Review for Vinland Saga Season 2 - Part 1

Introduction

When I was a kid, I got a painful but instructive lesson on monopolies. I decided to build a cushion fort, and went around grabbing all the portable upholstery, constructing my defences. It wasn’t long before all the adults in the room complained about their painful posteriors. My mother gave me a slap, the cushions were restored, as was comfort, and I cried for ten minutes at the injustice of it all before moving on. I wish we could slap corporations. Everything is commoditised, monetised, and geared towards the profit motive, and fairness is a thing of the past, and that can take all the fun out of a hobby like anime.


Vinland Saga went the Netflix route, which is a pain to begin with, but Sentai got Season One, and MVM released it here in a glorious Collector’s Edition. Anime fans always look for consistency in packaging on their shelves, but Crunchyroll has Season Two, and they’re not doing Collector’s Editions. Crunchyroll’s parent company Sony has gone for the anime monopoly, and it’s made the hobby a misery compared to the fun it used to be. Sentai get those few new shows that are left over, but don’t have enough for a full release schedule, so they’re left padding it with re-releases of old licences. Discotek get by with giving classic anime new leases of life in high definition, while Crunchyroll have so much of the content that they can’t release it all in the US, let alone elsewhere. And it’s all become a faceless monolith. The days of fans interacting with the companies that release their favourite shows are long past. In other words, if MVM had released Vinland Saga Season Two, I’d be a whole lot more excited than I am with this Crunchyroll UK release, even if there would have been no fundamental difference between the discs.


As a child, Thorfinn swore revenge against Askeladd, the man who killed his father, but the only way he could ever have a chance was to join up with Askeladd’s mercenaries, and become involved in the Viking raids on Britain around the end of the first millennium, and the bloodthirsty politics that was occurring back then. In the end he was denied his revenge. Season Two catches up with Thorfinn a few years later, where he’s an uncharacteristically meek slave, serving on a Danish farm, when a feisty new English slave named Einar is bought by the farmer to work alongside Thorfinn, with both offered a chance to earn their freedom.


Twelve episodes of Vinland Saga Season 2 are presented across two Blu-ray discs from Crunchyroll.

Disc 1
1. Slave
2. Ketil’s Farm
3. Snake
4. Awakening
5. Path of Blood
6. We Need a Horse

Disc 2
7. Iron Fist Ketil
8. An Empty Man
9. Oath
10. The Cursed Head
11. Kings and Swords
12. For Lost Love

Picture

Vinland Saga gets a 1.78:1 widescreen 1080p transfer on these Blu-ray discs. The image is clear and sharp, with strong, consistent colours. There is no sign of compression or aliasing, and digital banding is kept to a minimum. Production for the second season moves to Studio MAPPA, but they maintain the vibrant, detailed and fluid action, coupled with the effective character designs established by Studio WIT to once again really sell the story. They also don’t stint on the gore, pretty much essential when it comes to a show about the Vikings.

Sound

Matters audiowise change with the transition to Crunchyroll. Now the audio options are Dolby TrueHD 5.1 Surround English and Dolby TrueHD 2.0 Stereo Japanese, this time with optional translated subtitles and a signs only track. I stuck with the original language track, and was happy with the experience. The subtitles are accurately timed and free of typos, and the actors suit their roles well. Unlike the first season, I found the theme songs eminently skippable, sounding like current chart music fodder. Once again, the Netflix dub is locked away, and Crunchyroll had to dub the show over again for their release.

Extras

You get two discs in a BD Amaray style case, wrapped in an o-card slipcover, although this time, the o-card offers different artwork to the sleeve art, and there’s more art on the inside of the sleeve. The discs boot to static menus.

On disc 2 you’ll find 4:50 of Promo Videos, as well as the textless credits.

Conclusion

When I reviewed the first season of Vinland Saga, I made more than a few connections with Berserk, another mediaeval fantasy, although Vinland Saga is more of a historical fiction than an out and out fantasy. One thing I noted was just how good that first season was, brilliantly written drama, and engaging and effective action and all pretty much presented as the prologue to a larger and more epic story. I noted just how similar that seemed to Berserk’s Golden Age Arc, so good they made it twice, and how what followed couldn’t quite compare. I made a facetious and passing comment that I hoped that Vinland Saga wouldn’t follow a similar route...


