Vikings: Valhalla preview: Showrunner didn’t want to make Vikings season 7

Jeb Stuart was (Die Hard, Fugitive() was hired to assume control and carry on the Vikings team. Vikings: ValhallaMichael Hirst (creator of History Channel’s original series) gave him one tip: The Netflix spinoff should feel nostalgic.

“I [knew] what he meant immediately,” Stuart tells Polygon. “The goal of the show is that, as we move from season to season, there’s parts of it we’re going to have to give up. So my goal would be, at the very end, that you suddenly look back on this incredible period of time of both shows and say, ‘Wow, it was really good when they were just killing those Saxons. I miss the purity of that moment.’”

If “wistful” isn’t a description typically applied to the brutality of both Vikings and VikingsAllow Valhalla Correct the story. Set 100 years after the final episodes of the original series, the Vikings have found themselves in conflict with the English (who burned the Danish encampments on their shores in what’s come to be known as the St. Brice’s Day massacre) but also themselves. The new Christian Vikings find themselves in conflict with the old pagan gods of Vikings. They would rather everyone join Christ.

According to history, Christianization played an important role in the end of the Viking age. Stuart notes that Scandinavia was the last part of Europe to be Christianized (“Those Catholic monks stood up there, you know, in northern Germany, in the Netherlands, and they looked across the Baltic. Und they said, […] I don’t want to go there. There are people who die there.”). True to Viking tradition, conversion was swift, violent, and inexorable.

This conflict will be fought by a whole new set of characters including Leif Erikson, the legend.Amazing Adventures of Sabrina’s Sam Corlett) and his sister Freydis Eriksdotter (Frida Gustavsson of The Witcher(), who depart Kattegat with their goals and beliefs on religion.

Bernard Walsh/Netflix

“If you’re an action writer it’s a good place to be working,” Stuart says of the conflict-philic Vikings at the heart of the story. Having minted his writing career with action classics of the 1980s and ’90s, Stuart wanted Valhalla to have “more action”, particularly in his vein of “character-based action” writing. “In other words, it all comes from the people that you know, that you’re watching […] as opposed to, you know, a comet is about to hit Earth or something like that.”

That is what I mean. ValhallaStuart is provided with a unique playground. Like the original series historical events can help to root the drama (the pilot’s first episode was filmed on November 13, 1002), and also obscure some facts. (to the English, the “massacre” wasn’t as unprompted as ValhallaYou would be foolish to believe otherwise. The history of events like the Danish invasion and the fall of the London Bridge are inferred by nursery rhymes, sketchy records and other sources. There is still plenty to be done. Valhalla To fill in the missing pieces with the clever strategies of the new Vikings generation.

Still, the part of his research that most drew him in wasn’t rooted in the bloodshed or the major arc of history. They were two individuals who represented wild choices available at that time to women.

“I latched on to Freydis, who I thought was a spectacular female character. The era is filled with women, which I find fascinating, particularly from a writing perspective. [in Danish culture] could own property and they could rule kingdoms,” Stuart says.

Emma of Normandy was then discovered by him (played with cool resolve). Valhalla by Laura Berlin), who, as Stuart puts it, had come from Normandy around 15 years old, “just a piece of her father’s property. She was then one of Europe’s richest women by her 20th birthday. How did she do that?”

These journeys are a balance to the standard Viking fare and each one complicates the historical story. Perhaps, more than anything else, that’s the ethos that Stuart is taking into the world of ValhallaThe book is equally at home demonstrating how innovative Vikings were in their time as reminding its readers that they were still barbaric in many other ways. The duality is something that Stuart couldn’t find himself nostalgic for, even as he kept it at the forefront of the story.

Bernard Walsh/Netflix

Photo: Bernard Walsh/Netflix

Photo by Bernard Walsh/Netflix

“I would really love to say, sitting here in the 21st century, that we’ve got a much more enlightened view of other cultures,” Stuart says. “But […]While I was making the series, there were children being held at the Mexican-Texas border. And our view about that humanity aspect, kind of resonated with me.”

Similar VikingsIt was before that. Valhalla isn’t interested in perfect characters. Rather, the show seems most interested in how the more things changed around Viking power the more it stayed the same: there’s still violent religious tension, England still remains the primary land to conquer. The practical reality of the Vikings doesn’t seem to have shifted too much — but we know it will.

That endpoint Stuart says the jump freed him from having to write “Vikings season 7”, and offered him the chance to create something new, its own animal. This show has more shine than History Channel; even its theme song is less avantgarde than History Channel. VikingsOne and more are in line with The WitcherAnother Netflix sword drama is titled. But ultimately Valhalla benefits from Stuart’s aims to not shy away from conflict, but rather to power through it. After all, it’s what the Vikings themselves would’ve done.

Vikings: Valhalla Netflix premieres Feb. 25,