The Mennella Line

“My brother doesn’t hold grudges. He’s strange that way.” – Rollo

“Burial of the Dead” is a rewarding episode of Vikings, and probably the show’s best to date. The season-long conflict between Ragnar and Earl Haraldson finally reaches its climax, appropriately in the form of a personal combat — a one-on-one fight to the death.

Predetermination is a recurring theme in this episode, and that is what drives Ragnar to propose the personal combat and why Haraldson ultimately agrees to it, despite the obvious risks. Ragnar, remember, is still wounded from last week’s attack on his farm by Haraldson and his thugs, and as his wife, Lagertha, reminds him (during sex, of course), he’s departing from Viking rules of combat by fighting while the odds aren’t in his favor. Believing himself to be destined for greatness, Ragnar is OK with taking this liberty.

As Haraldson prepares, and faces the very real possibility of his own impending death, he comes clean to his wife about his efforts to stifle Ragnar. He knew Ragnar was probably right about the lands to the West, and even concedes that Ragnar is not unlike a younger version of himself — driven and ambitious. He stood in Ragnar’s way merely in the interest of preserving his own power, he explains. But now, finally, he’s willing to submit his will to fate, whatever it may be.

Ragnar wins the showdown, and even in a bloody victory over his mortal rival, his actions underscore why he has risen to power and usurped Haraldson. Rather than spike the proverbial football, Ragnar plays it earnestly. After incapacitating Haraldson with an axe to the back, Ragnar mercifully kills him simply by opening his wrist with the blade of the axe. He’d have been well within his rights to do something horrific after what Haraldson had pulled (and I suspect much of the audience was pulling for that), but again: spiking the football. Haraldson’s wife tries futilely to stem the flow of blood, but Haraldson brushes her away. He’s at peace with his fate — an honorable death in battle is the optimal way to go.

Of course, it is Ragnar who affords Haraldson this honorable death, and it is Ragnar who decides Haraldson should get an elaborate funeral on a burning boat. Athelstan, our eyes and ears on the ground, asks Ragnar the question everyone watching at home is asking: Why go to these lengths for a villainous old man, your mortal enemy?

“He was also a great man — and warrior,” Ragnar says. “He earned his renown in this life, and now in death he deserves such a funeral.”

If you’re thinking Ragnar is a hell of a guy at this point, well, he is. Even his half-evil brother Rollo understands this:

“My brother doesn’t hold grudges. He’s strange that way.”

This is what Rollo tells Haraldson’s widow while she’s lining her pockets with treasure in anticipation of being cast into exile — or worse. You can’t blame her for fearing the worst now that her husband is dead and she’s out of office, but Rollo — his face badly scarred from last week’s torture incident at the hands of Haraldson — assures her she’ll be allowed to live a normal life. Rollo seems like a swell gent to be so compassionate, but soon he reveals to her his real intentions: He thinks he’ll be earl. He doesn’t know how or by what means, but hey, predestination has a funny way of taking care of those things. Or not.

So begins the new chapter in Ragnar’s life, replete with a new set of challenges. Haraldson is dead, and so it stands to reason his sibling rivalry with Rollo will come into focus. Ragnar also has another baby on the way; Lagertha tells him that she’s with child at Haraldson’s funeral, a nice bit of symmetry, albeit an easy one.  Joffrey Baratheon Bjorn, meanwhile, is becoming increasingly obnoxious, having a couple cross exchanges with Athelstan and throwing a tantrum when Ragnar tells him he’s not yet ready to join the Viking men on their next raid. You’ll be a man some day, Bjorn. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the hapless Northumbrians are growing increasingly leery of Viking raids. As the episode ends, Ragnar and a crew of his men sail up an English river in search of plunder. King Aella, meanwhile, shows off his new toy, a snake pit. He tests it out on a soldier who failed to halt Ragnar the last time the Vikings paid a visit. Turns out, it works.

Ragnar’s innumerable virtues — bravery, grace, wisdom, pragmatism, to name a few — have gotten him to where he is. But that was when he was merely the people’s earl. Now, he really is the earl. Will the same virtues serve him as well in his new role? For example, while taking his seat as earl, he grants a purposeless old Viking his wish to join the younger men on their next raid — to do the only thing he’s ever done. But perhaps Ragnar’s sympathy for the warrior will haunt him if the old timer is a weak link in battle.

- Athelstan, meanwhile, sees a lot in this terrific episode, because a lot of new ground is covered: the personal combat; the preparation and later sacrifice of one of Haraldson’s female slaves; the boat burning; the swearing-in of Ragnar and his family; the Ragnarok. His reactions serve to show what a great and interesting character he is. Really, he doesn’t bring much to the forward movement of the show’s story one way or the other, but his constant sense of wonder (and shock, and appall, etc.) at the foreign world in which he’s immersed is a mirror for ours. He’s getting by among the Vikings just fine, but he’s no Viking, to be sure.

- The slave bit, in particular, is especially jarring for the monk, as you might imagine. First, he witnesses her entering a house full of men where she’ll have sex with all of them, then he’s forced by Bjorn to see her sacrificed (by throat-slitting) at the hands of a new female character, the creepy Angel of Death. It almost played like comic relief when he crossed himself and kissed his cross necklace as the sacrifice neared.

- The personal combat is a barbaric way to resolve a conflict, at least to us, but one the Viking community sees as acceptable and, indeed, honorable. To me, that dissonance — and how it challenges us, the viewers — is what distinguishes Vikings as a really good show in its own right, rather than just being a medieval heroic saga riding the coattails of Game of Thrones.

- There’s only a brief buildup to the combat, which transpires only about a quarter of the way through the episode. This was a wise choice after the relative lull of the second half of last week’s episode, when Ragnar retreats to Floki’s house to heal.

- Despite his injuries, Ragnar defeats Haraldson in the personal combat. The injuries might have been the only way to raise any doubt about who might win such a confrontation — seriously, who ya got between the decorated-warrior hero and the old man? — but that’s almost beside the point. If the outcome was obvious (and I think it was), then the renewed focus on all those foreign cultural customs, and how they imbue the characters’ behaviors before, during, and after the main event is what made this hugely important scene, and the rest of the episode, compelling.

Bryce Harper debuted for the Nationals tonight. His ascent to the Majors has been swift, but relative to how long we’ve been hearing about him, it’s taken a lifetime.

This is the kid whose career has been as shrewdly orchestrated as Guy MacKendrick’s. He had an “agent” when regular kids were having their first kisses and beers. He was on the cover of SI as a high schooler. He gamed MLB’s silly draft rules by pitstopping at a junior college for a year.

And to further enhance the fabricated villain angle, he looks and occasionally acts like an utter douche. He has a mohawk and sometimes an ironic mustache. He wears too much eye black. He blew a kiss at an opposing pitcher after hitting a homer last year. He’s not handsome but has a jaw cut from stone and blue eyes like a Siberian Husky, the kind of pronounced features that make you look at them and try to figure out where the hell they came from.

What’s not to hate about that? It smacks of Brycie having been manufactured into some kind of contrived caricature by his parents in an epic fit of creepy stagemomery.

So, the-guy-you’ll-love-to-hate narrative was in place. But after being treated by Harper to an astonishing athletic display, I can’t help but to call bullshit on that.

Harper plays his ass off, and he is a physical marvel. To watch him run is captivating; his speed is impressive but his stride severe, like an all-out-effort guy’s.  He possesses what is undoubtedly the next great arm, and he is aggressive with it (there’s a mentality that must accompany having such an arm so it may be wielded correctly, and Harper owns it). His swing is tremendously powerful, the action of it like a tightly wound spring uncoiling to create a violent bat whip.

Harper is 19, and he is a talent that typically finds its way to the NFL or NBA. But he is aware of this. He’s a showman but only because he understands that people want to see the extraordinary things he can do on a baseball field. He self-consciously busted to first base on a no-chance comebacker in his first at-bat. It was a sure sign that he wouldn’t cheat his many curious onlookers when he broke into a sprint despite his obvious fate of being beaten to the bag by a good two strides.

