Vikings: Valhalla creator’s priorities for the Netflix spinoff: nostalgia and ‘more action’

polygon.com:

When Jeb Stuart (Die Hard, The Fugitive) signed on to take over and continue the Vikings franchise with Vikings: Valhalla, Michael Hirst, creator of the original History Channel series, gave him just one piece of guidance: He wanted the Netflix spinoff to 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 Vikings, allow Valhalla to correct the narrative. 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 old gods of the pagan Vikings offending the new Christian Vikings, who would prefer everyone just get on board with Christ already.

True to history, Christianisation played a major role in the dissolution of the Viking era. 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. And they said, [...] I don’t want to go there. They kill people over there!”). And in true Viking fashion, conversion was fitful, violent, and unsparing.

That conflict is set across a new cast of characters, including the legendary Leif Erikson