Vikings: What to Expect from Season 4b 

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Full spoilers for Vikings through its Season 4a finale, "The Last Ship," continue below.

That time jump in Vikings\' Season 4 midseason finale is sure going to shake things up when the series returns later in 2016.

Marco Islø as Hvitserk, Alexander Ludwig as Bjorn, Alex Høgh Andersen as Ivar, Travis Fimmel as Ragnar, Jordan Patrick Smith as Ubbe and David Lindstron as Sigurd

In addition to meeting the four new actors playing Ragnar\'s sons Ivar, Ubbe, Sigurd and Hvitserk, here\'s a preview from showrunner Michael Hirst and actors Travis Fimmel, Alexander Ludwig and Gustaf Skarsgard of what\'s to come when Season 4b premieres.

Vikings has been the story of Ragnar\'s ascension to kingship, but looking back on his character\'s journey, Fimmel said Ragnar definitely wishes he\'d just stayed a farmer. " Everything\'s changed around him, including him. Changed for the worst," he said.

"I feel like it always feels like he\'s let down or he doesn\'t have the support of the people anymore," Fimmel added. "He doesn\'t know who to trust. The reasons is not what he thought he was doing it for. Everything that\'s occurring is not why he started doing these adventures. It\'s all for different reasons now -- other people\'s reasons, not Ragnar\'s reasons. So he\'s lost the beauty. He feels like the beauty of it\'s all gone."

Marco Islø as Hvitserk, Alex Høgh Andersen as Ivar, Jordan Patrick Smith as Ubbe and David Lindstron as Sigurd

Hirst feels Ivar, Hvitserk, Ubbe and Sigurd will fill the show\'s void as Ragnar continues to age and become an "old man." "We all looked at pictures of Travis from the first season when he was fresh and young and everything. He\'s grown in to Ragnar, he\'s changed. It was amazing to see him with these young guys," said Hirst. "It filled me full of optimism and hope for the show moving forward."

"Alex [Høgh Andersen], who plays Ivar the Boneless, is just awesome," said Hirst. "To see him in a scene with Travis is immense. The really strange thing is we were casting, we had 14 young guys in this room. They rehearsed some scenes, they did some together and some separately. Alex was just clearly amazing, and he wasn\'t here to read for Ivar the Boneless but as soon as I saw him and heard him I said, \'Would you do that?\'"

"He came in to do them and he said to me [about Ivar\'s condition with his legs], \'Would he be in pain?\' And I said, \'He\'s in constant pain, I imagine.\' He said, \'OK,\' and then he did this scene and he didn\'t manifest the pain, whereas all the others when I\'d asked them you could see the way [they held the pain]," Hirst continued. "He didn\'t, but we were filming it and when you looked through the camera and the camera went close on his eyes, there was the pain. It\'s fantastic."

Ragnar has four young sons who have grown to become young men in the time since he\'s been a way, but only one is his favorite: Ivar. "Ragnar sees a mind in Ivar that nobody else sees and doesn\'t treat him as a cripple -- admits he\'s a cripple, but he always believes that his mentality is the strongest thing," said Fimmel.

Alexander Ludwig said he\'s been looking forward to meeting the new generation of Vikings ever since he found out the show would be doing a time jump forward. "Being a fan of this show myself, even before I was on it, I\'ve always found I was most attracted to seeing the Vikings," he said. "When I was told we were going to introduce these new brothers and they\'re going to be older and it\'s going to revolve around this new generation and I\'ll be leading that, it was super exciting to see. I knew the scripts were only going to get more exciting for me because I love reading about the Vikings, because I think that\'s a history that we\'ve lost. A lot of people don\'t know very much about how they lived, so that\'s exciting."

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"He feels that Bjorn is the future and that Ragnar\'s been away, and this is where he\'s going next," Skarsgard said. "He\'s about to embark on a new journey with Bjorn down to the Mediterranean; that\'s what they\'re aiming for. He\'s still curious to explore the world and have some fun."

"We\'re still early on in the stages where Bjorn is the big brother who just loves his brothers," Ludwig previewed. "He\'s always loved his brothers. There\'s no bad blood there at all. He sees the potential for Ivar and his other brothers. He sees it because he\'s lived it, and he knows that you can go both ways. You can get corrupted by fame and whatnot. He\'s seen it in his father to an extent as well. For Bjorn it\'s all about protecting them from that as opposed to a sibling rivalry. They\'re still young in that they would still have that, but Bjorn has seen so much and grown so much that it\'s really not for him about that at all. It really is about his own destiny."

8. That Battle Between Ragnar and Rollo Is Their Last

Don\'t expect Ragnar and his brother Rollo to clash again after their fight in Paris. "It\'s the final confrontation between Ragnar and Rollo," Hirst said. "It\'s complete catastrophic defeat for Ragnar, coming on top of the fact that he\'s wearing the kingship very heavily now. It doesn\'t appeal to him anymore."

Vikings will return with the 10-episode second half of Season 4 later in 2016.

Terri Schwartz is Entertainment Editor at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz.