Board Thread:Rewatching "Merlin" - Season Five/@comment-5102537-20140329115401/@comment-5102537-20140407130755

Merlin After wrote:

You're right, Arthur inherited Camelot but he united it, introduced some sense of equality and brought peace to it for a short time. All depending on which version, of course. You're in the lucky position to have liked the route that the show took with the last two seasons. Thanks for your understanding.

As for the quote above, Arthur didn't unite anything, not even Camelot and Caerleon. Camelot had a peace contract with Caerleon under Uther which Caerleon jeopardized when trespassing the borders and Arthur jeopardizing it when he executed the king in cold blood even without a trial. What Arthur did was damage limitation of his own actions but not uniting two kingdoms that had been at (cold) war. A real unification would have been to solve the problem with Caerleon when he trespassed the borders. Instead, Arthur triggered a war.

The Five Kingdoms were united by Uther and heaven knows where the other Five Kingdoms came from all of a sudden when Arthur led the peace treaties. That's the point, previous storylines were overlooked and replaced with new ones that didn't make sense. There are either Five Kingdoms or Ten Kingdoms, but nobody can just demonstrate a unification with completely new Five Kingdoms when there were other Five Kingdoms in the previous seasons that had signed the peace treaty with Camelot already.

As for the sense of equality, I agree up to a certain point. Actually, we haven't seen any other improvement than Arthur knighting a few commoners and marrying a servant girl. We never saw any other commoner being promoted in any way. Not to mention that it was completely unbelievable that all nobles and other kingdoms as well as the commoners would accept Gwen on the throne and commoners as knights without any objection.

He also didn't bring peace but still persecuted sorcerers and was only lucky that Morgana was imprisoned for two years by Sarrum. Otherwise Morgana would have started war again immediately. The only attacks on Camelot were led by Morgana: the first time with Morgause and Cenred, the second time with Morgause and Cenred and the third time with the Saxons. Aside from her attacks, Camelot was at peace for several decades under Uther's reign.

This all contributes to the disappointing ending because Arthur didn't achieve anything and made the previous seasons, all the prophecies and all the effort completely absurd.