Board Thread:Rewatching "Merlin" - Season Two/@comment-5102537-20130629093831/@comment-5674726-20130716211424

‘‘That's why it was so annyoning that "The Sins of the Father" suddenly changed it and simpy told a different story that didn't make sense in regard to season one.’’

It wasn’t without precedent.

Nimueh went from swearing that she had no idea that Ygraine would be the one to die and that she wouldn’t have agreed to help Uther had she known in ‘‘Excalibur’’ to not raising the slightest argument when she was accused of having deliberately chosen Ygraine to sacrifice in ‘‘Le Morte d’Arthur’’. The ‘‘Excalibur’’ angle is the only one that made sense; unless she was a complete idiot, she would have known that if a man loves his wife so much that he is prepared to resort to magical help, at the cost of somebody’s life, to have a son by her rather than divorcing her and remarrying, is not going to be happy with her if said wife ends up dying as a result of her intervention. However, by turning it on her in ‘‘Le Morte d’Arthur’’, they could allow Merlin to sacrifice an unwilling victim to save Arthur while still allowing him to occupy the moral high ground.

I don’t know if the Ygraine in this episode is supposed to be misinformed or an illusion or if they were rewriting history but it would make no sense for Uther to be willing to sacrifice his wife in order to have a son. If he was willing to get rid of Ygraine in order to have a son, he could have divorced her, remarried and fathered a son by his new wife. He sought magical help because he wanted to stay married to Ygraine and have a son.