that bit at the end that renewed Mulder's faith in the unknown.

Dear diary. After episode 4, the narrative and the cinematography both get washed out. Just kind of sitting here waiting for more fighting and more Fisk. Again. This happened last time at exactly the same point. The strong start's momentum gets washed away with Anatoly's head chum. Lawyer Murdock is out the window, Foggy is pinballing around pointlessly, and the psychological handling of anyone but Fisk is standard as hell. This is why I started doing chores last time. I had forgotten about that.

Foggy's whole story line fucking sucks. Not only does the actor *playing* Foggy suck, an unrequited crush and a candle light dinner with the handy-man-to-the-rescue is garbage as far as emotional lures go. You want me to feel sorry for him (or more importantly, give a shit whether he's even in the show at all), put the focus on the deterioration of his friendship with his best friend, getting consistently passed over, ignored, and dismissed while Murdock gathers toward a crisis while sprinting toward his futile, masochistic obsession, becoming an increasingly distant asshole. Foggy, when you think about it, is basically Sam Gamgee. I wish they had followed that model and given Foggy something to do other than be a career blue-baller. Like .. notice that his best friend is having problems. How about that?

Fighting is still good though. I know things'll pick up, but these few episodes in the middle are weak compared to the first four.

Don't forget you still have Caucasian Ninja Master™ and Masked Ninja CEO™ to look forward to.

First, the Wanderer shit that just came out of nowhere. They seem to lay down the supernatural stuff a bit more thick this time around huh? Before it was usually ambiguous, perhaps explained by coincidence, or superstition-fuelled hallucinations, or something, but the three women dreaming of the dude, and he just shows up and works miracles, and then poor Siggy dies just like that. WTF?

I'm a bit annoyed that suddenly no one cares about Lagertha anymore. After all she did for Ragnar, he just goes "ehhh whatever" and shrugs and even openly allies himself with her enemies?

And more annoyingly, the recent episode "Born Again". I thought it was, frankly, kind of bad. Athelstan's re-conversion was horribly forced. If he had witnessed, say, something that could be interpreted as a "miracle", or something really powerful and impressive... but what, he saw a beam of light through his door? And now he's all a big Jesus freak again, to the point of throwing that bracelet in the river? Are you fucking kidding me? He was such a far more interesting character when he was conflicted, torn between both worlds. "I love Odin. And I love Jesus Christ" was just a perfect summary of the character but they threw that away in the stupidest, most banal way. Really disappointing. That said I thought his "funeral" moment with Ragnar was relatively well done, but the whole thing just soured me.

I thought Siggy and Athelstan were some of the most interesting characters of the cast, and I don't mind so much that they died, only that they got the deaths they did. They deserved better send-offs than that...

anthropomorphic, on-the-nose YOU FUCK WITH TIME TIME FUCKS YOU RIGHT BACK

Speaking of dumb, the "domino death" scene in the zombie crowd seemed particularly stupid and lazily written. How about just picking up the damn kid?

Didn't expect Ragnar to be up and about quite that quickly, but I guess I can roll with it. The thing that seemed most far-fetched to me was the idea that an Asian slave would make it that far west in the 8th/9th century AD. My GF and I read a bit into the slave trade of that time after the episode on Wikipedia and didn't find any evidence that that would ever happen. Just seemed like wishful thinking there. I guess it's possible the showrunners decided they needed more ethnic diversity on a popular show, which is fine, but why not go with a more believable choice? It's just a show, whatever, but it'd be nice if they at least tried to stick to historical plausibility.