The Last Kingdom

The Mud and the Cross

I remember very clearly when *The Last Kingdom* premiered in 2015. Everybody was desperate for the next big medieval fix, and Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Stories looked, from a distance, like another attempt to cash in on swords, mud, and prestige-TV appetite. But Stephen Butchard's series never cared about dragons or mythic spectacle. What interested it was the slow, ugly mechanics of making a country.



That is why the show works for me. It is rough, damp, and stubbornly human. Butchard's 9th-century England is not some polished fantasy realm; it is a miserable strategic board slick with rain, muck, and fear. The struggle is not only over a throne. It is a clash between pagan fatalism and the ordered theology of Christian Saxons who are already imagining a literate nation into existence. *SFGate* had it right early on when it wrote that the show "avoids simplistic good guys vs. bad guys plotting. History is, after all, messy." You feel that mess most strongly when talk gives way to violence.



Uhtred, as played by Alexander Dreymon, is the engine. Saxon by birth, Dane by upbringing, he is basically an identity wound that learned to use a sword. Dreymon gives him a terrific physical volatility. Having grown up between France and the US and trained heavily in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, he moves with the sort of loose, predatory responsiveness that keeps the fights from feeling ornamental. In the shield wall, he does not hack away like a choreographed hero. He drives his whole body into the crush, surviving through leverage, momentum, and plain animal panic. The battles feel tight and breathless. You can believe people went home bruised from those shoots in the Hungarian mud—Dreymon himself said he sometimes injured stunt performers in the heat of it and simply had to stay in character until someone yelled cut.



But the series earns its place in the quieter scenes. Uhtred's long, miserable dance with David Dawson's King Alfred is the real masterpiece here and the spine of all 46 episodes. Alfred is Uhtred's opposite in every useful way: sickly, devout, cerebral, endlessly strategic. Dawson plays him with that hollowed-out stare of a man who is exhausted, in pain, and still somehow thinking several moves ahead. To Alfred, Uhtred is a necessary contaminant—the pagan weapon required to build a holy England. Watching him slight and use the man who keeps saving his kingdom should be maddening, and it is, but Dawson makes the logic legible. I can't think of many historical dramas that capture this kind of toxic political dependence so well. If you need nonstop battle, the theological arguments may test your patience. For me, those arguments are the show. *The Last Kingdom* is obsessed with the cost of belonging, and the bill is almost always paid in pieces of the soul.