Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-5102537-20140620091030/@comment-5102537-20140707093105

Ozymandias v wrote: I doubt the royal household would have thought the dragon's escape indicated the presence of a traitor, because it came so closely on the heels of Morgause's attack on Camelot with the Knights of Medhir. I always assumed they would think Morgause broke the dragon's bonds during the time she was there (and one could reasonably assume that the dragon would wait until nightfall to begin its assault).

Good point. The problem is that something like this has never been mentioned but that all was forgotten again in the next episode (next season). When considering that holding a dragon captive was obviously one of the greatest victories, and given that Uther mentioned it so proudly in the first episode of season one, as a symbol of peace in Camelot ever since the dragon's imprisonment, plus that Kilgharrah was meant to be a warning for all sorcerers, it was extremely weird and unbelievable that nobody ever mentioned the mysterious escape of the dragon again. Never ever. It wasn't just Uther's favourite dog missing, or a sword or artifact stolen, but the very symbol of the victory over magic, the end of war and destruction in the Five Kingdoms and a warning sign for everyone that was released from undestructable enchanted chains, somewhere in the vaults deep down that nobody actually was allowed to access.

If they thought that it had to do with Morgause, which is totally possible and  would even make sense,  mentioning it in the same epsiode or an episode later would have been necessary.

This kind of storytelling where important parts are left out and ignored, is like school lessons when the teacher approaches a subject, maybe maths or history or whatever, and then completely skips it while the students wonder what was going on or how the calculation works. Like teaching two of the three binomial formulars and forgetting about the third. Or teaching WWII in history lessons but not mentioning the allies.

By the way, Morgana wasn't mentioned either in "The Last Dragonlord", despite the fact that she had just disappeared an episode ago.

What you wrote here:

"It could have been a great opportunity to explore less of a black and white morality. For me it's less about 'anyone else who did it would have been evil' and more about 'for once Merlin didn't just blindly support Uther's persecution of magic.' Because really, it's hard to keep making excuses for him when he stops every sorcerer that wants to bring Uther to justice for being a mass murderer. In this episode, he might have been feeling particularly guilty for doing so given that he just poisoned one of his friends to put a stop to one such plot."

Yes, it would have been a great opportunity to explore Merlin's motives and thoughts and push a little character development.

I agree that Kilgharrah deserved freedom and I was even a little relieved when Merlin released him. However, it wasn't all about Uther and what he had done to the dragons and what he deserved. It was about the entire city of Camelot and all the innocent people who died. Arthur had almost been killed in Kilgharrah's attack, too. Moreover, most magic-users/sorcerers who attacked Camelot didn't do it out of revenge on Uther. Most of them had other reasons that didn't have to do with the ban of magic and Uther or his Great Purge. And those who seeked revenge weren't any better than him. Especially Morgause and Morgana had no problem at all with mass murdering people, even torturing them (which made them worse). This was something that Merlin couldn't allow, of course. Besides, the war between magic and those who hated it had started long before Uther, so it could as well be said that the Old Religion had been mass murdering people over centuries which almost destroyed the land. Merlin knew that from Gaius, and what he wanted was peace, not revenge. At that point of time, he was still trying to not judge people lightly and kill what- or whoever was in his way, but to find a solution to end the killing on both sides.