Now that Season Two of Vinland Saga is here, or at least the first half, I have to sheepishly admit that I find that it does follow the Berserk model. What we have here just doesn’t compare to the awe-inspiring first season, and at best seems like a pale shadow of that story, or rather a slow paced entry into a much larger, and longer series. If this is the pace of the story-telling, you can expect Vinland Saga to go for many more seasons. This isn’t a story that will be done and dusted in the space of just the next 12 episodes following this one, completing Season Two. These twelve episodes then have a very important job to do, present enough of a hook to get the viewer signed on for the long term.


You’d think that Season One would have accomplished this with ease already, but the problem is that Season Two takes place after a significant time-skip following the end of Season One, following the demise of Askeladd, the death of King Sweyn of the Danes, and the first steps that Prince Canute takes to the throne. All the while these grand events were taking place at the turns of the first millennium AD, Thorfinn had been taken as a slave by Askeladd following the murder of his father Thors. He’d sworn revenge on Askeladd, but learned from him as he grew up into a teenage warrior, looking for his chance. In the end he never got that.


Season Two begins some time later, with England still being plagued by the Danes, introducing a young English farmer named Einar, living the idyllic life with his mother and sister, only for the Vikings to attack, leaving him the sole survivor, and transported to Denmark as a slave. It’s a quick reminder of just how brutal and bloody this story is. Einar is put to work on a farm owned by a man named Ketil, alongside a taciturn slave named Thorfinn, although they are more indentured servants, with the chance to buy their freedoms if they turn a forest into fertile farmland.


Given how much time has passed since Season One, Thorfinn is unrecognisable from before, emotionless and acquiescent, refusing to react even when abused by his social superiors. It’s only his nightmares that remind us of the berserker he once was, and an indication that he’s suffering from post traumatic stress. Most of these episodes are spent following Einar and Thorfinn as they work the farm, become friends, and deal with the adversities that the world throws at them as slaves. Ketil is an interesting man, ostensibly a warrior retired to the farming life, and gentler than you might expect, although his retainers are nothing of the sort. His younger son Olmar is a braggart and a coward, a bully existing on his father’s name and a sense of entitlement. His older son Thorgil is actually a powerful warrior usually away in the service of the king, but who displays the cruelty that is absent in Ketil. Ketil’s own father has a holding nearby, and the local area is protected by mercenaries led by an unscrupulous man named Snake who is as much bandit as he is protector.


In the midst of all this, Thorfinn has merely been existing, numbly doing his work and little else, until Einar arrives. Einar could very well have been one of his victims when Askeladd used to raid England, but now they’re becoming friends, and that slowly awakens Thorfinn to his past, and puts him on the slow and painful journey to understanding and accepting his past, to coming back to life. It’s nothing like the first season of Vinland Saga. There is violence and brutality, but in the central characters, Thorfinn is a reactive figure, and it’s Einar who has to carry the burden of personality and agency in the story. And despite the brutality, it’s very much a domestic story for much of this collection.


It’s not until episode five that we get a reminder of the potential as we move away from the farm to catch up with what Canute has been up to. He had a baptism of blood at the end of the first season, and gone is the naive young princeling. Now he’s a manipulative, cold-hearted and ruthless schemer, who is plotting his way to Denmark’s throne. The fifth episode sparks some of the old feeling for the show, but we’re back on the farm in the following episode, where Einar and Thorfinn realise they need a horse to help work the land. And so this second season continues, idling in rural domesticity, until we get to the last three episodes and events seem to coalesce, as Canute returns to Denmark to finally ascend to the throne, realising that he needs to fill the coffers if he is to hold onto Danish territory in England. Tax is the unpopular option, but it would be easier just to confiscate land. His eyes turn to Ketil’s farm as the first test case, scheming a way to put the old man in his debt, but the plan doesn’t unfold as expected, and Ketil’s family has enough of a respite to escape back towards their farm, which is where this collection of episodes ends, a cliff-hanger to Part 2.


Season One of Vinland Saga was epic, it was brilliant, and it was compelling viewing from beginning to end. Season Two is nothing like that. It’s a pedestrian start to a much bigger story, and much of this collection of episodes is spent on setting the scene, and gradually developing the characters. For my tastes, it’s too slowly paced, and I’d expect it’s possible to tell much the same story in half the time. It’s a slow burn, and it hasn’t done enough to sell me on the idea of watching Vinland Saga for a few hundred episodes. But, it has done enough to get me buying part two of Season Two to see what happens next, and that’s all it really needed to do. It would have been nice if it had done the big job of selling me on the bigger story, but maybe the next twelve episodes will manage that.

Vinland Saga Season Two Part One is available from Anime on Line, from Anime Limited, and from mainstream retailers.