to have two butchered looks like carelessness) and against the advice of his friend and lover, resolves to sneak into the ruins of his home, cut a wizzand, and cry about it. Welcome to the Last Kingdom; come for the bloodletting, stay for the King.

Based on the novels by Bernard Cornwell, the series shows a land in turmoil, caught between the barbarous occupation by the pagan Danes and the pious bigotry of the native Saxons. The Scandinavians have swept the board and threatened the titular kingdom of Wessex, ruled by Alfred I (David Dawson) who yet dreams of uniting the heretofore squabbling kingdoms of England into one land, and forming a civilization out of a most uncivil time. His right hand in this quest will be Uhtred, caught between the peoples, rejecting the nearsighted violence of his adopted people but scorning the christ-choked culture of his birth, he charges through life with a willful arrogance and blinkered focus on his own goals (tempered only by guile when it comes to cutting down his foes.) Though we understand history to have writ out his contributions, he is the arms and back pulling the oar of the present against the tide of time.

The series roams the length of England, with wide shots of wooded countryside and many a slow mow montage of horseman galloping through the heather. It occupies, unashamed, that style of historical fiction that eschews technical accuracy in favor of the interiors being well lit and everyone’s hair looking really nice. The eerie wailing, the drumming with horses hooves, the ubiquitous watcher in the trees wherever our heroes travel forth, all these signal that we are here for an epic.

But if its an epic then it is an unpolished, tavern-told kind, with lots of fornication and dirty jokes daubed into the chinks. It starts off strong when we meet Father Beocca (Ian Hart) Uhtred’s priest and ally, nearly drowns him in a late-in-life baptism by running the sermon too long. It’s matched later by Brida (Emily Cox), Uhtred’s childhood frenemy and occasional lover coming up with a heist mid-coitus and crawling out from under her disappointed lover to explain her plot (eat your heart out Game of Thrones).

These moments of frailty and thoughtlessness, sometimes dark as pitch and sometimes just touchingly British, pepper the series with unexpected, sometimes deeply inappropriate, moments of humor (did I have giggle fit over the death of King Edward of East Anglia? Yes, yes I did.) They form notes of spice in the feast the writer’s room prepares, without fail, for every episode. Each hour long delve seems like it fits in three different adventures, yet never feels rushed or overstuffed, and no move of the plot is ever for naught or feels like an unnecessary detour. The writers have also mastered the rare art of historical novelese (no doubt under the tutelage of Cornwell’s source text, from whenst too comes the expletives “hump” and “weasel turd” keeping the meanings frisson but stealing their sting). The language is neither rusty in its archaicness nor barring in its modernisms, and often gives the good crisp crunch of a perfect pronouncement, of words with weight.

The one loose screw in this well oiled machine is Uhtred himself. No shame unto Draymon, a nebulously accented inheritor of the Orlando Bloom School of wide-eyed earnestness and bafflement. The problem is he’s written as a barbarian hero from a syndicated television show from the late 80’s where he should be in a loincloth and fur leggings, laughing his way through slaughter on surf, turf, and snow in half hour adventures where the status quo is god. Instead he’s in a damp, churning nuanced story of faith and blood feuds clad in incongruous shag. His performances hits emotionally, giving us the five emotions: smug, enraged, sorrowful, solem, and horny, but the lack of forethought of the character hampers the ability of forethought in the actor and the result skirts dangerously close to tiresome.

However this well-chiseled piece of flint strikes sparks when he meets other characters, and the rest of the cast is comprised of most impressive metal. He kindles fire notably with Brida and his other frenemy (non-romantic, alas) Leofric (Adrian Bower) a knight of the royal court. Terse, solid, efficient in speech and violence, but with hidden depths iced over by his soldiers life, Leofric roughly shoulders his way into the viewers heart.

Father Beocca, likewise, is an unexpectedly cherished figure. The Last Kingdom, though it declines to show the pagan life in a rosy, pure-hearted and equitable light, pulls no punches in its critique of christianity and the Church. Uhtred meets many priests on his journeys who are naive blunderers at best, genocidal madmen at worst, and greedy hypocrites on average. In the middle of this sad, grey collection, Hart shines with the flames of the righteous. Beocca is a true believer, who never stops trying to tempt Uhtred to the side of the angels but acknowledges all the monsters milling under their wings. He is often unaware he’s halfway to a bigot himself: one of the most powerful scenes (in the best, episode, of Wessex’s fabled nadir) is his total breakdown at witnessing a pagan ceremony accomplish what a hundred masses cannot. Still, he remains fiercely of the world and sees his position as a chance to do good, not for Christ, but for his brothers and sisters, sheltering and healing and providing council to numerous pagans and rejoicing in their successes, though claiming it’s all for Jesus.

