"Is any of this real?" Some of the stuff this season was just so incredibly poor. Heahmund and Lagertha's relationship was unbelievable, the whole Buddha thing was randomly thrown in for artificial character development (not to mention King Olaf's ridiculous introduction), Floki's Iceland story-line was dull and felt like a side story lacking any actual interesting characters, and all of the romance stuff was borderline laughable, as was Lagertha as a character by the end of the season. Her work was just bizarre and all over the place. The desert adventures were just out of this world tedious, too, so, it's hard to dispute anyone that says that this season is just straight up bad. And then, all of a sudden, it's very entertaining for a while. The brother's war stuff is always fun, although always Bjorn feels like the weakest link to me there and gets really grating. I enjoy Heahmund as a character, and he was a big highlight of the season despite the lousy romance. The battles are impressive, and the season is overall shot really nicely, it's clear the budget just kept going up, and so often when I am given a really terrible scene, it's followed up by something really interesting. And then, all of a sudden, it's somewhere in-between. And that's where I landed overall for this fifth, long season of Vikings - I thoroughly enjoyed a lot of it, but there was so much garbage in equal measure that it's hard to call it great as a whole.