Scratch Your Game of Thrones Itch With The Last Kingdom

It was revealed a few months ago that Game of Thrones wouldn't return to the airwaves until 2019.  And a new book might appear by...2029?  2525?  Who knows.  So if you've watched the show and read the books you might be looking for something else.

The Last Kingdom on Netflix is based on a series of books by British historical fiction author Bernard Cornwell.  In a way it's a sequel to his great "Warlord Trilogy" that tried to bring the Arthurian legend to 5th Century England.  In those stories Arthur and the Britons were being attacked by the raiding Saxons.  This takes place about 400 years later when the Saxons have displaced the Britons and are now beset by the "Danes" who we referred to as Vikings.

Like the books the show starts off slow with a lengthy prequel.  Osbert is a kid in the northern England territory of Bebbanburg, second in line to ruling there.  After his older brother dies, he becomes the heir apparent and his father renames him Uhtred because whoever runs the place has to be named Uhtred.  But then Danes raid the place and take Uhtred captive while his uncle takes over Bebbanburg.

Uhtred is taken by the Dane Ragnar and raised as one of them.  That is until he's grown and some other Danes kill Ragnar and Uhtred and his lady friend Brida end up going to Wessex in southern England.  Wessex is ruled by the sickly Alfred (Cornwell suggests he suffered from IBS, which isn't surprising considering the conditions) who is a pious Christian and dreams of uniting all of England.

Uhtred becomes one of Alfred's men and they defeat some Danes.  This earns Uhtred some land and a bride who is good looking but owes a large sum to the church.  Uhtred and his bride eventually fall in love and things seem to be doing well...until the Danes launch a sneak attack.

The show is largely slow and talky until the last few episodes of the first season.  Then it finally picks up some steam.  Alfred, Uhtred, and a handful of others are driven into the marshes while the Danes occupy Wessex.  Uhtred helps to disrupt a Danish force while Alfred summons every able-bodied Englishman to fight back.

The finale of season 1 gives us a really great look at the "shield wall" combat Cornwell describes in these books and the Warlord Trilogy ones.  Basically each side forms lines of men who use their shields to help protect the row in front of them.  The first row squats down and the second row holds their shields over the first row's heads and the third row does the same for them.  The idea is to protect them from arrows and such.  When the other side does the same, the lines end up pushing against each other, stabbing through the shields to try to form holes.  The first one to give way is likely to be routed.

In this case one of the Danes holds up the head of a woman Uhtred fell in love with who was not his wife and in a frenzy he breaks a hole in the enemy line.  The show cheats us a little in having him knocked out so it doesn't have to go through the entirety of the battle.  I mean that would be really expensive!

Season 2 starts out with Uhtred going north to free a slave who a priest believes will be a king.  At first the slave-turned-king is a good guy but he gets some bad advice and thinks Uhtred is trying to take power, so he does the only rational thing:  he sells Uhtred into slavery!  Uhtred and one of his lieutenants are forced to row, row, row a boat with a bunch of other guys.  It pretty much breaks him, for a time.

The season ends with Alfred's grown daughter being kidnapped by Danes who want to ransom her for basically all of Wessex's money.  But the daughter and one of her captors have fallen in love and try to enlist Uhtred's help to rescue her.

Each season essentially covers two of the books.  At this point there are 10 books.  In the next season it's likely that Alfred will die because that's what seems to happen in the books.  I've read the first three of them and they were OK, though I think Cornwell largely recycles the Warlord books with Uhtred's background pretty much as the narrator Derfel in those books and Alfred similar to Arthur, only Arthur didn't suffer from IBS and was a pagan--until he converted for the sake of political alliances.  Like Derfel, Uhtred is an unrepentant pagan, a great warrior, and a pig-headed asshole.

Really if he weren't such a pig-headed asshole he could have become one of Alfred's top confidantes.  Instead because he refuses to convert to Christianity and play politics he remains outside the royal court.  As it is their relationship is more like Commissioner Gordon and Batman where they respect each other but Gordon doesn't really like needing Batman any more than Alfred likes needing Uhtred's sword.

This series is fairly grounded in reality so unlike GOT you don't have dragons or zombies.  Someone does rise from the dead, but it's just a trick.  There's less nudity and not really any incest.  Near the end of Season 2 Alfred's daughter's new husband treats her basically like Sansa Stark when she was married to Ramsey Bolton.  I guess if those are the things you really like about GOT then this won't quite satisfy your itch until 2019.

But for me after the first few episodes I started warming to the characters and getting more into it.  At some point maybe I should go read the rest of the books to see what lies ahead for Uhtred.

Incidentally, I don't really recognize anyone on this show from anything else, but the guy who plays Uhtred looks like if you crossed Kip Harrington and Colin Farrell.  Maybe that was intentional.