Board Thread:Rewatching "Merlin" - Season One/@comment-5102537-20130512091538/@comment-5674726-20130514134412

As a matter of fact, Merlin only got out of this situation because he has magic and was able to kill Nimueh.

In terms of characterisation, I think that the only reason he was able to kill Nimueh without coming across as a much darker character than the writers intended him to be was that, despite previously indicating that she hadn't known that Ygraine would be the one to die if magic was used to create Arthur and that she wouldn't have helped had she known, in this episode, we were expected to believe that she deliberately sacrificed Ygraine's life, and was apparently too stupid to see that the consequences for this would be dire. The Excalibur angle made much more sense, and it also made Uther's crusade against all magic users more understandable if Ygraine's death was the unintended backlash of a spell intended to do something good rather than a deliberate action on Nimueh's part.

Imagine if Nimueh wasn't capable of choosing who would die to save Arthur, that her role in this episode was solely to give Merlin the Cup of Life and warn him that the price for saving a life was that a life would be taken, but Merlin was able to do this, and had made the choice to murder Nimueh because he didn't like the price he would have to pay to save Arthur when it was his time to die.

I think that Merlin was let off the hook too easily in this episode.

It would have been much better dramatically and in terms of his character if he had either lost his mother as a result of his attempt to play God - no way were they going to kill off Gaius - or made the choice to shoot the messenger, despite Nimueh being incapable of controlling who would die in Arthur's place, and preferably indicating future neutrality towards Arthur and Merlin.