The home-team Dodgers fans in attendance were not easy on Harper as he was introduced for that first at-bat, but I sensed his later feats softened them if not because they realized they were seeing something special, then certainly because they were simply awed dumb.

The game itself was terrific, with only the equally impressive athlete Matt Kemp ending it all on a walkoff home run to slightly right of center field. I don’t think the baseballpornmongers had entirely forgotten about Kemp during Harper’s show, but the former certainly insinuated himself into what was otherwise his first game this season in which he was not the only player belonging to a better talent planet.

I love Harper right now, and I really hope he doesn’t change that by trademarking the helmet takeoff between first and second base.

I came across this French-language column about Gary Carter in my Twitter feed, and, for reasons I can’t explain, I decided to dust off the few vestiges of my high school French in attempt to read it.

Needless to say, even with the help of my French-to-English dictionary app I spent about a half-hour slogging through the first few paragraphs. However, luckily for me, one sentence that came relatively easily was this beauty:

From 1979 to 1982, the Expos compiled the best record in the National League with 331 wins against 261 defeats, and Carter was at the summit of his art.

That third clause is a charming turn of phrase, one you simply wouldn’t see in English, at least not in the context of baseball. If the author, Denis Casavant, were American or had written this in English, he’d have written something like, “and Carter was at the height of his game.”

Close, but not close at all, right?

I was working overnights at this time last year, when Stephen Strasburg completed his ascent from laughably dominant college pitcher to perfunctory Minor Leaguer to magnetic force around whom baseball revolved on a bathwater-warm night in Washington. In retrospect, maybe that — my foray into nocturnal living — is what made Strasburg’s debut (and his too-brief stint in the bigs) feel like a dream.

On June 10, 2010, I hopped on the 12:53 a.m. train westbound to New York as I did on many other nights. I was camped out with my bag, coffee, peanut butter and jelly, soy yogurt, banana, Pepsi Throwback, iPhone (listening to The Roots’ How I Got Over) and computer for the hour-plus ride. The car in which I rode was empty save for a deadbeat who couldn’t pay his fare, and it was littered with reminders of its barrenness. A few half-empty beer cans were tipped on their sides, rolling to the front and back of the car each time the train started and stopped. A breakman had emptied his hole-punch so that ticket parings were strewn like confetti on the seat across the aisle from mine. And, of course, yesterday’s Newsday was gutted like fresh catch on a deck, its sections ruffled and discarded like unwanted entrails.

Despite the lifelessness of the setting, I was electrified and jittery. Maybe it was the coffee, but I like to think it was Strasburg. He had arrived and surpassed the immense expectations, striking out 14 batters. And I had a chance to write something about him, however insignificant. I knew then that no one would read it, and I’m sure no one did, but I didn’t care and still don’t. I had a chance to archive my marginalized existence in relation to this unlikely spectacle — a midseason game between the Pirates and Nationals — in a very small way.

Of course, Strasburg remained a story throughout the summer, but I slept through a lot of it, literally. I checked box scores, sure, but as I said, I was nocturnal then. I was only waking up when games began on the East Coast, so I was showering and eating and spending time with my obscenely patient girlfriend during those hours. There was always this disconnect, this feeling that I had just barely missed all the excitement.

And then, Strasburg had elbow pain, and anyone remotely interested in baseball experienced that crippling momentary dysphoria. The worst was confirmed, and Strasburg underwent Tommy John surgery, and his narrative shifted. For a short while he was the talking point for a tired debate, and then he receded into nothingness, into invisibility. That kid — that awkward kid — was gone. The tree-trunk legs and blood-red socks and steel-blue eyes all gone for at least a year and probably more, and no one could be sure what he’d be once he returned.

Now, Strasburg is just a grainy ghost in the baseball consciousness. And I want him to come back and be as good as he was on June 9, 2010, if only to confirm that I hadn’t dreamed all of it.