Vinland Saga Season 2

Episode 17

“The Road Home” is yet another episode of Vinland Saga's stunning second season that has me questioning how in the hell I can sing the praises of this show without getting repetitive. Are you looking for some gorgeous animation and impeccable art direction? We've got it in spades. Do you need some of the most heart-wrenching drama currently airing injected into your veins immediately? Vinland Saga has the fix you crave. Some of the strongest vocal performances we've heard in ages? Folks, your ears are in for a treat…so long as you define “treat” as “the kind of visceral human anguish liable to bring you to tears at least four times a month.” I know that I sure do! Most other anime fans do, too, surely?

Okay, in all seriousness: This episode turned me into a blubbering mess by the time the credits rolled. Here I was, prepared to write paragraph upon paragraph about how gorgeously directed and animated the showdown between Snake and Thorfinn would be. While the fight does rule, it's just one small facet of an episode with so much more on its mind. As the title suggests, this is not an episode about drawing fresh blood so much as it is about one man finally concluding the slow and painful death that he had already been suffering through for years up to this week. Despite Thorfinn's best efforts, Snake does, indeed, get his revenge on Gardar. While Gardar nearly manages to throttle the life out of Snake as his final living act, Arnheid manages to calm her husband's righteous fury so she can send him home properly.

Bleeding out and succumbing to delirium, Gardar takes one last wagon ride out into the country with his wife. He hears her stories of how their son Hjalti has grown; Gardar is sure that the boy must be nearly ten by now, but the boy would only be six now if he were still alive. Time gets hard to keep track of when you're a slave, Gardar admits, but he can still muster up a smile at the thought of his son growing up to be the kind of prankster that he once was, even as visions of his life in bondage and the mistakes he made that led him to this point threaten to consume his final moments. It's haunting, poetic, and utterly heartbreaking.

I was still holding it together, though, as “The Road Home” led this doomed family to their inevitable ending. Sure, the music was beautiful, the imagery was dreamlike and evocative, and the combined performances of Mayumi Sako and Takuya Masumoto sell the emotions of this extended elegy with pitch-perfect emotional clarity…but I was still keeping a stiff upper lip, as it were. Then, as Gardar finally passes on, leaving his wife and her surviving friends to whatever fate awaits them back on Ketil's farm, we see him approach his homestead. A young boy is sitting on a swing, silent and troubled, until he sees his father approaching at long last.

Folks, the implication that Hjalti has already died and has spent who knows how long waiting for his family to find him in the afterlife was already too much for me to handle. The absolutely radiant joy on the boy's face when he sees his dad, though? That broke me. I was sobbing. I can barely keep it together just writing this review right now.

I've spent an ungodly amount of time writing an ungodly amount of words about anime over the years, and I have often wrestled with how, exactly, to communicate what makes something a genuine masterpiece. I've found all sorts of analogies, metaphors, and the like, and some have been more successful than others, but sometimes it's so obvious that I barely have to work to figure out what to say. Vinland Saga is the kind of story that makes me feel heartbroken and overjoyed, all at once, over and over again. It moves me. It makes me need to find my wife and hold her as close as I can and tell her that I could never forget, even for one second, how bright she makes my world every day. That's what makes Vinland Saga a bona fide masterpiece. Simple enough.

Rating:

Vinland Saga Season 2 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.