Cox, meanwhile, plays Brida as is a force of equal but opposite strength. Though Saxon born like Uhtred, Brida has thrown every part of herself into being a Dane, doubtless won by the greater freedoms it allows her as a woman, such as wearing trousers and severing men’s spines with a well flung ax. Her insouciance in the face of power, her pride in lording her sovereignty over other, timider souls, her absolute devastation when her prowess fail to save those she loves; all of these steal with gravity’s weight the strength of the show and tighten the viewers alarm as she slides further and further from the path of a hero (“Brida was always mean,” A character remarks, “But now she’s nasty.) Having her charge off into battle in a white shirt was probably a costume designers whim, but Brida’s the kind of woman who you believe would make the choice as a statement.

I would be remiss however without heralding the a thread of gold in the grim tapestry that is Sister Hild (Eva Birthistle). A nun turned warrior, rescued by and swiftly joining Uhtred’s party, Hild distinguishes herself with admirable self possession, care for her companions and a shocking capacity for violence. She has come to kill rapists and chew bubblegum, and no one has invented bubblegum. Her gaping, fanged screams of rage as she perforates the persons of the unrighteous is occasion for shivers and Good For Her gleeness (Did I hiss “Yaasss Sister! Slay! Slay him!” as she skewered another reprobate? Perhaps.) But her, completely platonic, warmth and care with Draymon, stitches a more personal in-depth relationship between the two warriors, than often arrises between Uhtred and his various love interests (which I will stress, are not nonexistent, only terribly basic).

Draymon is equally good at playing the mirror to the light of his enemies as his friends. These are many and tastefully carried, from earl Guthram (Thomas W. Gabrielson), whose lake like calm and interest in christianity erupt into bloodshed, to the oily Odda the Younger (Brian Vernel*) a saxon lord and Uhtred’s sitcom archenemies (until his revenges become decidedly unsitcomy), to the straight up psychopathic, tear-out-peoples-throats-with-my-teeth-while wearing-copious-amounts-of-eyeliner Scorpa (Jonas Malmsjø).

But if you want to see real menace, if you want to see real power, if you want to see politics and philosophy, faith in all its dimensions polished to the shine, come see The Last Kingdom for King Alfred, the undeniably Great.

Soft spoken and heavy lidded, Dawson looks as though he has stepped out of a church bass relief, drawn unnaturally thin and angular and possessed of holy purpose. He radiates a stillness rarely found in humanity, that draws the cameras eye towards him (think Anthony Hopkins’s first appearance in Silence of the Lambs). In a world of sword arms and men who wrestle their way through life, Alfred is slight and often in chronic pain (it is speculated he suffered from Crohn’s Disease), yet his will is inflexible as steel and his faith unshakable as the earth. Moreover, he can cut to the root of a rumor or a man and his thoughts race rings around a puzzle before anyone else has got their metaphorical boots on. Uhtred first meets him the royal library surrounded by scrolls, pouring over information from all over Wessex, from all over England, and it’s not hard to summon the shade of Tyron Lannister, or at least a Purityflix version of him: “That’s what I do. I pray, and I know things.”

Alfred is also perhaps our most committed antagonist. He dreams of a united, enabled Britain, he loves his children, he takes time to notice pieces of beauty and humor in small ways, and finds solutions that don’t nessisarily end with a bloody sword. But he’s also a dangerous zealot and adulterous hypocrite, losing himself with the (thankfully consenting) serving staff to the deep embitterment of Queen Aelswith (Eliza Buttersworth, who, in a star turn, takes the energy of a waspish ultra-zealot PTA Quaen and makes it both pitiable and oddly sexy). Alfred’s insistence that G-d’s way is the only way, and only he and his priests know that way, consistently scourge Uhtred and illicit the best performances from Draymon as King and the Hero lock horns, betray trusts, swing in to their rescue both in body and soul, and shove each other into being more nuanced, graceful men.

There is a moment in the finale of season one which shows Alfred, never much of a fighter, wading into the climactic battle of his reign, the one destined to save Wessex and cement his line as the first Kings of England. He’s come from a speech of stirring power and more than a little uneasy-making patriotism. His sword bloodied, his eyes wild, screaming “No Mercy!” the camera freezes for a minute, mid shamble, mid-kill, and I honestly could not tell whether the series wanted us to cheer for the valiant strength of arms or sorrow for the quiet scholar who’s reded himself, who has lost his peace and can only scrabble in the mud. And that’s what the Last Kingdom is all about: you come for the bloodletting, but it stays on your hands for a long time after. But the grimy, guilty squish that lingers with you is its own kind of pleasure.