Board Thread:Rewatching "Merlin" - Season One/@comment-5102537-20130302204954/@comment-5674726-20130310001028

''This was actually a brilliant plan but the episode didn't make it clear. What the viewers saw was that Nimueh wanted to take revenge on Uther and by that didn't care about the many lives that are sacrificed. It would have been a good idea if someone, maybe even Nimueh herself had mentioned that the plan was to make people turning to magic and by that turning against Uther.''

I think that the writing of Nimueh was odd during her appearances. If there was more to her plan in this episode than just letting everybody in Camelot die, they didn't show it. Her next episode, the whole thing about Arthur not being destined to die at her hand would suggest that she was aware that this wasn't his time but instead she led him into what she thought would be a fatal trap. It didn't make sense.

The biggie for me is that, in Excalibur, it looks like she's sincere when she tells Uther that she didn't know that Ygraine would die but her last episode flips that around and indicates that she can control who lives and who dies. In terms of her characterisation, I think that it works better if she didn't realise that Ygraine would die when she agreed to help Uther. It makes no sense that she would deliberately leave Ygraine to die and expect no reprisals from Uther. If he loves his wife enough to resort to magic so they can have a child together rather than setting her aside and remarrying to have the heir he needs, you don't need to be a genius to realise that he isn't going to take her death lying down.

Making Nimueh out to have deliberately set up Ygraine and later Hunith to die to balance Life and Death strikes me as a cheap plot device to excuse Merlin's decision to sacrifice an unwilling victim when he took it upon himself to mess with the balance of life and death and didn't like the way it turned out. Personally, I think that it would have been better had Hunith died, to teach him that just because you can do something, it doesn't mean that you should.