While her father fretted and her mother silently suffered, Æthelflæd herself was busy adapting to life as a Viking hostage, a situation that was considerably better than she might have expected thanks to a growing tendresse with Erik, the more sane and less bloodthirsty of the two brothers. I can say this to no one but you, I can ask no one but you: will you help us escape?’ Photograph: BBC/Carnival/Steffan Hill ‘It is best for me and it is best for Wessex. Sigefrid (Björn Bengtsson) – likely to kill Æthelflæd and Erik’s vibe. Yet it was possible to understand that counsel while rejecting it, and for all that Odda insists Alfred is a king before he is a father, the truth was written devastatingly across both Alfred’s face and that of his pragmatic wife Ælswith. He was right that thousands of people had already died for Alfred’s England and right too that Æthelflæd’s life was not worth a lengthy war and the loss of that kingdom. It was Odda who in the last series sacrificed his son when he became a threat to the notion of a nation of England, and thus only Odda who could say the unthinkable to Alfred: when does a beloved daughter become a liability, and once she has, what action should the true king take? Odda’s bleak solution was entirely in keeping both with his character and his understanding of what was at stake. ‘Should the ransom be too great, then should she not be encouraged to take her own life for the good of the kingdom?’īy far the evening’s most conflicted player, however, was poor Odda, the last of the old king’s regime and a man who has lost almost everything in supporting Alfred’s vision. Not even for Uhtred, who found himself brought once again to the brink of breaking his oath, thanks to a girl whose life he once saved and with whom he shares a kinship far greater than that oath he was forced into taking by her father. Gratifyingly, there were no easy answers: not for Alfred, forced to choose agonisingly between his dream of England and his favoured daughter, nor for Æthelflæd who learned diplomacy at her father’s knee and understands the problems of being a pawn in the hands of Wessex’s enemies. That was certainly the case this week, in a tense penultimate episode that asked whether there is such a thing as too great a sacrifice in the name of a fledgling kingdom. For all the mayhem and bloodshed, The Last Kingdom is often at its best in the quieter moments when diplomacy rears its compromised head, deals are struck and lives betrayed.
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