Why Vikings Season 6 Brought Back That Major Character

The end of has come and with it, a number of surprises that wrapped up the long-running series. The final 10 episodes of the series have debuted first on Amazon Prime Video, giving fans the opportunity to watch them all at once, rather than waiting week-to-week for new installments.

Warning: The following contains spoilers for the final season of Vikings. If you haven’t watched all 10 episodes of the second half of Season 6 yet, stop reading now. They are currently available to stream on Amazon Prime Video.

In the penultimate episode, after arriving in the new world, Ubbe (Jordan Patrick Smith) and his fellow Vikings were introduced to the person known to the indigenous people as “crazy man.” Imagine everyone’s surprise when said crazy man was actually Floki (Gustaf Skarsgård), who hadn’t been seen since he was essentially buried alive inside an erupting volcano. Miraculously, he wasn’t alive. Instead, he wound up in Newfoundland, where he was finally reunited with a son of Ragnar.

According to series creator Michael Hirst, not giving Floki the closure the character–and fans–deserved wasn’t an option. “I couldn’t have left Floki under the mountain, sort of forgotten and not brought him back for a proper ending,” he explained to GameSpot. “He was the kind of life force. He was so important to me and so important to the show.”

Instead, there’s a sense of redemption for the character after everything he’s been through over the past few seasons. What’s more important, though, it shows how Floki has grown and aged since we last saw him.

“He’s found some peace. But I did have a line in his final little colloquia with Uber when he’s talking about what’s happened to him since coming to America,” Hirst said. “I had a line in there that he said, ‘My mind’s not right.’ But I do think you get that sense that he’s been profoundly changed. [And] there may even be a touch of Alzheimer’s. He doesn’t engage really with the Vikings when they turn up.”

He does engage with Ubbe, though, even telling him how much he looks like his father and admitting he still hears Ragnar’s voice asking him to build boats. It’s such an appropriate place for the series to end. Floki is the only character left that’s been there since the beginning, so having him there for the final episode–and even the final scene–is as fitting as it gets.

What did you think of Floki’s return for the final season of Vikings? Sound off in the comments below.