Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-5102537-20140217120328/@comment-203.166.255.199-20140228030122

You are so right Fimber, nothing changed. The thing that really annoys me is that Merlin kept telling everybody he encountered who had magic that "Things will get better, one day we will be free", without actually doing anything about it. He should have been the on one on the inside, working to change Arthur's opinion of magic, which always came back to Magic is EVIL. Did he think if he kept Arthur alive long enough, he would just wake up one morning and change his mind? We are shown in Series 5 that there were people who were prepared to do something about it - Kara and Ruadan were freedom fighters. So the 3 years of peace was only because Morgana was chained up and nothing changed for anybody else. Yes Merlin was yearning for the freedom he's been told would happen - one day... whenever that would be.

Just because we don't see Arthur actively persecuting magic holders we see by The Disir, Kara, Ruadan and Finna among others  very actions that it was still happening. Just because he wasn't being as tyrannical about it as Uther means he was a better King? Kara (who ends up being the voice of reason) said herself that she had seen no evidence of Arthur's greatness. These people still lived in fear. I think we're also supposed to believe Merlin did too. He reminded Mordred that if Arthur knew of his magic, he would be executed, and in that last episode he told Arthur, "you'd have chopped my head off"  (before amending it to " I didn't want to put you in that position" ) How did Arthur and everybody else not see that when you oppress a people, they would fight back. Merlin and Gwen were just there to continually reassure him that he was a great King (just nobody could ever see it, because they didn't know him)  But he actually never did a thing to deserve the Greatest King Eva tag.

Gah, that series 5 made such a mess of things. Nothing makes any sense. Its hard to believe that they couldn't see that by continually writing the same thing over and over, without addressing these concerns, they weren't writing themselves into a corner, and they left no time to try and get out of it. I don't think they understood the legend very well, and I'm not even sure they knew what the word Legend means!