User blog comment:Fimber/Elements of classic literature and religion in "Merlin"/@comment-5659316-20130202004258/@comment-5102537-20130202125057

I had assumed that not everyone is familiar with classic literature since also the movies Moby Dick and Don Quijote are rarely shown on television nowadays - and based on what my daughter's friends are interested in, such literature or movies are out of date for most younger viewers, I suppose.

I've never liked Moby Dick, most of all because I felt very sorry for the whale and I also didn't like Ahab's fanatism and despise. It's all in all a quite dark story. So in case you want to read or watch Moby Dick one day, prepare for a dark and depressing story. But then, I didn't like Don Quijote either because when I was young, I never got the point of fighting windmills... :-D  On the other hand, these (in my opinion) combined traits of them in Uther's character are most facinating because he wasn't just vengeful or a fanatic fool but had more/other reasons and became a character of its own.

I don't know if you've ever read "Faust". Faust makes a deal with Mephisto, one of the devils, who takes his soul in exchange for an enjoyable life which includes falling in love with Gretchen. In the end, Gretchen is sentenced to death and dies after she had killed their illegitimate child. Faust couldn't prevent her or their child from dying and the deal with the devil turns out to have destroyed lives - as usual when turning to supernatural help that actually isn't supposed to be a human's toolbox. You know, playing with forces that humans don't understand or can't handle.

It's interesting what you wrote about Merlin. I'm not very familiar with all the Arthurian legends but I agree that "Merlin" was much more lighthearted than those legends I know. But then I was sure that "Merlin" was on its way of presenting a tragedy that could compete with other tragedies, just not with all this misery and torture. More lighthearted, which I found was a great thing but at the same time full of clever tragedies that described the characters so well. It's very disappointing that it turned out to be the opposite in the later seasons: full of misery and torture and death, yet naive and simple, and being turned into a soap opera.